Webpages for SCU Engineering Students

Date of last revision: 3/1/2005

Webpages for SCU Engineering students are available through the Engineering Design Center. This document describes how to set up and use webpages; see "helpme webpage-policy" for policies governing the content of student webpages.

Recent Changes

Setting Up and Using Webpages

Webpage Requests

The command "webpage" will allow you to request that your webpage be created. You may also use this utility to request that your webpages be removed from the system. Please note that the webpage utility only makes requests; your webpage will not be created/removed until a later time (at present, requests are processed approximately once an hour; this may be changed later).

Any other requests regarding webpages should be emailed to webmaster@engr.scu.edu.

Webpage Location

Your webpage directory will be in the Unix system in /webpages/username (replacing username with your own username). All files must be placed in this directory or subdirectories of it to be visible on the web. Use the URL http://students.engr.scu.edu/~username or one of the operating system-specific hosts (see below) to see your webpage.

Note: The web server will not be able to access your webpages unless they are world-readable. If you do not know how to do this, please see the man page for chmod or umask.

File Naming

Regular HTML files should have an extension of .html or .htm.

If a URL references a directory instead of a file, the server will look for a file named index.html and use that. If index.html does not exist, the server will also search for other index files in this order: index.htm index.cgi index.pl index.shtml (see below if you do not know what some of these extensions are). If no index is found, the server will generate a listing of files in the directory.

CGI Programs

Any file with an extension of .cgi or .pl will be treated as a CGI program regardless of what directory it is in. No other directories or extensions will be recognized as CGI programs. CGI programs will be run under your own account. You should create a cgi-bin subdirectory from your account. e.g. /webpages/testuser/cgi-bin . You need to make the permission on this subdirectory chmod go+rx.

You can write your CGI programs for Sun or Linux workstations. Please note that programs compiled under one operating system will not work under any others, although perl or shell script CGIs may work on multiple machines. The main hostname students.engr.scu.edu is a Solaris workstation. To run under a different operating system, you must replace that hostname with an operating system-specific variation.

Linux: linux.students.engr.scu.edu
Sun Solaris: sol.students.engr.scu.edu

These hostnames can be used for regular web content as well, so we encourage you to always specify a specific host in hyperlinks to your CGI programs.

Server-Side Includes

If you wish to use Server-side includes (SSI), also known as server-parsed HTML, simply name your file with a .shtml extension.

Java Servlets

Please see "helpme jsdk" for information about using Java servlets. Note that servlet support is not automatically enabled for student webpages at this time.

Access Control

You can restrict access to your pages by placing directives in a file called ".htaccess" in your home directory. For further information, see the Apache documentation for restricting access by hostname/address restrictions or by username/password authentication. The htpasswd program is currently located in /opt/apache/bin/.

Server Configuration and Logging

The server configuration files can be found in the /opt/apache/conf/students directory, and files named students.* in /opt/apache/shared/logs are log files related to the student web server. For problems with CGI programs, you may also want to check /opt/apache/shared/logs/*.suexec_log, and /opt/apache/shared/logs/*.mod_jserv_log and /opt/apache/shared/logs/*.jserv.log for Java Servlets problems.