Search, Stats, and Security

When a vhost or site grows larger, owners of web sites often want to put a search tool in place to help visitors find the information they need. They also want to know how their sites are being used, which requires logging and statistics services to collect that data. Finally, they sometimes need to restrict access to parts of their web site to specific users who log in through the campus WRAP service.

Searching with Google

Google provides a free and specialized University Search.  Google can be easily set up to search a single domain, e.g., www.vhost.ncsu.edu.

Google University Search will not allow banner ads or any other kinds of paid advertising on the search results pages. However, it may show a text link for Google products or services.

Google refreshes its entire index about once a month, so you may find that new content does not immediately appear in search results.

Statistics with AWStats

Site-use data and statistics are available to owners and webmasters of college and department web sites via the AWStats software. To access statistics for your web site, change the www to webstats (or add webstats if there is no www) and then append your site's base URL (without the 'http://') to the URL.

For statistics related to the ABET site under the www.engr.ncsu.edu vhost, i.e.,
http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/abet/

Enter the following into your browser's address field:

http://webstats.engr.ncsu.edu/www.engr.ncsu.edu/abet/

Web site statistics can only be displayed and read by the site owner and those with access to the site, see also http://webstats.engr.ncsu.edu/.

Security with WRAP

SSL-based authentication to secure web pages is through Web Realm Authentication Protocol, or WRAP, a web-security technology developed at NCSU. When you log in to WRAP, your username and password are sent to an SSL-secured server where they are verified. Additionally, some vhosts are SSL enabled as needed.

In AFS, you secure directories, not individual files. If you have content to restrict to certain users, create a .htaccess file and place it in the directory you want to secure. Put the following code in the .htaccess file to require a login with a campus Unity ID to any pages in the directory.

AuthType WRAP
require affiliation ncsu.edu
require known-user