Frequently Asked Questions about Glue and WAM WWW Services

Contents

• About this FAQ
• What hardware platform and operating system is used for the Web servers?
• What HTTP server is WAM and Glue running?
• I want to have a personal homepage on the Web, how would I go about that?
• What kind of CGI programs are available for users to use?
• Can I at least use server-side includes?
• How do I create an imagemap?
• How can I make a change to many of my files at a time?
• Can I add a new MIME type?
• Can I put a restriction on some of my html pages so that only some people can access it?

• About this FAQ
  This document is intended to familiarize you with the World Wide Web tools available in your WAM and/or Glue account by providing answers to the most commonly-asked questions that appear in the webmaster and system staff mailboxes, um.* newsgroups, and our request system.
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• What hardware platform and operating system is used for the Web servers?
  WWW.Glue.umd.edu is a set of round-robin sun sparc 4 machines running Solaris 2.4 operating system.
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• What HTTP server is WAM and Glue running?
  Both are running the same binary which is Apache version 1.0.0 with some local modifications.
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• I want to have a personal homepage on the Web, how would I go about that?
  Here's an example:

        cd /users/$USER/pub
        pico Welcome.html
        

  There you go, you now have a personal homepage with url: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~your_user_name or http://www.glue.umd.edu/~your_user_name if you did those steps on your Glue account.

  Of course, you'll edit the Welcome.html using the html language. Yahoo has diverse html guides and tutorials if you need to find out more about html.

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• What kind of CGI programs are available for users to use?
  CGI programs can easily take up lots of resources. They can also easy opens up a security hole if not written carefully. For those reasons, we're not allowing any user CGI scripts.
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• Can I at least use server-side includes?
  No, for the same reasons as above.
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• How do I create an imagemap?
  You'll need an image file, a map file, and an html page. Create the map file using mapedit. A faq for mapedit is available.
  On your html page insert the following tag:

        <a href="your_map_file.map"><img src="your_image_file.gif" ISMAP></a>
        

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• How can I make a change to many of my files at a time?
  Use find and perl -p -i. For example, to change all occurrences of "~olduser" to "~newuser" in your HTML files, saving the original files with a .OLD extension, do

   
        find ~/html -name '*.html' | xargs grep -l '~olduser |
        xargs perl -p -i.OLD -e 's/~olduser/~newuser/g'
        

  If you don't want to leave the original files around, just omit the .OLD after the -i (which is the perl option for edit-in-place).
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• Can I add a new MIME type?
  The standard file extension to MIME type mapping is in the file /:/system/common/www/lib/mime.types. If you have files on your server that you need the clients to process using a special (nonstandard) MIME type, you can add a mapping by putting a line like the following in /users/$USER/pub/.htaccess:

        AddType   application/x-myapp   .myapp   
        

  This example makes the server return MIME type application/x-myapp for all files with the extension .myapp in the directory with that .htaccess file in it, and any directories below it.
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• Can I put a restriction on some of my html pages so that only some people can access it?
  Yes. There are two kind of access restriction you can do: by IP address or by using an external user database file.

  The protection is based on directory and it's controlled by a file .htaccess in that specified directory.

  1. Restricting by IP address

  Create .htaccess file in the directory you want to restrict access. Here's an example .htaccess:

        order deny,allow
        deny from all
        allow from 128.8.*
        

  
  This will only allow access from machine with ip address 128.8.*

  Another example:

        order allow,deny
        allow from all
        deny from 128.8.28.130
        

  This will allow access from anywhere except machine with ip address 128.8.28.130

  2. Password base restriction using external db file

  Create the password db file using dbmanage.

  Here's an example:

        dbmanage /pub/whatever/private_stuff/.mr_passwd_file adduser bob
        New password:
        Re-type new password:
        User bob added with password encrypted to dFWh/sR2Ve9.g
        

  That will create a user 'bob' in file /pub/whatever/private_stuff/.mr_passwd_file with the passwd you typed, in the above case we set the passwd to "Hi Bob"

  Next we need to create an .htaccess file in the directory you want to password-protect. Here's an example .htaccess file to be used with the db file above:

        AuthType Basic
        AuthName ByPassword
        AuthDBUserFile /pub/whatever/private_stuff/.mr_passwd_file
        require user bob
        

  This will make that directory only accessible by using username "bob" and password "Hi Bob"

  Some notes: While this will exclude all the folks useing web-browsers to look at the directory, this will not exclude users who have access to that directory. If you want to exclude them too, you should give access to system:httpd and exclude acccess from system:anyuser. For example:

        fs sa /pub/whatever/private_stuff system:anyuser none system:httpd read
        

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