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Web
Hosting Manual & Guide
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CHAPTER ONE -
General Features
1.1)
OVERVIEW
1.1.1)
Domain Name Usage & Activation
Domain name registrations and
transfers normally take 24-72 hours from the time
you apply for your College Street
account, until the time the registration is
completed. Once your domain name
is activated, you will be able to use yourname.com. Accounts
can be accessed in the following method
for HTTP access:
http://CollegeStreetservices.com/~username
FTP access is gained via logging into
CollegeStreetServices.com OR the server's main IP address,
with your assigned username and password, until
such time that your own domain name is activated.
Non-Domain name accounts, such as
yourname.CollegeStreetServices.com, have no waiting period
for name activation.
1.1.2)
Company Contact Info
Email Contact Info:
Sales Dept: sales
Support Dept:support
Billing Dept:billing
Mailing Address:
PO Box 750714, Petaluma, California 94954
Please
include the login name and/or domain name you are
referring to when you write to support. We can't
yet tell from your e-mail address, unless we
happen to remember working with you before, and we
may need to know in order to help. If appropriate,
tell us exactly what file(s) you are referring to.
1.2)
WHAT DO YOU OFFER?
College
Street Services offers storage space for web pages with global public
access to those pages over the Internet. We also
offer a limited form of program execution known
as "cgi-bin". Our computers are Pentium
III, or Pentium IV, class machines running the latest
version of Apache web server software over the latest
release of the Red Hat Linux operating system. Apache
responds to web page fetch requests from remote
browsers while Linux is one of several variants
of the Unix operating system.
1.2.1)
Web space
Every
customer gets his own password protected username
under Linux. By logging in to his username, the
customer gains access to his web storage space.
Every username "owns" a structure of disk
subdirectories in the Linux file system. The "root"
of this structure is the "home" directory,
found at path "/home/username". Note that
this is somewhat similar to the MS-DOS directory
structure, except that there is no drive letter
and forward slashes are used instead of backward
slashes.
Inside
the home directory is a subdirectory named "public_html".
Every customer has his own separate "public_html"
subdirectory. Files placed in "public_html"
are visible to remote browsers over the Internet.
As many clients are used to having their main
directory refered to as "www", we have
created another directory as such. When www is
attempted to be accessed, the directory is automatically
redirected to the correct public_html directory.
For
example, when a browser asks for URL http://yourname.com/page.html,
Apache looks for the file /home/username/public_html/page.html
and sends it out. If you have not registered "yourdomain.com"
with InterNIC and specified
CollegeStreetServices as its
domain server, then the remote browser must ask
for URL http://CollegeStreetServices.com/~username/page.html
to get the page.
Username/logins are always the first 8 digits
of your domain name, or the the domain name itself
if it is less than 8 digits.
Example:
The username for yourdomain.com would be "yourdoma".
The username for here.com would be "here".
Passwords are always 4-10 digits in length, as
supplied by you.
Now
that we know where the files have to be located
in order to be visible from the Internet, just
how do we put the files there? There are several
ways, depending on the local computer.
For
the MacIntosh, a program called "Fetch"
is used. Documentation on Fetch is not yet available.
However, note that the binary mode referred to
throughout the manual corresponds to the 'raw'
mode in Fetch.
For
MS-DOS systems, communications programs such as
ProComm emulate dumb terminals for connection
to Linux. (See
1.2.1.1.)
For
UNIX systems, use rlogin to connect. (See 1.2.1.2)
For
Microsoft Windows systems, use FTP (See
1.2.1.3).
This is the easiest method.
1.2.1.1)
MS-DOS Dumb Terminal Access
Set
up your dumb terminal program under MS-DOS to connect
to your local access provider. Log into your UNIX
shell account and the use rlogin to get to your
College Street userid.
Now
follow the procedures under 1.2.1.2
immediately below.
1.2.1.2)
UNIX Shell Access
After
you have used rlogin to get to your College Street userid,
you should be at the shell prompt in your home directory.
Type cd www to enter your www directory.
Then use rz to upload files into your www directory.
Please don't upload web files into your home directory!
