Web Server Manual | Frames Format

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Your Links:
- Review your Web Site's Control Panel:http://cp.insert_your_domain
- Read your Email: http://mail.insert_your_domain
- Manage your Email Account: http://mail.insert_your_domain
- Online Manual (this page):http://manual.insert_your_domain/Stats
- Change your Spamassassin rules (if installed):http://sacp.insert_your_domain
- Review your Web Site's Stats: http://insert_your_domain/Stats

Common terms:
- home directory: directory above your public_html directory, path /home/vs#####
- cgi-bin: located in the home directory. place where PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) scripts go. CGI by the way stands for "Common Gateway Interface"
- public_html: place HTML files go.
- username: your virtual server number, such as, vs01000, fp00000 or ds00000.
- email_name: your email account name, such as, john.
- mail email_name: the default POP account for all virtual servers. This account catches all email with any email_name sent to the account (excluding other installed accounts).
- POP account: a single email account with an assigned username and password.
- domain: a domain name or server name or hostname. Your personal domain name is frequently represented here as your_domain.com or a_domain.com
- DNS: Domain Name System. DNS is used mostly to translate between domain names and IP addresses, and to control Internet email delivery..
- UNIX: your server uses the unix operating system.

Apache UnixWeb Server FAQs | top

How do I access my account via PC FTP or Mac FTP:

Host Name: your domain name
User ID: vs#####
Password: password assigned

* Remote Host:

* Check box "Use PASV mode" (AKA Use Passive Mode)

You may also access your files with your web browser, using the following format example:

ftp://vs#####:@your_domain.com/vs#####.access.log

How do I access my account via Telnet or SSH:
Shell access to your account is available via SSH (Secure Shell) client side software only.
Since Telnet passes username/password and other information sent to the server in "clear text," Telnet software access to your account is not available.

SSH clients provide the same functionality as Telnet. In addition, SSH uses secure encryption and does not pass information in clear text.

In October, 2001, direct shell access to web server accounts was turned off to further enhance web site security.
Contact your service manager for details on how to obtain a secure shell account (SSH).

Within your SSH client software access your account using the following settings:
Protocol: SSH - 3DES
Hostname: will be provided
Username: will be provided
Password: will be provided
Directory:

Once you have established access to your SSH account, use the following syntax to connect:
ssh vs## -l vs#####

Changing my web server password:

How can I view my web site in my web browser without using my domain name:

When I review my error log I see occasional robot.txt errors:

Can I redirect viewers to a web page using a short URL?

Sample .htaccess file and mime type settings:

Audio/Video Streaming

The technology and information related to Audio/Video changes frequently.
We recommend reviewing the search engines for the latest tips and examples.

Server Side Includes:

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP):

Managing server log files and Webalizer:
Graphical server log file data may be viewed with Webalizer.

Webalizer is an unsupported free site statistics program, available within your account. It may be useful for basic web server log file reporting. Webalizer is not a commercial application and corruption of the data has been known to occur. Statistics are likewise archived for one year. Periodic backup is recommended.

Webalizer archives your data daily, at 1:30pm PST.

http://your_domain.com/Stats

Rotation notes:
Each Sunday at Midnight logs for the week are moved to the previous_log directory in the home directory.

Each weeks log will overwrite the previous log file. This will give each user one week to work with the previous week's log file if necessary.

Special note:
Host name lookup (what country viewers are from) is "not on" by default. Ask your service manager to turn this feature "on" for your account if needed.

You may have noticed Webalizer only lists the top 20 or so in most categories (http://your_domain.com/Stats). You can change this easily.
Download the file in your /home directory named: .webalizer.conf"
Edit the text in the file as follows, and upload over the original.
Changes will take place on the next day's stats listing. For example:

TopSites        100
TopKSites       100
TopURLs         100
TopKURLs        100
TopReferrers    100
TopAgents       100
TopCountries    100
TopEntry        100
TopExit         100
TopSearch       100

 

Email FAQs | top

How do I set up my email software(checking and send email):

All email programs ask a mininum of four questions, though the exact words used may differ slightly:

  1. Incoming mail server (POP3)
  2. Outoing mail server (SMTP)
  3. Username (or User ID or Account Name)
  4. Password (may not requre this, but may ask for it when you first check email)

Locating the Email account settings page in your email software is your first challenge. If you are unfamiliar with your program's menus, see your software "Help" menu for exact directions.

Using the basic four questions above, your settings may look like this:

  1. Incoming mail server (POP3): mail.your_domain.com
  2. Outoing mail server (SMTP): mail.your_domain.com
  3. Username (or User ID or Account Name): mail@your_domain.com
  4. Password. password-you-chose

Microsoft Outlook 2002. See [ Print Ready Page]

What is my unlimited aliases account setting (catch-all / catch all email account)-- in case someone makes a typo and sends email to a wrong address at my domain (such as jonh):

Your unlimited alias email account (mail) will catch all stray email.

vs#####-mail@your_domain.com

Changing email passwords:
"Ok, I give up. How do I change an email password?"

You may change email passwords via your online email control panel.

I have problems sending email, why?

Please contact your Internet access ISP and use your ISP's SMTP setting when possible.
Sending email direct through your ISP account may be faster (i.e., use their SMTP setting).

Some ISP's restrict outgoing mail, so this may not be possible.
If that is the case, use your domain name as the SMTP setting (alternately try mail.your_domain.com).

