Web Services

The ODU CS Department provides faculty and students the ability to host web pages from their CS Unix Account.

Users interact with this system through two main components, the ~/secure_html directory and the command line tool webcli

Basic Usage

• Initial setup

1. SSH into the department's Linux servers (linux-new.cs.odu.edu)
2. Run the following commands to create a directory at /home/<username>/secure_html and give read and directory listing permissions to other user set:

 mkdir ~/secure_html
 chmod o+rx ~/secure_html

1. Add some serve-able content to your ~/secure_html directory, a simple example:

 echo "Hello world!" > ~/secure_html/index.html
 chmod o+r ~/secure_html/index.html

1. To start the personal webserver, users must use the webcli tool as follows:

 webcli start

This command will prompt for your CS account password, to ensure only you can start your own webpage.

A successful command will look like so:

 $ webcli start
 Username: <username>
 Password: **********
 Service is starting. It will be available at https://web.cs.odu.edu/~<username> soon.
 This may take a few moments.

This command starts a personal webserver for every user,