These instructions are for the technically-minded. They are not very explicit; they lay out the conditions under which the web server operates and allow you to work as you like within those conditions. These instruction assume you have a working knowledge of web pages and UNIX systems, at least at a user's level. If this is not the case, please try the basic instructions.

Web pages are hosted on the School of Pharmacy file server, binder, with a virtual-host name of people.pharmacy.purdue.edu. binder is a Linux box, running SAMBA with full NTFS emulation. This makes things somewhat interesting. URLs are in the form http://people.pharmacy.purdue.edu/~username/, where username is the user's Windows-domain login.

There are three ways to put content on binder. You can map a drive in Windows Explorer (easiest way), FTP/SFTP files, or telnet/SSH to binder. When using telnet/FTP/SSH/SFTP, your username should be supplied as 'PHARMACY\username', or 'PHARMACY\\username' (note the double slash) if you are coming from a UNIX system.

Web content goes in a directory named www, located in the your home directory. Ownsership for your home directory should be owner = you, group = 'Domain Users' or possibly your department. Permissions for your home directory should be at least 711 to allow the web server to access your files.

A note on listing permissions: Your account exists in the windows domain, and your UNIX username is PHARMACY\username. Unfortunately, when you list files, even in the long listing (ls -l), UNIX displays on the the first 8 characters of your username. For us, this is inevitably 'PHARMACY', and the same applies to groups. Use the 'numeric listing' option (ls -ln) to get your numeric identifier, and use the command 'getent passwd' to get a list of username/numeric identifiers. "getent passwd | grep username" works well. "getent group" gets you group listings. Another side effect of this system is that command such as "cd ~username" don't work, as username is not included in /etc/passwd.

Ownership of your web directory, for maximum security, should be owner you, group apache (the web server), with permissions 750. This will allow you to manage files in the www directory, allow the web server to see them and serve them, and keep everyone else out.

We are using an Apache web server. An online manual is available; our current version is Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat). Index file names for this system are index.html, index.htm and index.shtml, in that order. Directory listings are supplied when none of these files is provided. Filenames are case-sensitive. Users' accounts have the following configuration:

<Directory /home/*/www>
    AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
    Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
    IndexOptions DescriptionWidth=* FancyIndexing FoldersFirst ScanHTMLTitles
    <Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Limit>
    <LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
    </LimitExcept>
</Directory>