Website:Webhosting

From UGCS

[edit] Webhosting

UGCS is proud to offer webhosting services to our users. Our webserver is poseidon.ugcs.caltech.edu, and can be accessed at www.ugcs.caltech.edu or ugcs.caltech.edu.

[edit] Server Settings

Here are the important bits of our server settings:

Server Version: Apache 2.2
UserDir /afs/ugcs/user/<username>/public/html      # this is where your webroot is
ScriptDir /afs/ugcs/user/<username>/public/cgi-bin # cgi-scripts go here; accessible at
                                                  # ugcs.caltech.edu/~username/cgi-bin

DocumentIndex index.xhtml index.shtml index.html index.php
Options +Indexes # if you don't have an index.html or index.php, users can will see a directory listing
AllowOverride  AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes Options

[edit] Scripting

All scripts (cgi-bin scripts and php scripts) are run as CGI scripts through a wrapper. Your script will run as the <username>_cgi principal. If you want your scripts to be able to write to a directory, add an ACL on the directory so that principal can write to it. By default, your ~/public directory is world-readable, so your scripts will be able to read stuff in your public directory. If you need additional libraries installed, please let us know.

[edit] Database Access

We run PostgreSQL for our users. More information is available on our postgres help page.

[edit] Kerberos Authentication

We have installed mod_auth_kerb on our webserver, so you can take advantage of our Kerberos database for authentication. Add the following lines to your .htaccess file to restrict access to your pages:

AuthType Kerberos
AuthName "<Your Website>"
Krb5KeyTab "/etc/apache2/poseidon-apache.keytab"
Require valid-user

As show, this will allow anyone with a valid UGCS account to view your page. If you want to restrict access to just a few users, replace the line

Require valid-user

with the following line:

Require <username1>@UGCS.CALTECH.EDU [ <username2>@UGCS.CALTECH.EDU ...]

If you have installed a Kerberos client on your computer and have active kerberos tickets, Firefox will automatically use them to authenticate to any websites protected with these settings.