PNCE-Unix: Departmental/Group Web Pages

PNCE-Unix: Departmental and Group World-Wide Web Pages

We also make liberal use of symbolic links, so there can often be many multiple paths to the same file on the filesystem, and sometimes multiple paths via the web as well.

The main departmental pages are maintained (with respect to content) by the chair's office. Pages for individual research groups can be delegated to the group (or designated members thereof); contact PCS to request this. Typically the delegated research group pages will be located under the URLs http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroup/GNAME or http://www.physics.umd.edu/GNAME or the related https: protocol versions, where GNAME is the name of the research group, or more commonly an abbreviation for it. As per the algorithm described earlier, the files are located at /dept/phys/htdocs/www/rgroup/GNAME or /dept/phys/htdocs/www/GNAME. They are also typically equivalently located at /group/GNAME/pub/public_html or equivalently /dept/phys/groups/GNAME/pub/public_html.

The department also maintains a test web server at http://testwww.physics.umd.edu which you can use if you are doing major work on your web site and want to try things out without breaking your current site. The group pages URLs are similar to the above, just swapping testwww for www in the above, and the files are generally located at /group/GNAME/pub/test_html. If you have not used this before, you may need to contact PCS to ensure things are set up properly. Note that pages on the test server are not accessible off-campus unless you have a specific password for such access. If you ensure that your URLs referencing other pages are relative (i.e. do not mention the server name, so <a href="http://www.physics.umd.edu/pcs/mypage.html" > would not be relative, but either <a href="mypage.html" > or <a href="/pcs/mypage.html" > would be relative), you can test out your pages on the test server and by simply copying them over to the production server they should just work.

CGI binaries and scripts are located in code_it(/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-bin/www) and code_it(/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-script/www). Because CGI codes are very prone to security risks, PCS encourages you to avoid CGI except when absolutely necessary. If you need to have a CGI binary or script installed on the WWW server, please submit a physhelp requesting it be installed, including the full path to the code you wish to have installed, what the code does, and why you feel it is necessary.