FAQ: Setting Up Personal Web Pages

Yes, if you are a CS faculty, staff, or a current CS graduate student.

Use of these facilities must adhere to all Federal/State statutes and the policies of Oklahoma State University and the Computer Science Department. Explicitly prohibited are activities which in any way try to gain, maintain, or collect information for unauthorized access, or any activities for personal or corporate profit.

Yes and no, web pages on departmental machines need to be related in some way to computer science. The primary purpose of all CS Department facilities is faculty research and assigned student course work. Personal information, i.e. hobbies, family info., etc., are fine as long as it's not excessive. Material of questionable taste is definitely a no-no. Again, the main purpose of the CS facilities is to promote computer science. The CS facilities committee is the final arbitrator.

The CS department's main web server is located on a.cs.okstate.edu, however www.cs.okstate.edu is defined as an alias for a.cs.okstate.edu and is the preferred address (see http://www.cs.okstate.edu).

Since improperly written "cgi-bin" programs represent a known security risk, the department does not allow "cgi-bin" programs on it's main web server a.cs.okstate.edu. Persons needing to run "cgi-bin" programs for research or thesis can use z.cs.okstate.edu (see Computer Science CGI-BIN Policy first).

All personal web pages reside under a user's home directory underneath the directory public_html. The directory public_html and the path to it, must be world executable (see 'man chmod'). Underneath public_html should be a file named index.html, this is the default page the web server will try to find. All files you wish to server must be world readable (again see 'man chmod'). Below are commands to initially setup the public_html directory.

After creating any web pages under the public_html directory, users should do a 'chmod o+r filename' on the file to insure it is world readable.

There are two log files related to the web server on a.cs.okstate.edu. The file /var/apache/logs/access_log contains messages about access attempts, while the file /var/apache/logs/error_log contains messages about errors.

The URL for accessing your newly created web pages is http://www.cs.okstate.edu/~userid, where userid is your login id for a.cs.okstate.edu (notice the tilde character "~" before userid).

• First, are the files world readable?
• Is the path to the files at least world executable?
• Do you have a default web page named index.html?
• Is it world readable?
• Did you forget the "~" (tilde character) before your userid?

If the answer to all the above questions is "yes", then your userid may not be in the file /etc/apache/srm.conf, send e-mail to sysmgr@cs.okstate.edu.