Web Page Setup at HICom

(The reason two accounts are used is for security. When you run using the PPP account you actually enter superuser state. Because of this, we restrict PPP accounts to only process the PPP server "shell" which prohibits them from running Zmodem or FTP programs.)

In order to do most of what is described below, you must log in to your shell account and select option 9 from the menu. This will put you into native Unix and allow you to issue the commands described. To login as a shell account, you can dial-in to the main number and login as a shell user or dial-in to the main number and login as a PPP user. PPP users would then telnet into HICom and login as a shell user.

The response time on a direct shell login is generally much better than when you telnet in. However, if you dial-in as a PPP user first, you can see the changes you make to your web page more readily and in graphical format.

In order to get data between the two accounts, the accounts must be in the same group. Establishing the group relationship between the two accounts is done by HICom for you and we set the initial permissions. However when you create new files in your directories, you must adjust the groups permissions as necessary.

To move files from your shell account to the PPP-account, use the mv command from your shell account.

All the files you wish to share must have group-level access permissions set. Generally, this means all files in your home directories. You can check that this is so via the "ls -l" command from your shell account. It should look like:

-rwxrwxr-x    user-id   group-id           file-name
 |  |  |------- world premissions         for web pages should be r-x
 |  |----------- group permissions   	  for your accounts should be rwx
 |----------------  your own permissions  should probably be rwx

Your user directory, the public_html subdirectory, and the contents of public_html must have world access permissions of r-x. You can check this from your shell account via the command "ls -ld /home/user/userid" where "userid" is one of your userid(s).

When a browser visits your web page, the default web page which gets loaded is called "index.html". If you develop the index.html on a PC and upload it, the suffix will probably not be .html. To change it, use the "mv" command from your shell account:

    mv index.htm   index.html

 	chmod  -R o=r+x public_html

   chmod  -R g=r+w+x public_html

All HTML must have a suffix of ".html". Some other valid suffixes are ".cgi", ".jpg", and ".shtml" (there are others).

If you use FTP, you must have an FTP client associated with your browser. Configure the FTP client to login using your SHELL account/password. (Generally, you login using your PPP account and then fire up the FTP.) If you have NFS, you can take care of the file rename's via NFS and actually "drag" the files from your PC to the FTP session. "Internet in a Box" allows this. After uploading, remember to set the file permissions for the new file. If you dont have NFS, you must login to your shell account via telnet and set the permissions.

You can use Lynx from your shell account to confirm that your upload worked.

Note that you can test your HTML via http://www.hicom.net/~shell-userid/ before you establish the link to your domain. HICom will set up the domain name, mail aliases, and pointers from the web server to your directories. Let us know which account you will use for the web page (shell or ppp) - we default to setting up pointers to the SHELL account.

We also set up a pointer to the web server error log in your directory, called error_log. During testing you can see what errors appear. The log gets cleared once a day. To look at the current log, use the commands:

    more    error_log
or  tail   -20 error_log

  Example:
The login name is:			qqq
The public_html actual name is:		/home/user/qqq/public_html
The cgi directory actual name is: 	/home/user/qqq/cgi-bin
The cgi useage is:			http://www.domain.com/cgi-qqq

If you use Perl to write cgi scripts, make sure that the first line in the program is:

#!/usr/bin/perl    

The command htpasswd (from NCSA) is located in your path for shell accounts.