College and Department Web Sites
To build a web site under your college, department, center (or other) domain (e.g., www.bae.ncsu.edu, www.engr.ncsu.edu, engineeringonline.ncsu.edu, www.spec.ncsu.edu, etc.), you need an allocation of file space (web locker) to house the site. ITECS creates web sites free of charge, but only under the hosted domains (vhosts) it supports.
Requesting a web locker
Contact your college or department webmaster to request a web locker for your site. Please provide the following:
- Unity ID of the faculty or staff locker owner.
- Name of your site (program, unit, etc.) to be mounted under the vhost (http://www.dept.ncsu.edu/), e.g., http://www.ce.ncsu.edu/distance/
- Quota needed (usually 50-100MB to start but can be increased to multiple 2 Gig volumes if needed).
- Unity IDs of people who need access to the locker as administrators and editors.
- MySQL database, if needed.
Who can request a web locker
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 department 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 individual people lockers, configured for both web and non-web content, without going through the webmaster.
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. For example, http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/mep/ and http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/MEP/ are two different addresses. The file system is case sensitive and not hospitable to spaces and some special characters. (Underscores can also be a problem since they can be hidden by underlining and read as a space. Use a hyphen/dash instead.) For consistency across all COE web addresses, the automated locker request system will only accept site names in lowercase with no spaces.
Path to web lockers
The web 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.
Path to locker:
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/vhost/locker/
e.g.,
/afs/eos/engrwww/sites/engr/research/
URL:
http://www.vhost.ncsu.edu/locker/
e.g.,
http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/research/
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.
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/sites/engr/research/ % fs la
Access list for . is
Normal rights:
engr-research-www:wwwread rl
engr-research-www:wwwedit rlidwk
engr-research-www rlidwk
itecs-admin:lockeraudit rl
engr:www-servers rlidwk
itecs-admin:webadmins rl
system:administrators rlidwka
jsstren 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 locker above at /afs/eos/engrwww/sites/engr/research/:
- Owner: jsstren is the faculty/staff owner with write (rlidwk) access. The owner can request quota and add/remove people to/from any of the following groups through the LOCKER PORTAL.
- Admin Group: engr-research-www is the administrators group with write (rlidwk) access. No "a" rights (rlidwka) are granted or needed with this configuration.
- Edit Group: engr-research-www:wwwedit is the editors group with write access (rlidwk).
- Read Group: engr-research-www:wwwread is a rarely used, read-only group of people with read-look (rl) permission to use/copy files from the site, such as templates, images, etc.
The other pts groups listed are for system administrators and access to the site by web servers.
Important notes!
- 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.
- ITECS can host .org domains with restrictions.
- All web sites can use PHP and MySQL with some restrictions, including people lockers, no CGI, SSI, perl, jsp, asp, etc.
- Use the campus WRAP tool if you need to restrict parts of your site with a login.
- Backups are made daily and kept for 23 days, but you should save regularly to disk and know the procedures for restoring lost files.
- See also diagrams of engineering and Wolfware file space lockers in AFS (PDF) for the location of web lockers in AFS.