FAQs for Web Server Access

The latest copy of this faq list is always available at http://me.eng.sunysb.edu/faq.php

Note:
1) All the commands that you need to type on the shell (command prompt) are in Courier Font.
2) All that is in angled brackets (<..>) needs to be substituted with a user specific string - like your username.

Q1. How do I access the not-so-new server?

There is a SSH (Secured Shell) server running on the web server. You need a client (a piece of software that runs on your local machine) to access it.

Q2. How do I get a client for SSH?

Go to http://softweb.cc.sunysb.edu, enter your credentials when asked, click on SSH 3.2.2, download either windows or unix version. This is a very good client and the university has a site license for it. Save it on your hard drive and install it. If you're using a Linux machine, chances are a ssh client is already installed on it. If not, get a binary from rpmfind.net or from the web site of the distro that you are running. It is quite likely also available on the distribution CD of your OS. If you are using one of the variants of Unix, like Solaris, IBM-AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, etc., you can download source code from http://www.openssh.org and compile it yourself or email me for help. Before venerable MAC users come after me for not talking about them, I already have Mac OS Secure Shell site to divert their attention.
If all you are interested in is just uploading the files to the server, you may download open source and free winscp client.
If you want to use this server from an arcane machine running even an even more arcane operating system for which you simply can't find a client, please do yourself a favor and buy one of the cheap Dells and install a free linux distribution ( Linux Mandrake is a good choice.) on it.

Q3. How do I use this SSH client? (from this point onward, all instructions will be for the SSH client available at the university softweb site)

After installation, by default, installer will put an icon on your desktop with name something like "SSH Secure Shell Client".
Launch it by double clicking on it. Click Profiles, and Add Profile. Type me in the box, and click Add to Profiles. Again click Profiles, then Edit Profiles, Select me from the left hand side and fill in following in some of the empty boxes:

Host name: me.eng.sunysb.edu
User name: <put your login id here>
Do not touch other values and click OK.

Q4. All right, presumably, I added a profile for ME Dept web server. Now what?

You are all set to access the machine now. Just click Profiles and then me. A dialog box will pop up asking you your password and a warning asking something like Do you want to store this key..., say Yes to that dialog. Type in your password. If you see a welcome message, you are logged on the server.

Q5. I put in my password, but it did not allow me to log in. Why?

Either your password is expired or you did not type it in correctly. Please remember that all passwords are case sensitive and those of class users age in 4 months time. After expiry date, you have 7 days to change your passwords before being locked out. If the problem persists, please email me.

Q6. I put in my password and now I can see my cursor sitting quietly next to my login name. What is going on here?

You are in what is known as a shell for Unix/Linux where you can issue commands like ls to see your files and directories and cd (change to another directory) and many more.

Q7. All I want to do is put my web pages in, so stop bothering me, and just tell me what do I do to make my web pages available to my class and netizens?

Putting your web pages to serve to the world is as easy as just dragging and dropping. By default, when you log on to the web server, you are in your home directory (/home/<your username>). There is a directory called public_html in your home directory. Put all the files and directories that you want the world to be able to see, in the directory "public_html". You should have a file with the name index.html in public_html directory. But wait, if you transferred the files already then don't forget to read the next FAQ. It's important from security point of view.

Q8. You still have not told me how do I actually transfer files from my PC/workstation to this directory that you call public_html?

If you are using the SSH Client that we recommended you to install, then just click in the menu window->'NewFile Transfer in Current directory'. This will open another window with a divider in the middle. Now, just navigate to your folder in the left pane and drag files/folder to the right pane in the public_html folder. You may also put your files in other directories, and create new ones for better organization. See help of SSH Client to learn more. After you transfer the files, right click on them, click properties and make sure that the permission mode (shown at the bottom) value is 644 (if it is a file) and 755 if it is a directory. If it's not then change them to these values. If you don't make sure of that then myriad bad things can happen to your files and directories - including tampering to deletion of them by rogue users. If you created your web pages on windows machines and then transferred them, chances are that the files and directory permissions are by default very dangerous, so you need to be especially careful of that.

Q9. I transferred my files to public_html directory, now how do I see them in a browser?

