Faculty Web Servers

UPDATE: 2020 onwards

These instructions are no longer valid, the www-student.it.uts.edu.au student webpage facility is now CLOSED. You now need to host your own web pages elsewhere such as Amazon web services, Google cloud or other 3rd party vendors. 

Please contact your subject coordinator about subject specific web hosting.

Introduction

The UTS:IT student web server is provided for UTS:IT subjects that require a web server. If your subjects don't require a web server, you are currently free to experiment and find your own problems and solutions.

The URL to use is of the form: http://www-student.it.uts.edu.au/~username/filename.html
(where username is your alphabetic rerun.it.uts.edu.au userid and the filename.html is the appropriate html file name.Do NOT use your student number as the username!)

HTML and supporting files should reside in the users ~/public_html directory. You MUST create  this directory yourself!

This means that in the example above, filename.html would be referring to /home/username/public_html/filename.html on UTS:IT Unix servers or Linux workstations.

All files must be readable and, if a script or directory, executable by ''others''. Your home directory should only be executable by ''others''. So in a Unix session:

cd ~
chmod 711 .
chmod 755 public_html
chmod -R go+rX public_html

Advanced security setup

If you are concerned about access to your public_html directory from other users, you can use "access control lists" to provide a more tigher security access by using the setfacl command on rerun.it.uts.edu.au

cd ~
chmod 700 .
chmod 700 public_html
setfacl -m user:wwwsrv:--x .
setfacl -m user:wwwsrv:--x public_html

Server Side Includes

This server honours the ``BitHack'' convention. ie. an executable .html file will be parsed by the server before being delivered to the client.

To do this, you need to put in your directory's .htaccess file: 

   Options +Includes
   XBitHack On

See the Apache manual for more details.

Authentication

Rerun will always prompt for a username and password. NEVER USE YOUR FACULTY COMPUTER ACCOUNT LOGIN/PASSWORD. The username is available to CGI programs via the REMOTE_USER environment variable.

It is possible to restrict directory access to a sub-set of users via a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file generally looks like the following:

     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "your private account"
     AuthUserFile /home/USERNAME/.htpasswd

     require valid-user

The above configuration restricts access to accounts described within the file /home/USERNAME/.htpasswd

To restrict access to particular users, you may replace the replace the require statement with something like this:

     require user username1 username2 ...

Remember: the .htaccess file and .htpasswd file must be readable by ``others to work.

     chmod o+r .htaccess ${HOME}/.htpasswd

Usernames and passwords can be added to your .htpasswd file with the htpasswd program:

     htpasswd -c ${HOME}/.htpasswd username1
     Adding password for username1.
     New password: password
     Re-type new password: password

Use the -c option to create a new .htpasswd file. From then on you can leave it out (htpasswd ${HOME}/.htpasswd USERNAME).