Web Services

Web Services

Please Read!

LIONS was developed to provide the university with UNIX-based high-performance computing and research facilities. While LIONS is perfectly capable of serving web pages, the University supports an environment that may be more appropriate for web sites. Additional information on university web development resources is available at:

http://www.odu.edu/docs/developer/

OCCS can assist you with migrating your site to the new environment or with planning, designing, and setting up a new web site. If you wish to use the university web resources, please email 'webadmin@odu.edu'.

As explained in Introduction to LIONS page, faculty and staff may request the ability to host a university related web page from their LIONS account by sending a request to 'unixhelp@odu.edu' and then creating a public_html directory via the directions which follow in the next section. In most cases students may obtain this ability through the authorization of a department representative, meaning, that their instructor or faculty advisor needs to make the request in behalf of the student. Please note that in neither case is this ability on by default unless it was requested at the time the account was created. Just having a public_html directory will not make its contents accessible via the web.

If you wish to house your departmental or organizational web pages under LIONS, we recommend that you do not store them under your LIONS user id. Rather, we can set up specific directories in the LIONS web hierarchy to house your pages and give whomever you desire access to update them. Please contact us via 'unixhelp@odu.edu' for more details on this service.

DISCLAIMER

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING: While the LIONS support staff maintains the web server software, we are unable to assist with the creation and design of your web site. There are several online tutorials as well as some excellent books on how to make your pages as professional as possible. In addition, the central university web services is more than capable of assistance in creation of web pages which utilize their services - please email 'webadmin@odu.edu' for more information.

Creating The public_html Directory

In order for your web pages to appear, your files should be placed into a folder in your home directory called 'public_html'. In addition, this directory should have the proper permissions set so that the web server can access it's contents. (Departmental and organizational directories should already have their permissions set correctly by us - if not, please let us know.) Once we have made your LIONS account "web-capable", please follow these instructions for setting up the public_html directory:

1. Log into a UNIX LIONS workstation in your department or into sol-login.lions.odu.edu. (For help on this, please see our Remote Access document. NOTE: You will not be able to log into www.lions.odu.edu as that is a restricted machine and you will see an error message telling you so.)
2. Once logged in, enter the following command at the unix shell prompt:
   
   mkpublic_html
   
   

   This command will create your public_html directory and set the permissions correctly such that the webserver can access your content.

Please note that even if you create the public_html directory without issuing the 'mkpublic_html' command, you can always rerun 'mkpublic_html' over again at any time, and your file permissions will be set properly..

Creating and Updating your Web Pages

To create/update your pages, you can use these methods:

1. Log into a UNIX workstation in your department or into sol-login.lions.odu.edu and edit your web pages by hand using UNIX utilities such as 'vi', 'pico', etc. This method is probably best for those who like to 'get their hands dirty' with raw HTML.
2. Edit your pages 'offline' using any one of the available WYSIWYG web development packages such as 'DreamWeaver' or 'FrontPage'. Then, you'll need to upload the files to the public_html folder in your LIONS home directory or departmental/organizational home using either a standard command line-based FTP client or by 'dropping and dragging' your files with a graphical FTP client such as WS-FTP.
   
   As a reminder, the LIONS FTP site name is ftp.lions.odu.edu.
   
   If the above is unclear, here is a brief tutorial uploading files from a Windows XP machine.

Accessing Your Web Pages

You may access your personal web pages by pointing your browser to the following URL:

http://www.lions.odu.edu/~youruserid

where youruserid is the name of your LIONS user id.

For departmental pages, they can be accessed by:

http://www.lions.odu.edu/dept/departmentname

For organizational pages, they can be accessed by:

http://www.lions.odu.edu/org/departmentname

Note that every directory, including the public_html directory, needs to have a 'index.html' or 'index.htm' file in them. If not, you will receive a 403 Forbidden error message. The reason for this is to prevent open directories from being exposed to the world..

Setting Up The "cgi-bin" Directory

Once you have access to display web pages, you also have the ability to create and run CGI scripts. All of your CGI scripts must be placed in a directory called cgi-bin located in the public_html folder in your home directory. If they're not there, your CGI scripts won't work.

To create it, follow these instructions after creating your public_html directory as described earlier in this document:

1. Log into a UNIX LIONS workstation in your department or into sol-login.lions.odu.edu. (NOTE: You will not be able to log into www.lions.odu.edu as that is a restricted machine and you will see an error message telling you so.)
2. Once logged in, enter the following two commands at the unix shell prompt:
   
   cd $HOME/public_html
mkdir cgi-bin