If you have an index.html file in your public_html directory, then just type http://me.eng.sunysb.edu/~<your user name> in the browser of your choice and you should see index.html file. For example, to access the home page of Professor Kincaid, just type http://me.eng.sunysb.edu/~kincaid

Q10. How do I create a web site and serve to the world for my class or for my personal web site?

First, you need to create the web site, using a web editor, such as FrontPage, or Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Adobe GoLive. If you are a brave soul, you can just write your own html code using notepad or vi (however, I don't recommend it unless your pages are very simple in layout and just a dump of textual information). Microsoft word also provides a facility to save your word documents as html - that'd do if you were in a hurry. My recommendation for putting up documents at the server is to convert all non-html documents in pdf (portable document format) format because as the expansion of the acronym implies, it is portable and that means it'd not only show up consistently across all platforms (windows, mac, unix, linux) but also print exactly how you intended. This is not true of Microsoft Word. Another advantage of using pdf is that the viewers (Adobe Acrobat Reader) for pdf documents are available for most of the platforms.

All classes have their own accounts, so if you are teaching a class, you can get the password of that account. Please contact professor Kincaid if this is the beginning of the semester and you'd like a password for your class web site. If you are a faculty in the department, you already have a personal login id for your personal web page. If you don't know the password, email me with your phone number so that I or someone from the secretary's office can call you to verify the request. It's easy to spoof emails these days.

Q11. I'd like to make an archive of my class web site after the semester is over. I am afraid, evil admin might delete the class pages?

Admin will not delete your files. But we recommend you to please back up the contents to your own home directory or on another machine. After the semester is well over, we take backups of public_html directory. (And, admin like magnatune guys is not evil.)

Q12.What happened to the beasts I knew so very well - telnet and ftp, I mean?

They have been retired now. They could no longer handle the fire of Internet Hell. They also had a bad habit of shouting passwords and your sensitive information loudly over the wire. SSH is quite discreet that way. It encrypts (much like your secure Internet shopping) data before sending and decrypts only locally, so it's much safer.

Q13. This current password is quite cryptic and hard to remember. How do I change my password?

Log on to machine as described above, and type /usr/bin/passwd at the prompt. It'll ask you your current password and then you can put in your new password. Please, choose a password that is hard to guess and is difficult to crack. A good mnemonic to remember password is to form an acronym of a long sentence of your choice with some numeric and special characters (like 123$^%&*@) interspersed.
An example: My dog ate my homework today.
Using above sentence, you can choose a password by just selecting first letter of each word alternated by a number or special character: M1d*a%m@h^t (ok, it does n't have to be this long or cryptic, a 6-8 charachter long password is fine.)

Q14. How do I password protect file(s)/directories so that only those who I give the user id and password can access it?

It's very easy to do this. Take following steps:

Step 1: Download this sample htaccess file and rename it to .htaccess (on the shell typemv htaccess .htaccess). Open .htaccess using vi on the shell and do following (or you may edit it using notepad and then upload it to the server):

i) Change the path shown after AuthUserFile (here it assumes that you are trying to protect everything inside directory /home/purwar/public_html/private/)
ii) Put a different phrase inside the double quotes after the AuthName (change Secret Location to something less secret)
iii) Put a username after require user (change JamesBond to something less dangerous and less frivolous)

Save it, place it in the directory that you want to protect and make sure that it has 644 permission mode, see FAQ#8 for details on permission.

Step 2: type /usr/sbin/htpasswd -c .htpasswd <username>

(where, username is the name that you have put in file .htaccess after require user). Type a password when prompted and remember it. Give this username and password to anyone whom you'd like to give access to this directory. The sample file here assumes that you are trying to protect files and directories in /home/purwar/public_html/private/ Change this path accordingly in .htaccess file.
If at a later stage, you'd like to change the password, on the shell type
/usr/sbin/htpasswd .htpasswd <username>
It is also possible to create multiple user ids and different passwords for them. For more details refer to apache documentation.
Here is a link to a simple tutorial.

Last Modified: July 06, 2004, Anurag Purwar , ME Dept, SUNY Stony Brook (email webmaster for comments/questions)

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