One
way to update pages is to enter your account with
the command rlogin -8 -l user CollegeStreetServices.com
where user is your userid. This enables 8 bit
access so zmodem can work. (Note this is the letter
l, not the number 1.) Then type rz -a to
upload a file or files to your directory. Type
rz -ao if you wish to overwrite a file
that is already there. You can edit files offline
using a DOS editor and then upload them and test
them before going offline.
The
advantage of this over ftping is that you can
then immediately run other shell commands after
the files have been transfered. For example, you
may wish to use lynx to test them or mail to send
someone mail.
Note
that the sequence rlogin -8 -l user CollegeStreetServices.com
plus typing in your password SHOULD be done via
a modem script. You really don't want to be typing
this stuff on a daily basis. Name your script
CollegeStreetServices.
(Just
be sure that the disk where your script is kept
is physically guarded.)
1.2.1.3)
MS Windows Access
This
method is nearly intuitive and almost idiot-proof.
You need an FTP program, many of which are available
at Download.com.
We recommend CuteFTP or WS_ftp.
Then
double-click on the FTP icon. This will bring
up a "session profile" form. Under hostname,
fill in your domain name (yourdomain.com, for
example). Under username, fill in your username.
Under password, put in your College Street password.
Make sure the checkbox for "Anonymous Login"
is CLEARED.
At
the bottom of the form, under "initial directories",
you may specify which directories you want to
work with on your local system and on your College Street
system. Under "remote host", specify
/home/username/public_html. Under "local
PC", specify the DOS path where your web
files are located.
Hit
the OK button. This will cause you to be connected
to your College Street acount. The right side of the
screen will show the files in your public_html
directory while the left side will show your local
PC files. To send a file from your local PC to
your College Street public_html directory, click on
the file you want to send and then click on the
right arrow button. To send a file the other way,
click on the left arrow button.
You
will see two option radio buttons under the right
window labeled "ASCII" and
"Binary". For all text files, including
html files, and perl cgi programs, be sure to
select "ASCII" so the end-of-line
conventions are handled correctly. Graphic/image
files and sound files should be transferred in
binary mode
1.2.1.4)
The "home" page and HTML
The
filename of your home page should be index.htm or
index.html. You must try them both, for each account
may be set up differently., however, one of the
two is sure to work. The web server will automatically
send the file at path /home/username/public_html/index.htm
or /home/username/public_html/index.html when a
browser specifies http://yourdomain.com.
To
learn how to write HTML, get Laura LeMay's books
"Web Publishing with HTML in a Week",
and "More Web Publishing with HTML in a Week"
. Both are published by SAMS. Then find out about
the latest
Netscape
extensions.
1.2.2)
FTP Space
All
accounts, except non static IP accounts, come preset
up with an ANONYMOUS ftp area where files can be
uploaded or downloaded by anyone in the world without
a password. This area is necessarily separate from
web space and password protected ftp space for obvious
reasons. If you want both upload and download anonymous
ftp, you may want a read-only subdirectory for distributing
files and a separate write-only subdirectory for
receiving files. This is to prevent files that you
are distributing from being destroyed accidentally,
and to prevent files uploaded to you from being
distributed to others before you examine them. The
location of this directory is /home/username/public_ftp/
Thru the browser control
panel, you may also set up individual logins for
extra FTP users, whom can have acces to a special
subdirectory of your public_html directory. See
the control panel instructions for informatioon
how to go about this.
1.2.3)
Telnet/SSH Account
A
telnet/ssh account is just another name for a Unix/Linux
username. You need at least one to be able to upload/download
your html files. When you sign up with College Street,
you get a username and password. You may ask for
more than one such username. Regular accounts include
one, Additional setups are available for an additional
charge.
Multiple
telnet/ssh accounts are useful when more than
one staff member will be working on the domain.
You may wish to set it up so that different accounts
have different security levels. For example, you
could make it so only one telnet account could
access your listserver data. For those of you
wishing sophisticated access control, we will
be happy to create additional groups for your
domain. That may not make sense to those of you
who are not Unix veterans, but it can allow you
to have one account able to access only one directory
while your others can access all directories,
including that one.
Some
of the programs available at the shell prompt
are mail, a primitive email program, and
pine, a much more powerful email program,
ftp, to FTP onto other sites, telnet,
to telnet onto other sites, and lynx, a
text-only WWW browser, pico, an easy to
use text editor.
