Web Lockers

To build and deliver a College of Engineering web site, your department or college webmaster must first request an allocation of file space (web locker) for you to house the site. ITECS creates sites free of charge, but only under the hosted domains (virtual hosts, or vhosts) it supports. The following web lockers can be requested.

• college and departments (including centers, institutes, labs, and other college units)
• administrative units 
• student organizations
• individuals (faculty, staff, students)
• .org domains

Procedure for Requesting a Web Site Locker

1. REQUEST A LOCKER (Note: Only COE webmasters can request web lockers, so contact them to make a request for you.)
2. Select Web.
3. Select the locker type, vhost or site.
4. Select the COE Department making the request.
5. Provide Unity ID of the Locker Owner (must be faculty or staff). This person can add/remove people to/from the locker's pts access groups.
6. Specify Initial Quota needed (usually 50-100MB).
7. If requesting a site locker, identify the Vhost Name under which the site will be created, e.g., www.engr.ncsu.edu.
8. Provide a Site Name to be mounted under the Vhost, e.g., research, and URL Path to the site, e.g.,www.engr.ncsu.edu/research (lowercase, no spaces).
9. Under Locker Permissions, enter Unity IDs of other people who need access to the site:
   • Admin Group (faculty, staff, and students who can administer the site).
   • Editors Group (faculty, staff, and students who have write permission to edit the site).
   • Read-only Group (faculty, staff, and students who have read permission to copy files from the site).
10. Select the Continue button to get a summary of what you entered.

You will be notified by email when the space is set up.

Who Can Request a Web Site

Only full-time staff and faculty can own web lockers, but the request must come through the department webmaster or administrator. The reason for this is important. All web sites must be organized under a hosted domain, or vhost, which is done by the webmaster. The request process keeps the webmaster informed of what is created for the department so that s/he can manage sites, space, and addressing throughout the vhost.

Note: COE faculty and staff can also request personal lockers, configured for both web and non-web content, without going through the webmaster. They can also request non-web AFS lockers themselves, see File Services.

Web Addresses and Short URLs

On the locker-request form, the webmaster provides a name for your web locker, an AFS volume which appears as a directory or folder in the file system. This locker name becomes part of the site URL, so it is important to choose this name carefully.

The web address, or URL, is constructed from the name of the locker and the vhost it is under. The vhost (domain) is engr, csc, ece, eos, etc., as in www.engr.ncsu.edu. In most cases, the locker (site) name is mounted directly under the vhost to give it a short URL, e.g., http://www.domain.ncsu.edu/site/. However, the webmaster might choose to mount the site under another directory, e.g, http://www.domain.ncsu.edu/directory/site/.

Only one address per site is supported, and the URL is case sensitive! The file system is case sensitive and not hospitable to spaces and some special characters. For example, http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/news and http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/NEWS are two different addresses. ITECS recommends lowercase file names and URLs with no spaces. Underscores can also be a problem since links are generally underlined on web pages, and an underscore in a file name could be read as a space.

Path to Web Lockers

The locker is in the AFS file system. The path to the locker is /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/vhost/locker/ The first part of the path, /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/, is the same for all college and department web sites, except for those delivered from Personal lockers.

Web site lockers are accessed by their owners, editors, and readers via the path:

/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/[vhost]/[locker]

BE SURE THAT /sites/ IS IN YOUR PATHNAME.

The webmaster has a different access path:

/afs/eos/engrwww/[vhost]

NO ONE BUT WEBMASTERS CAN ACCESS LOCKERS VIA THIS PATH.

Examples of paths:

• Department, Administration, and Research Web Sites

Path to locker:
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/vhost/locker/
e.g.,
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/engr/news/

URL:
http://www.vhost.ncsu.edu/locker/
e.g.,
http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/

• Student Organization Web Sites

Path to locker:
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/locker/
e.g.,
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/students.engr/e-council/

URL:
http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/locker/
e.g.,
http://students.engr.ncsu.edu/e-council/

• Faculty and Staff (Personal lockers)

Path to locker:
/afs/eos/lockers/people/a-z/userid/www/
e.g.,
/afs/eos/lockers/people/m/mcdaniel/www/

URL:
http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/userid/
e.g,
http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/mcdaniel/

Personal web lockers have a different path from other college web sites because they also house non-web content in a private folder at the same level as www. These lockers are organized alphabetically by Unity user ID.

Access Permissions and What They Mean

The webmaster who requests the locker for you will need the Unity IDs of any other people (students, faculty, or staff) who need permission to work on files in the locker. However, once the web locker is set up, the owner of the space can use a web tool to update and change access to the locker without going through the webmaster.

LOCKER PORTAL at http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/lockers/portal/

This web tool overlays fs and pts commands, so you don't have to go through the command line. Protection (pts) groups are created and placed on the access control list (ACL) of your locker. People who have access to the locker must be a member of one of the pts groups.  Each group has a defined membership that users are added to or removed from. A typical web-locker access control list (ACL) looks like:

/afs/eos/engrwww/students.engr % fs la
Access list for . is
Normal rights:
students-engr-www:wwwread rl
students-engr-www:wwwedit rlidwk
students-engr-www rlidwk
itecs-admin:lockeraudit rl
engr:www-servers rl
itecs-admin:webadmins rl
system:administrators rlidwka
mcdaniel rlidwk

In engineering web lockers, only the owner is listed by UnityID on the ACL (must be faculty or staff). All others with access reside in pts groups. vhosts and sites are organized the same way. For example, in the vhost locker above at /afs/eos/engrwww/students.engr/:

mcdaniel is the faculty/staff owner with write (rlidwk) access. The owner can add people to the admin group, students_engr-www.

students-engr-www is the Admin Group with write (rlidwk) access.

students-engr-www:wwwedit is the Editors Group with write access (rlidwk) to edit.

students-engr-www:wwwread is the Read-only Group with read (rl) access.

All lockers are set up with these same groups. No "a" rights (rlidwka) are granted or needed with this configuration. The other pts groups listed are for system administrators and access to the site by web servers. For administrative-level tasks, please contact and work through ITECS.

The table below shows the same:

Important Notes!

• See more on Vhost Web Lockers and Site Web Lockers in Engineering Locker Model Technical Specifications.
• See Web Services for more on hosting and developing web sites on College of Engineering servers.
• ITECS does not make university-level domains, i.e., www.yoursite.ncsu.edu, except for primary departments and centers, e.g., the Department of Nuclear Engineering, or www.ne.ncsu.edu. If you wish to secure a university-level domain for your site, contact ITD web services to acquire for-pay space and support services on university servers.
• Only PHP is supported, no CGI, SSI, perl, jsp, asp, etc. (see http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/web).
• Use the campus WRAP tool to restrict parts of your site with a login.
• Backups are made daily and kept for 23 days, but you should save regularly to external media and know the procedures for restoring lost files.
• See Diagrams of Engineering and Wolfware Lockers for the location of Web lockers.
• Please contact eoshelp@ncsu.edu for assistance.