Creating Personal Web Pages
TIG maintains a web server called people.csail.mit.edu for the purpose of hosting personal web sites. To create and manage your web site you will need a system with access to the
CSAIL AFS cell such as
login.csail.mit.edu. Files placed in the public_html subdirectory of your home directory will appear as http://people.csail.mit.edu/<username> on the web.
AFS Permission for your Web Directory
In order to serve your pages, the Web server must have at least read permissions on your public_html directory and at least lookup permissions on your home directory. If you have scripts that need to write to your Web directory, the server must also have write permissions. By default, home directories are created with appropriate permissions for read-only access, and the public_html directory will inherit those defaults, but if you change the permissions on either, here are the minimum requirements:
- If you need to keep some of the data in your site private using .htaccess files or other Web-server access control, you need to change the permissions on the ~/public_html directory, or the subdirectory of ~/public_html where those files are located, using the following command:
fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT system:anyuser none www read
- If you want to restrict access to the data to authenticated CSAIL users (which includes the Web server) you can instead use:
fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT system:anyuser none system:authuser read
- If you have a CGI or other server-side scripts that needs write access to your file space you will need to allow the group "www" write access:
fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT www write
For other information about permissions in AFS, see our
AFS Intro or the more detailed
OpenAFS site.
Web Server Configuration and Features
This web server is configured permissively, please think of the possible effects your actions will have on others. If certain features become problematic, they will be removed.
So how permissive is it? All overrides are allowed in .htaccess files and CGI script may be run from any directory. Currently perl (and the CGI perl module) are installed as /usr/bin/perl (v5.6.1), there is a /usr/local/bin/perl symlink for compatibility with scripts that expect that. If you need additional languages or perl modules installed, contact
help@csail.mit.edu.
Server side includes are also supported using the .shtml extension or the XBitHack, setting a .html file's execute bit (chmod +x <filename>) will cause it to be parsed by the server for includes.
For those interested in the gory details, the virtual server config is in AFS at /afs/csail.mit.edu/proj/www/people.csail.mit.edu/conf/http.conf and the logs are kept in afs/csail.mit.edu/proj/www/people.csail.mit.edu/logs/
Personnel Directory Listing
To link your personal web page to the personnel directory at
http://www.csail.mit.edu/directory/directory.php click on one of the "Update Personal Information" links at
http://www.csail.mit.edu/resources/resources.html. Any questions about this tool should be sent to
webmaster@csail.mit.edu.
