User web pages

The CSC has commissioned a server web.iitd.ac.in for hosting web pages of all faculty and PhD students. Your pages will become visible both internally, and externally with a url http://web.iitd.ac.in/~userid where userid is your LDAP id (email id).

To facilitate limited access from only within IITD, CSC has commissioned a separate web server privateweb.iitd.ac.in, where all users of IITD can have their personal web pages. Users can create their web pages in a directory/folder called private_html under their CSC homefolder. These web pages can then be accessed from within IITD through the URL http://privateweb.iitd.ac.in/~userid.

Some of the features of the new web-page hosting servers are as follows:

  1. No separate account for creating user web pages will be necessary. All faculty and PhD students can maintain their personal web pages in a directory called public_html in their CSC home folder. The web pages are accessible as http://web.iitd.ac.in/~userid.
  2. All users can maintain their private (accessible from within IITD) web pages in a directory calledprivate_html in their CSC home folder. The web pagesare accessible as http://privateweb.iitd.ac.in/~userid.
  3. The CSC home folder for all users are mounted as the default home folders on all Windows and Linux machines in the CSC. Users can install and modify their web-pages from any CSC desktop.
  4. The CSC home folders are also available on the publicly accessible ssh servers ssh1.iitd.ac.in (for all users including faculty) and ssh2.iitd.ac.in (for faculty only).Home directory can be access fromssh1.iitd.ac.in and ssh2.iitd.ac.in (faculty only) by usingsecure shell client (ssh client). ssh clientis available by default on all versions of Unices, Linux and Mac. Windows users can download and install a popular ssh client called Putty and a popular GUI secure copyclient calledWinScp.
  5. The CSC home folders can also be mounted by users (after authentication) as local folders on any Windows, Mac or Linux desktops/laptops connected to the IITD LAN. Using this, the users can install/edit their web-pages from their own machines also. Please see the CSC page on Home spaces through CIFS shares for details.
  6. Users can link their own php and cgi scripts to their web-pages and these will execute under userprivileges and permissions. Hence one user's files and data will be completely protected from another user, as long as the file permissions are set up suitably. Please see below for the recommended permission settings.

Login to ssh1.iitd.ac.in using a ssh client (or an sftp client) and set the recommended file permissions as follows:
  1. For any static web content (all non-executable files, like static HTML pages, Images, JavaScript, CSS files, etc), the corresponding file should be set to world readable (preferably 644), and all the parent directories (including the $HOME) should have the execute bit set for the world (preferably 701).
  2. For any executable (PHP or CGI scripts), as well as configuration files which are to be read only by such executables, nobody other than the owner should be given read permissions. It is also required to set executable bit for the owner, to allow executing it as a script with the owner's ID. The permissions thus become 700 for such files (if write access has to be granted), or 500 (for read only).
  3. The bare minimum to get started is:ssh to ssh1.iitd.ac.in or ssh2.iitd.ac.in and use the following:
    chmod o+x $HOME
    chmod uo+x $HOME/public_html
    cd $HOME/public_html && chmod -R u+rx *.php *.cgi
n.b.Please ensure that all html files have read access by all and all php and cgi scripts have the executable permissions set. Please note that there is no web based user interface to manage the website.