Creating personal web pages on the CLASSE server

Creating your own Web Pages

The CLASSE server supports personal Web pages for users with accounts on the CLASSE Linux (Unix) systems. You can make personal web pages available by creating a world readable directory named public_html in your Linux home directory. This can be from Linux using:

      % cd
      % mkdir public_html
      % chmod o+rx public_html

Your Linux home directory (and thus your Web page directory) is available

• from Linux at /home/userid
• from Windows at \\samba.classe.cornell.edu\home\userid
• or from OS X at smb://samba.classe.cornell.edu/home/userid

Please see DataStewardship and ConnectingToALinuxMachineFromWindows for more information.

All the files you wish to serve should be under your public_html directory, where they can be accessed via the URL prefix http://www.classe.cornell.edu/~userid/. (Replace userid by your own CLASSE userid.) The URL http://www.classe.cornell.edu/~userid/ is translated to a request for the file ~userid/public_html/index.html. You may use soft links but they must point to files you own--for security reasons, the web server will not allow soft links to other people's files in personal web directories. If you do not create a file named index.html in a directory, the web server will by default generate a directory listing; this behavior can be turned off with a .htaccess file, or by creating an empty index.html.

Access Restrictions

By default, there are no access restrictions on personal home pages--anyone on the internet can view your pages. If you create a sub-directory called private in your public_html directory, the CLASSE restricted access permissions will apply to it. Anything within your ~userid/public_html/private/ directory will only be visible by systems connected to a CLASSE network or after authenticating with a CLASSE username and password. If you wish to apply a different set of access permissions, you can do so with a .htaccess file. For details, see Apache's htaccess documentation, or submit a ServiceRequest.

Getting Started

Here are a few starting places for help on writing your own HTML documents:

• The NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML does contain a few bits of bad advice, but overall is a reasonable introduction to HTML.
• The W3C 10 minute guide to HTML gives a very quick introduction.
• The W3C validation service can be used to syntax check your documents, or you can use the local installation of nsgmls--see the document on local sgml tools for the web for details.

Support Policy

All public facing pages and applications will be scanned by Cornell's AppSpider vulnerability scanning service.

We will continue to allow individuals to manage their own public web pages as long as they do not cause any support problems, but keep in mind that:

• Use of CLASSE computing resources must comply with the relevant lab and University policies, including
  • Common Sense and Computer Use at CLASSE
  • Campus Code of Conduct
  • Responsible Use of Electronic Communications
  • Sales Activities on Campus
• Computer equipment at CLASSE is funded specifically for the purpose of advancing CLASSE physics analysis and detector and accelerator development. We will not provide additional disk, network or CPU resources to support personal web pages that are not directly related to the laboratory's purpose.

Use some common sense, taste, and consideration for the lab resources involved when you create your own web pages. Do not serve pages that will cause huge amounts of traffic and are unrelated to the mission of the lab, and respect copyright and other applicable laws and university policies.