Important - If you set your SMTP setting to your domain name:

I just moved in my account and mail is sporadic:

Testing New Email Accounts
Your domain is not yet fully set up on the server? Not a problem:

You may access your email directly without using your domain name. Instead of entering your domain name in the incoming mail server name setting of your email software, enter your web server's machine name instead.

Examples:

Leave Email on Server?
When you check email your software will immediately delete each message from the server after retrieval, unless you have "Leave a copy of messages" set/checked within your email software.

If you note email is being saved on the server and your email is not being deleted as expected, uncheck or modify the "Leave a copy of messages" setting in the "Advanced" settings section of your email software.

If you do not know where this is located, see the "Help" menu of your software (F1 key). To locate the "Advanced" settings section of your email software, enter in the "Help" screen search box one of the following phrases:
"advanced settings" or
"leave a copy"

Email and System Viruses?
Due to the nature of things, viruses are an inevitable part of computer use. Your web server does not include email virus filtering for the following reasons: uncertainty over the potential accidental deletion of important email, would slow web server performance, and cannot prevent the spread of viruses inadvertently sent from your local computer.

Instead, we recommend every computer user consider the purchase of commercial "auto updating" antivirus software, such as Norton AntiVirus among others. These software packages can be useful in checking incoming email as well as local software.

Additional recommendations:

Spam & SpamAssassin FAQs
- What is the server policy on spam?
- What is SpamAssassin?
- Why tag spam instead of deleting it?
- How do I filter email tagged as "spam:"?
- I forward my email elsewhere. Will SpamAssassin tag it first?

How can I send my email to fax?
eFaxprovides this service for free or small fee. You can go direct to eFax to take advantage of this service anytime.

Perl / Unix FAQs | top

Ready to run programs for your web site
Copy this HTML to your web page:

Free Web Designer Utilities:

Recommended Commercial/Site Utility Scripts:

Places to find easy to install Perl scripts (numbered in order of recommended review. Time to read/review all: 60 minutes):

Perl Scripting - Must Read Sites (time to read/review all: 30 minutes):

Move-in Checklist for Perl scripts
Common settings you will need to change to in your scripts:

  1. #!/usr/bin/perl
  2. /bin/date
  3. /usr/sbin/sendmail
  4. Call scripts using:
    1. <FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/file.cgi" METHOD=POST>
    2. /cgi-bin/directory/file.cgi
  5. SSI's:
    1. <!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/file.pl"-->
    2. <!--#include virtual="/directory/file.html"-->
  6. Server paths:
    1. /home/vs#####/public_html/
    2. /home/vs#####/cgi-bin/

Common Script/SSH Questions:

How do I use CGI's in my public_html and with pointed domain names:
Since pointed domain names are subdirectories of another account, you will need to add an .htaccess file to the pointed domain name's HTML directory.

How do I untar or uncompress files in my directory:

How to Tar, unTar Files and FTP to Other Web Servers
Below is a pseudo screen capture of the Tar, FTP and unTar process using SSH.

In the example below:

Screen Capture of SSH Session, after logging in:

$ cd public_html
$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 2 web_mine www 512 Mar 11 1997 file1
drwxr-xr-x 2 web_mine www 512 Mar 11 1997 file2
drwxr-xr-x 2 web_mine www 512 Mar 11 1997 file3
etc...

$ tar cvpf myfiles.tar *
file1
file2
file3
etc...

tar: tar vol 1, 6 files, 20480 bytes written.

$ ftp web_other

Connected to web_other
220 web_other FTP server (Version wu-2.4(2) Tue Jan 7 08:37:31 EST 1997) ready.

Name (web_other:web_mine): web_other
331 Password required for web_other.
Password: xxxxxx

230 User web_other logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.

ftp> cd public_html
ftp> put myfiles.tar

200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for myfiles.tar.
226 Transfer complete.
20480 bytes sent in 0.071 seconds (2.8e+02 Kbytes/s)
ftp> bye
221 Goodbye.


Alternate method when tar'ing files is not an option, MGET:

$ ftp -i web_other
$ mget *

The "i" stands for noninteractive. "mget" is the multiple file version of get. The "*" character means all files.
Main disadvantage of this method instead of Tar is that permissions and datestamps are not maintained from the old host.

How to Uncompress Tar Files:

Enter the Web_other via SSH and uncompress the Tar file you moved over as follows:

$ cd public_html
$ ls -l
myfiles.tar

$ tar xvpf myfiles.tar
file1
file2
file3
etc...

tar: untar vol 1, 6 files, 20480 bytes written

How to gzip a directory: tar -c dir_name -- | gzip > dir_name.tgz
How to un-gzip a directory: tar -zxvf filname.tgz

How do I mirror a web site

      -nh -           don't perform DNS lookup on the host name (faster) 
      -nH             don't create host directories
      -r              recursive web-suck
      -np             don't ascend to the parent directory
      -N              don't retrieve files if older than local
     -nr             retain .listing files for FTP (for incremental updates) 
     -l0             recursively fetch files to infinite depth (-l3 would get 3 levels deep) 
     -np             "no parents" - only recurse down the directory tree
      -R index.html   don't bring index.html
      -L              follow relative links only
      -X cg-bin       reject subdirectories with this name (example "cgi-bin") 
      --cut-dirs=3    ignore 3 remote directory components (/users/muquit)
      -P /foo         save files to directory /foo
      -o /file.log    the log will be written to this file.
     -I              accept subdirectories with these extensions (alternative to using -np)
     http://xyz/     mirror this URL
 

Perl scripts are not working?

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