How to create your home page on the onyx server

---

Setting up your account

To prepare your home directory for access by a Web server in the lab, you will need to modify the security for your home directory and create a couple of folders.

• Create a directory cs125 and move all your program directories to this directory. Make sure that the directory cs125 can only be accessed by you.  (For students in other classes, create a directory called myclasses and move all your class directories inside this directory).
  
  
  
    mkdir cs125
    mv prog* cs125
    chmod g-rwx,o-rwx  cs125


The command chmod changes the mode of the file. such that no one in the group (the students) or others have any access to the cs125 directory. You can check the permissions using the ls command as shown below.

    ls -ld cs125

The output of the ls command should be similar to what is shown below.

    drwx------   4 amit     faculty      1024 Sep 22 11:46 cs125

For more details on how directory and file permissions work, please check the section on File protection in the local Linux guide.
 

• Modify the permissions for your home directory such that is is open to group and others for read and execute permission. The following commands can be used (the tilde ~ represents your home directory)
  

    cd ~
    chmod g+rx,o+rx ~

Now check the permissions of your home directory with the ls commands as follows.

    ls -ld ~

The output should be similar to the following:

    drwxr-xr-x   53 amit     faculty      4096 Oct  1 10:37 /home/amit

• Make a directory called public_html in your home directory. Make sure that this directory is readable by others. You can use the following commands to accomplish this task.

    cd ~
   mkdir public_html
   chmod g+rx,o+rx public_html
   ls -ld public_html


The output for the ls command should be similar to what is shown below.

    drwxr-xr-x  11 amit     faculty     4096 Sep 29 10:20 public_html/

The public_html directory is the only directory that will be visible to anyone browsing your home page.
 

• Create a file called index.html inside the directory public_html. You can use the  gvim text editor to create this file or use Netscape Composer (which is an html editor). See the quick-start notes(PDF format) on HTML to get started.

 
• Point your browser to  http://onyx.boisestate.edu/~loginid where loginid is your login name on onyx. Now you have a home page on the web!