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Guidelines for Departmental Web Pages |
The webserver addressed with URLs beginning with
http://www.physics.umd.edu is the official presence of
the Physics Department of the University of Maryland, College Park.
As such, the contents of these pages are expected to conform to departmental
standards regarding content, etc. Failure to do so will result in the
pages being removed and possible revocation of privilege to post on the
departmental web servers. Questions regarding these standards and suitability
of pages should be directed to
the Chair's Office.
The following guidelines are meant as an aid in familiarizing those appointed to maintain portions of the departmental web presence with site specific details and technical suggestions to facilitate their task. Again, all questions regarding content should be directed to the Chair's office; PCS is only responsible for technical aspects of displaying pages--- use physhelp to contact them.
This information pertains only to the department web servers, eg
the official server www.physics.umd.edu and the test server
testwww.physics.umd.edu (which will be discussed in the
next section). Personal web pages are served off
of the server www2.physics.umd.edu, and guidelines pertaining
to its use is found elsewhere.
The official web presence of the department is served off the server
www.physics.umd.edu. Because of the increasing importance
of this presence, there are conflicting pressures to constantly update and
redesign pages as well as keep them always available. To allow for this
need to rewrite, rework, and experiment with web pages without impacting
on the availability of our official web pages during this experimentation,
a test server testwww.physics.umd.edu. The preferred procedure
then for updating/changing web pages is then to
PCS is working on creating scripts that will facilitate steps 1 and 4 above, and will also include archiving and version numbers for the pages. Some guidelines for ensuring smooth migration between the two servers are presented elsewhere.
Because the test server is only intended for experimenting with pages before putting them on the official server, and is not intended to provide any web presence to the outside, the documents on the test server are only visible from machines in the Physics Department. Note that this is not intended to provide any real security, so do not rely on that. Also do not use the test server to publish pages to the department that you do not wish to make visible to the world at large---if you have such needs please contact PCS, explaining your requirements, and we will assist you in implenting this on the official server.
The top of the official web server is located at
/dept/phys/htdocs/www on the file system. Thus the file
associated with the URL
http://www.physics.umd.edu/my_directory/my_file.html
will in general be located at
/dept/phys/htdocs/www/my_directory/my_file.html in the
filesystem. Exceptions to this are CGI binaries and
scripts, and pages for research groups, which will be discussed later.
In a similar fashion, the top of the test web server is located at
/dept/phys/htdocs/testwww on the filesystem.
Web pages for research groups are addressable by the following
equivalent URLs:
http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/group abbreviation
and
http://www.physics.umd.edu/group abbreviation.
Similar URLs exist for the test server.
For research groups participating in the NSCP-II project, or who otherwise
have group space visible on the PNCE-Unix cluster, the actual HTML files
are located in the group space, at
/group/group abbreviation/pub/public_html.
The test web pages are similarly located at
/group/group abbreviation/pub/test_html in the
filesystem. For other research groups, the actual HTML files reside with
the regular departmental web pages; eg
/dept/phys/htdocs/www/rgroups/group abbreviation.
This space is provided by the department at a nominal fee (which may be
waived in cases of exceptional financial need) to cover cost of diskspace.
(NOTE: For legacy reasons, some research groups may find
that the symbolic links allowing the URL's above to be used to reference the
directories above are not in place. This was to ensure access to your old web
page locations were not disrupted until they were moved. Please
contact PCS
to have these symbolic links activated.)
In either case, or in situations in which the group wishes its web pages
to be served elsewhere, the department does maintain a page with links to
home pages for each of the research groups in the departments.
Note that this linkage is not automatic, and the webmasters for the
individual research groups should periodically ensure that the
departmental research group page links
correctly to their current homepage. Unless told otherwise, PCS will assume
the research group's home page resides at the URL
http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/group abbreviation/index.html
Please also note that PCS is still in the process of migrating the
departmental web pages from the structure used on the old web server to the
new and improved structure discussed in this document, and will be
for some time as the concept of the new and improved structure is
still being developed. In particular, note that the
link for the abbreviated URL
http://www.physics.umd.edu/group abbreviation/file.html
and the activation of web pages at
/group/group abbreviation/pub/public_html and
test_html are currently being done group by group upon request.
From a standpoint of systems security, PCS would like to eliminate CGI binaries and executables altogether. However, the importance of the world-wide web, and the important role that CGI plays in the web, makes such a unilateral response unfeasible. But the seriousness of the potential threat CGI imposes means that:
/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-script/www and
/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-bin/www for the production server, and
/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-script/testwww and
/dept/phys/htdocs/cgi-bin/testwww for the test server. The
cgi-script directories should contain only platform independent
executables (e.g. Perl scripts), and the cgi-bin directories only
platform dependent code (e.g. compiled executables).
http://www.physics.umd.edu/topdir/mydir/mypage.html,
the URL in your page should look like:
<href a="/topdir/mydir/mypage.html">. This means that
your link will point to mypage.html on the same server that your
page is on. Thus, while you are testing your page, it will link to other test
pages, and when production it will point to other production pages.
/topdir/mydir, the hyperlink can be simplified
to:
<href a="mypage.html">.
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