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Virtual Web Communications
2830 Olde Town Park Drive
Norcross, Ga 30071
Office Phone (678) 221-2180 x8356
Inside the home directory is a subdirectory named "www". Files placed in "www" are visible to remote browsers over the Internet. (When users FTP to their server, they are "logged in" to their www subdirectory. To access your home directory you must issue the FTP "cd /home/userid" command.)
Now that we know where the files have to be located in order to be visible on the Internet, just how do we put the files there? Although there are several ways, the most common are FTP and Telnet.
The filename of your home page should be index.html (or index.htm or index.cgi). The web server will automatically send the file at path /home/userid/www/index.html when a browser specifies http://userid.com or http://www.userid.com.
To learn how to write HTML, get Laura LeMay's books "Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week", "Teach Yourself More Web Publishing with HTML in a Week", "Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.0", and the collected "Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days (The Premier Edition)". All 4 books are published by SAMS.NET. Then find out about the latest Netscape extensions.
One last thing : Log files are stored at /www/logs/: /www/logs/snoopy-access-log for snoopy.com's access log, in fact.
This appears as the 'anonftp' directory in your home directory.
Multiple FTP/Telnet accounts are useful when more than one staff member will be working on the domain. Each Telnet account has its own separate home directory but shares the same www and FTP directories. You may wish to set it up so that different accounts have different security levels. For example, you could make it so only one Telnet account could access your listserver data. For those of you wishing sophisticated access control, we will be happy to create additional groups for your domain. That may not make sense to those of you who are not Unix veterans, but it can allow you to have one account able to access only one directory while your others can access all directories, including that one.
Some of the programs available at the shell prompt are mail, a primitive email program, pine and elm, more powerful email programs, FTP, to FTP onto other sites, Telnet, to Telnet onto other sites, lynx, a text-only WWW browser, pico, an easy to use text editor, vi, a not so easy to use (but standard) text editor, and in general a pretty complete POSIX environment.
At the shell prompt, type man and the name of the program to get instructions for that program online. If your problem is not knowing the name of the program, try apropos subject. (i.e. apropos mail.)
If you want a domain name with a foreign extension, such as .it for Italy, we can probably do it! Ask for details... Note that at least three days will transpire between when Internic says your domain is activated and when they really have activated it throughout the Internet.
Note that if you select the domain snoopy.com both http://snoopy.com/ and http://www.snoopy.com/ will work for you. If you select a domain name that begins with a number, such as 123abc.com, then only http://www.123abc.com/ will work in some cases.
Note that InterNIC charges $35/year for every domain. When you first apply for a domain, InterNIC will bill $70.00 for the first two years.
If you do not want to pay this fee, you can order domain names like vwcom.net/yourname or your-name.vwcom.net.
A typical use for cgi is the processing of online forms. When the user fills in the boxes on the form and hits the SUBMIT button, the cgi program specified in the html will be run at the server, and the information in the boxes become available to the program as parameters. The program, being a program, can then do anything the programmer wanted it to do.
"cgiemail", for example, is a canned program written in C that gathers up the contents of the boxes on the form and emails them to a specified destination, then sends a WWW page confirming the action.
"imagemap" is another common use for cgi. Here, the X-Y coordinates of the pointer on an image are correlated with a specification table, so that clicking on different parts of the image will result in different links being followed.
Other CGIs might ask for a password, check the password, then access a database for requested information. What it does is up to the programmer, but we do ask that the CGIs are reasonable in their usage of CPU time and memory. While we do not require that they be submitted for approval first, out of control programs that hog the CPU will be hunted down and killed by our death robot.
Standard CGIs reside in the cgi-bin subdirectory. Your CGIs may reside anywhere - but you must name them with the extension .cgi. See chapter six for more details on CGI.
Normally, a reference to http://your-domain.com calls up the index.html file. The file index.cgi, if it exists, is executed instead. Instead of sending out a canned html file, this runs the program index.cgi, which constructs a page on the fly and sends it out.
This is one method that may be used to implement home page counters and clocks (on-the-wall type that tells time) for any time zone on your main page.
Because of the amount of Spam going on today, we have stopped allowing outgoing SMTP addresses on our mail server.
You can also read your mail by first Telneting to your server and then giving the command "Mail". (We also support ELM and PINE.)
We support unlimited mail forwarding, autoresponders, listservers, etc. For the complete details on these features, see the Table of Contents for the section on Powermail.
Here's an example:
<!--#include virtual="sample.cgi" -->The server will automatically replace the above line with the output from the sample.cgi (located in king.com's cgi-bin directory).
See section 7.1 for more information.
