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:

      fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT system:anyuser none www read
      fs setacl DIRECTORY-TO-PROTECT system:anyuser none system:authuser read
      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.

Web server logs can be viewed by logging into the server that hosts your website (e.g. people.csail.mit.edu for personal domains), and viewing the access.log and error.log files in /var/log/apache2.

Personnel Directory Listing

To make the personnel directory on www.csail.mit.edu link to your personal web page, add link to the field “WEBSITE” on your CSAIL profile page. Any questions about this tool should be sent to webmaster@csail.mit.edu.