Eos, Engineering Computing at North Carolina State University

10 Things You Need to Know Before You Build

Please keep in mind that you're not the only one dabbling in our webspace. Most of these rules and guidelines were created to improve the overall security of our web infrastructure (for you and others).

• You won't see any PHP errors by default; they're turned off. Learn how to debug.
• You can't use mod_rewrite in Apache. That means no fancy URL rewriting.
• All javascript, css and html files are automatically gzipped using Apache's mod_deflate. This help make your pages load faster.
• You can easily create your own redirects using .htaccess files or php.
• Password protecting your website with WRAP is easy.
• You can't use PHP to crawl back up the file tree, period. This applies to functions like readfile(), include(), require(), etc. This is the single biggest reason that most third-party CMS and other web applications won't work in our space. Read more about open base directory restriction.
• All website domains must start with 'www.' You can't leave it off (unless you are operating under a subdomain like http://students.engr.ncsu.edu or people.engr.ncsu.edu). Having one standard URL pattern helps improve our search engine rankings.
• Your website's traffic statistics are automatically logged with Urchin. Learn how to access your webstats.
• By default, your folders or directories are NOT writeable by the server. So if you want to do things like upload files with PHP, you'll need to explicitly request server write access for the folders that need it.
• You can access your webspace with SFTP or SSH. Here are some instructions for connecting with WinSCP.