Student Website Info
How do I publish a web page to the GSoC server?
UPDATE:esus was upgraded from RHEL 6 to CentOS 7 at the end of 2020. It now uses netid accounts for student logins and how the web server serves up user's webpages has changed. There is now some required manual configuration for student web pages to work. If you want a webpage, please email coeithelp@montana.edu which will create a Web HelpDesk ticket for the COE... who will process your request ASAP. Once that is done, the instructions below should work.
Assuming you have an esus account... create a directory within your home directory named www. It is within this www directory that the GSoC web server (apache) looks for personal web pages.
File and directory names are case sensitive. You should name your top level web page index.html. It is recommended that you don't use any spaces nor special characters in your file and directory names although it is not a techincal requirement.
It is recommended that any graphic files are sampled / sized for web presentation... i.e. < 1MB at 60 DPI and in .jpg, .gif, or .png format.
Creating your web pages: Use whatever you want -- vi, emacs, Mozilla Composer, Dreamweaver, FrontPage, etc. Once you have created your web pages, just transfer them to your www directory on esus via ftp or scp... although since scp is an encrypted protocol, it is preferred. You'll need to know the following details:
Host: esus.cs.montana.edu
Username: Your esus account name
Password: Your esus account password
Again, make sure and put your web pages within your www directory. If you don't have a www directory, create one.
Viewing your web page: Just visit http://www.cs.montana.edu/~username where username is your esus account name. That should bring up your index.html page. If you don't have a file named index.html in your www directory, you'll have to tack on the full name of the file or directory you want to view to the end of the previously mentioned URL. For example: http://www.cs.montana.edu/~username/somefile.html.
File and directory permissions: If you run into any permissions problems, make sure your www directory has the other read and excute permissions set so the web server has the ability to access your web page files.
Your homedir should be drwx--x--x (711) [chmod 711 ~username]
Directories including www should be set to drwxr-xr-x (755) [chmod 755 ~/www]
Files should be -rw-r--r-- (644)
Most file transfer programs offer the ability to change permissions. Those who are comfortable with the command line can also login to esus via ssh and use the chmod command to fix permissions. See the chmod man page for more command syntax details.
Troubleshooting: Help! My pictures are broken links rather than displaying. File and directory names on esus are case sensitive. Microsoft Windows, although it offers upper and lower case, is not particularly case sensitive. When you upload a file, you need to check its exact spelling on esus and refer to it properly. If your HTML refers to "gif" and/or "jpg" and your files end in .GIF or .JPG, they will show broken links rather than displaying. To fix this, either rename your files to match how you referred to them, or change your references in your HTML to reflect the correct filenames.
It is recommended that you use only lowercase letters for filenames and directories... while not technically necessary, it eliminates some of the guesswork.
It is also recommended that you don't use any spaces in your filenames. Again, while not technically necessary, it eliminates having to use ugly HTML entity coding... where %20 = space.
How do I publish a webpage on the MSU servers?
MSU has a few webpages with instructions:
Student website: https://forge.montana.edu/projects/81/wiki/Student_Websites
Z-drive off campus: https://forge.montana.edu/projects/stlabswebsite/wiki/Z_Drive