George Blank University Lecturer

Creating A Web Site at NJIT Professor Blank

Starting Your Homepage A Web page should be already set up for you with a public_html directory that has the right permissions to create and use when your UCID account is created. If yours is not set up or you want more information, go to From the menu on the left select the last topic, User_Homepage. Follow the instructions there.

Servers Available to Students There are 38 public access AFS clients running the current Solaris operating system available to students. sunlab1.njit.edu through afs35.njit.edu are for academic use. prophet.njit.edu has Oracle installed for database courses. web.njit.edu is a web server that allows others to access your web site in public_html. harp.njit.edu is a special purpose web server that allows sound and video, which are blocked on web. There are also 29 Linux servers at osl1.njit.edu through osl29.njit.edu All use the same login and file structure, so any files you create on one server can be read, executed and changed on any other. Those students who have used the Sun Lab machines under their old URLs of afs1 through afs35 should know that all such odd numbers now connect to afsconnect1.njit.edu and all even numbers to afsconnect2.njit.edu. sunlab1.njit.edu osl1.njit.edu

Security Requirement Off-campus access to AFS must use Secure Shell (ssh) over a Virtual Private Network (VPN). To download software (including regular VPN) you must use VPN. This is possible with webvpn. Go to or follow the instructions at Once you have a VPN connection, you can download the Secure Shell software at

Connect to UCS and Log In Use the Secure Shell Client and your UCID username and password to log on the one of the UCS machines, such as afs23.njit.edu:

Use Secure FTP You can use the Secure File Transfer Protocol program to upload your materials. The SSH Secure File Transfer Client is provided when you get SSH.

Use Secure FTP The SSH FTP Client is a simple drag and drop interface. Most students should have little trouble figuring it out. If you do have trouble, try the Help selection on the menu. If that does not work, post your problems on Web Board and I will add enough detail to this presentation to guide you through it. It is recommended that you set up multiple connection profiles. The systems are public access and individual machines may be unavailable, yet others may still be accessed.

Your FTP address It helps to know the base address of your site. Mine is: /afs/cad/u/g/b/gblank/public_html The only thing that you need to change is the /u/g/b/gblank/ part. In my case, the u is for users, so yours will also be u. The g and b are the first two characters of my username. Use the first two characters of yours. The next section is your username. If your user name is xyz123 then you would specify: /afs/cad/u/x/y/xyz123/public_html

Create a Menu Your menu file should be an html file named index.html or menu.html. A Web Browser can find either of those automatically. I recommend that you create a directory for your projects, such as /cs602, with a separate directory for each assignment, such as /ch4. You can have an index.html file at your base directory that can load the other files. If you go to my Web Site and "view source" in your browser you can see how I do it. That will give you directories like: /afs/cad/u/x/y/xyz123/public_html/cs602/ch5

Using Unix Use Unix commands to create your directories: You can find a list by searching the Web. mkdir - create a directory cd – change directory ls – list files cp – copy a file mv – rename or move a file rm – delete (remove) a file setacl – give permissions to read/write a file

File Permissions For people to read files on your Web Site, you may have to set the file permissions. The normal Unix permissions like chmod are ignored by AFS. Instead, it uses an access control list managed with the command setacl. For a description of setting permissions, go to From the menu on the left select the first topic, AFS, then subtopic CheckPerms, then subtopic How to set AFS permissions.

Creating and Accessing Files I recommend that you use SunLab1 through SunLab36 or OSL1 through OSL29 to develop your website and do your course homework. The single digit numbers tend to be more heavily used than higher numbers, so you can avoid congestions by using avoiding Sunlab 1 or 2 or OSL 1 or 2. If you create a web site, others can view your web pages in public_html and its subdirectories on WEB, or on HARP if it uses sound or video.

Finding Your Web Site Your Web site will be at with a full path of etc. Of course, you will have to substitute your username for xyz Don’t forget the Tilde ( ~ )!

Public Access to Web Site Other users can find your Web site at if you have an html file named index.html or menu.html in your public_html directory. Otherwise, they will also have to know the name of the file to run. Of course, they will have to substitute your username for xyz If your Web site has sound or video they can use

A Quick and Dirty Home Page For a fast start to creating your home page, just steal my sample home page at An sample index.html is already installed for you, and you can simply edit that. Follow the instructions on my page and edit it to create your own menu. If you do not have an HTML editor, you can use Microsoft Word, as long as you select html as the file type when you save the file.

Note: You should not use a Web browser on SunLab1 through SunLab36 for http at all. Those systems are reserved for creating your programs, or running homework programs in a Unix shell. The only AFS systems you should be using to access Web services are and This will allow more people to use the system without overloading it. You can see the Solaris and Linux systems for yourself and work on them directly on the second floor of GITC.