NOTE:
Telnet is
disabled due security reasons - Please use
SSH access.
1.2.6)
Cgi-bin Access
"CGI"
stands for "Common Gateway Interface",
a fancy name meaning computer programs running on
the web server that can be invoked from a WWW page
at the browser. The "bin" part alludes
to the binary executables that result from compiled
or assembled programs. It is a bit misleading because
cgis can also be Unix shell scripts or interpreted
languages like Perl.
A
typical use for cgi is the processing of online
forms. When the user fills in the boxes on the
form and hits the SUBMIT button, the cgi program
specified in the html will be run at the server,
and the information in the boxes become available
to the program as parameters. The program, being
a program, can then do anything the programmer
wanted it to do.
"cgiemail",
for example, is a canned program written in C
that gathers up the contents of the boxes on the
form and emails them to a specified destination,
then sends a WWW page confirming the action.
"imagemap"
is another common use for cgi. Here, the X-Y coordinates
of the pointer on an image are correlated with
a specification table, so that clicking on different
parts of the image will result in different links
being followed.
Other
cgis might ask for a password, check the password,
then access a database for requested information.
What it does is up to the programmer, but we do
ask that the cgis are reasonable in their usage
of CPU time and memory. While we do not require
that they be submitted for approval first, out
of control programs that hog the CPU and system
resources will be hunted down and killed by our
system monitors.
Standard
pre-installed system cgis reside in the College Street
public cgi-sys subdirectory. Your presonal cgis
reside in a web subdirectory named cgi-bin directory
under your public_html directory. If your domain
is named company.com, you would then access your
scripts as http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin,
while the pre-installed system scripts are located
at http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-sys. You may
need to set up the preinstalled scripts thru your
browser control panel to see the correct HTML
that is used for such. The browser control panel
will walk you thru the simple processes.
See
chapter four for more
details on CGI.
1.2.10)
Real Audio( Server & Real Video( Server
Real(
Servers are real time
audio and/or video transmission/playing systems.
A digital audio or video stream is transmitted from
the server over the internet to the destination
and played immediately, rather than being stored
to disk first and then played. With this feature,
visitors to your website need not wait for several
minutes, or longer, to listen to an audio file,
or view a video file, while the large file is downloading.
With Real( technology, the audio/video starts playing
from the first few bytes of data that is downloaded.
This is called streaming technology.
Each
Real( audio or video file you wish to transmit
requires two files: a metafile with extension
.ram, and the digital audio or video clip itself,
with extension .ra. The .ram file holds one or
more lines of ASCII text, each of which references
the .ra file to be played when the .ram file is
accessed by the browser.
Entries
in .ram files have the form:
http://yourdomain.com/realaudio/filename.ra
or
http://yourdomain.com/realvideo/filename.ra
Place
your .ram and .ra files in the realaudio, or realvideo,
subdirectory under your public_html directory.
.ram
files must be uploaded in ASCII mode while .ra
files must be uploaded in BINARY mode.
You
may then access these files at http://www.yourdomain.com/realaudio/filename.ram
or
http://www.yourdomain.com/realvideo/filename.ram
1.2.13)
Capture Mail for Domain
Thru
the browser control panel, you can configure your
account to redirect all mail for your domain to
arive at one email address. You may also configure
all mail not specified otherwise to arrive at the
"default" address. If no mail address
is specified to capture all your non-specified mail,
the mail will automatically default to your account
username mailbox.
1.2.14)
College Street SMTP Mail Server(tm)
Only
College Street has the sophisticated College Street SMTP
Mail Server(tm) mailing system. In addition to being
able to have nearly unlimited auto-responders by
simply adding text files to your browser control
panel, you can also redirect mail for everyone in
your domain by simply clicking a few buttons.
Auto-Responder
Example
A
auto-responder is set up thru the browser control
panel with the email address of help@yourdomain.com
and says: We offer you help. Mail
to help@yourdomain.com will return the message "We
offer you help".
These
messages can be any size, even 100K!
Alias/Forwarding
Example
Set
up thru the browser control panel mail from "fred@yourdomain.com"
to be redirected to "73452.452@compuserve.com
", by simply clicking a button
This
would redirect mail for fred@yourdomain.com to 73452.452@compuserve.com,
etc.
Mail
to a user that was not set up as a pop account,
nor as a alias/forwarder, would be sent to the
default user
1.3)
How Do I Use This Program?
Note
that with the exception of the description
of using Eudora,
the commands you are told to type in this section
assume you have logged on to the College Street server
with telnet or rlogin.
1.3.1)
Mail Related Items
1.3.1.1)
Mail
READING
- Type mail to see if you have any mail. If you
have any mail hit enter multiple times and all your
messages will be displayed.
SENDING
- type mail -s "juice" CSS@CollegeStrtServices.com<juice.msg
to send the message juice.msg with the subject
juice to CSS@CollegeStrtServices.com.
Type
mail -s "juice" College Street@College Street.com
juice is good . to send
the message juice is good with the subject juice
to College Street@College Street.com
Type
mail College Street@College Street.com
juice is good . to
send the message juice is good with no subject
to College Street@College Street.com
1.3.1.2)
pine
Type
pine to enter a more advanced mail program.
Type
L to select Folder List and then inbox to see
what messages that you have received.
The
rest of this program is quite easy to use. Why
use mail instead? Mail has the advantage that
it is easy to send files that you composed off
line plus it is easy to read many files at once
into a log file that you then read off line.
1.3.1.3)
Eudora is a mail program that runs under MS Windows.
Eudora
connects to the mail server over the Winsock. Mail
may be composed and read offline, but make sure
that Winsock is running before attempting to send
or receive mail.
After
Eudora has been installed, it must be configured
to point to the College Street mail server. To do this,
start Eudora and select "Special" from
the menu bar. Then select "Settings".
Most of the options are self explanatory.
- Leave
the entries for PH, and Finger blank.
- Fill
in username@yourdomain.com for your POP account
(username replaced with your username and yourdomain.com
replaced with your domain name).
- Fill
in SMTP server as mail.yourdomain.com, where
yourdomain.com is replaced with your domain
name. Note: Some ISPs will not let you use any
other SMTP server other than their own, so you
may have to use your ISPs mail server instead.
Contact your ISP for information as to the location
of their mail server.
- Under
advanced network features, select 90 seconds
for your network timeout.
- The
option save password should be checked.
- The
authentication style should be password option.
- Under
connection method, do not check the offline
option.
If
you have multiple email addresses, you can install
a separate copy of Eudora for each email address.
Newer versions of Eudora allow for multiple personalities.
You can enter each POP/Login email account as a
separate personality and download mail from all
or some of these accounts at the same time.
Eudora
"Light" is freeware offered by Qualcom
and can be downloaded over the net. Eudora
"Pro" must be purchased. Search for
Eudora under Yahoo
for details on how to obtain a copy.
1.3.2)
Managing the Linux Account
1.3.2.1)
Symbolik Links (redirecting file access)
To
link one file to another in the same directory:
Type ln -s fred.htm index.htm to redirect all
file accesses from index.htm to the file fred.htm
, while you are in that directory.
To
link a file in your current directory to a file
in another directory:
Type ln -s /home/username/public_html/directory/joe.htm
index.htm to redirect all file accesses from index.htm
to the file fred.htm in the other directory, while
you are in the index.htm directory.
1.3.2.2)
passwd (changing your password)
Type
passwd to change your password. Or type passwd username
to change that of one of your ftp users or pop accounts.
You may also change your passwords thru the control
panel.
1.3.2.3)
zip/unzip
Type
zip to zip files and unzip to unzip files. This
program is compatible with the zip program for DOS.
For example:
$
zip myzip file1 file2 file3
This
puts the files file1, file2, and file3 into a new
zip archive called myzip.zip. On the other hand,
if you had the archive myzip.zip and wanted to get
back the files:
$
unzip myzip
Typing
zip or unzip by itself will give
you a usage summary, showing nearly all the
options availible.
1.3.2.4)
du (disk usage)
The
Unix command
du -s directory
shows how much disk
space is used by a directory and everything below
it. However, you may also check such on the front
of your browser control panel for a pre-calculated
figure.
If
you have an anonymous FTP area, also check du -s
/home/username/public_ftp to see how much space
your anonymous FTP users are using.
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