About pages.iu.edu
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About Pages individual home page accounts
UITS provides the Pages web hosting service for serving individual web pages. Current IU faculty, staff, and students are eligible to create Pages accounts using the instructions in Get additional IU computing accounts. Your Pages account should be created (though inactive) within two hours after you request it. You should receive an email message directing you to accept the terms of service. If you do not receive an email, see the Pages Service Agreement. Upon acceptance, your account should then be active and available within another two hours. Each Pages account is allotted 1 GB of storage space.
Pages websites are intended for use by individuals needing to serve professional, research, instructional, or academic content. Each Pages account is assigned to an individual IU username and must be maintained by the account owner. Do not use Pages to share hobbies, family information, favorite links, or other personal content that is unrelated to your professional, research, or academic work.
- You will need to re-accept the Pages Service Agreement annually.
- If you need a website for official IU business related to your organizational unit, approved professional organization, or registered student group, request an account on Sitehost instead. Accounts on Sitehost have access to subservices and web utilities that are not available through Pages. To determine which service best suits your needs, see Differences between Sitehost and Pages.
- Pages home page accounts were migrated to a new server on August 4, 2020. Mercury, the server that previously hosted Pages accounts, was retired and replaced with a new server called Pages (
ssh-pages.iu.edu
). - For policies regarding posting information on Pages, see About IU's policy on information on personal web pages.
Create your individual home page
The hostname for the Pages server is ssh-pages.iu.edu
. It is configured as follows:
- Operating system: Ubuntu
- Web server software: Apache 2.4
- Default shell:
/bin/bash
For web content to display properly, you must store it on ssh-pages.iu.edu
in your ~/web
directory (and/or its subdirectories).
Your home page will have the following URL (replace username
with your IU username):
https://username.pages.iu.edu
Choose a method for creating and editing HTML files
ssh-pages.iu.edu
from outside the IU network, use VPN.
You have the following options for creating and editing your Pages web content:
- Use an SSH2 client to connect to
ssh-pages.iu.edu
(log in with your IU username and passphrase, and then confirm your identity with Two-Step Login (Duo)). Then, use one of the installed text editors (Nano, vi, or Emacs) to create and edit HTML files in your~/web
directory. - Use a text editor or word processor on your computer to create and edit HTML files, and then use an SFTP client to upload them to your
~/web
directory onssh-pages.iu.edu
(see Upload your files below).Note:If you use a word processing program, make sure to save the file you create as a plain text file (or as HTML text, if that option is available) rather than the default word processing file format. - Use an application specifically designed for creating and editing web pages, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, and then use an SFTP client to upload them to your
~/web
directory onssh-pages.iu.edu
(see Upload your files below).Note:You can use your web design application to upload files directly tossh-pages.iu.edu
only if the application supports secure file transfer. For help, consult your application's documentation.
Name your home page
For your home page to display properly, you must name it home.html
or index.html
. If you do not use either of these file names, your home page URL (https://username.pages.iu.edu, where username
is your IU username) will return an error.
Manage your files on Pages
Upload your files
Once you've created your web pages, you need to make sure they're in the proper place in your Pages account:
- If you used a text editor on
ssh-pages.iu.edu
from within your~/web
directory, your files are already in the right place. - If you created your web page on your personal computer or on an STC workstation, you will need to upload the file to
ssh-pages.iu.edu
using an SFTP client.
Work with files and directories from the command line
To work with your Pages files and directories from the command line on ssh-pages.iu.edu
, use an SSH2 client (for example, PuTTY in Windows or the Terminal in macOS) to open a terminal session on ssh-pages.iu.edu
. When connecting via SSH, use the hostname ssh-pages.iu.edu
, and your IU username and passphrase.
ssh-pages.iu.edu
from outside the IU network, use VPN.
Because Pages runs on Ubuntu, you should be familiar with some basic Linux commands. In particular, note the following commonly used commands:
- Change directories: When you SSH to
ssh-pages.iu.edu
, you most likely will land in your home directory (~/
). Use thecd
command to navigate between directories:- To change from your home directory to your
~/web
directory (where your Pages files are stored), on the command line, entercd web
. - To change from your
~/web
directory to one of its subdirectories (if one exists), entercd my_directory
(replacemy_directory
with the name of your subdirectory). - To move back one level, from your subdirectory, to your
~/web
directory, entercd ..
. - To return to your home directory (
~/
) from any directory or subdirectory, entercd
.
- To change from your home directory to your
- List files: Use the
ls
command to view the contents of a directory:- To list non-system files and directories stored in the current directory, on the command line, enter
ls
. - To include system/configuration files (dot files) in the list, enter
ls -a
. - To list all files and directories (including hidden dot files), and their associated metadata, enter
ls -al
. - To list non-system files and directories (and their associated metadata) sorted by modification time (newest first), enter
ls -lt
.
- To list non-system files and directories stored in the current directory, on the command line, enter
- Create a new directory: To create a new directory within the current directory, on the command line, enter
mkdir my_directory
(replacemy_directory
with the name of your subdirectory). - Set file permissions: The correct file permissions should be set by default so that your pages will be visible to you and to others in a web browser.
Use the
chmod
command to set file permissions:- To set file permissions an HTML file in your current directory, so that its accessible to anyone with the URL, on the command line, enter
chmod 755 my_file.html
(replacemy_file.html
with the name of your file). - To set file permissions on all files and subdirectories in your
~/web
directory, so they are accessible to anyone with the appropriate URLs, entercd
to make sure you're in your home directory, and then enterchmod -R 755 ~/web
.
Note:You also can limit access so that only specific IU individuals can view your pages; see Limit access to your files below. - To set file permissions an HTML file in your current directory, so that its accessible to anyone with the URL, on the command line, enter
For more, see Introduction to Unix commands.
View your web pages
Once your files are in place and the permissions are set correctly, you can view your web pages in a browser:
- To view your home page (the
home.html
file in your~/web
directory), use the following URL (replaceusername
with your IU username):https://username.pages.iu.edu/
- To view another web page stored in the top level of your
~/web
directory, add the file name to the end of the URL; for example (replaceusername
with your IU username andmy_file.html
with the name of your file):https://username.pages.iu.edu/my_file.html
- To view a web page stored in a subdirectory of your
~/web
directory, the URL will include the name of that directory; for example (replaceusername
with your IU username,my_subdirectory
with the name of the subdirectory, andmy_file.html
with the name of your file):https://username.pages.iu.edu/my_subdirectory/my_file.html
Limit access to your files
To limit access to your web pages so that only specific IU individuals can view them, use .htaccess
files in your ~/web
directory and its subdirectories. For more, see Control web page access for Pages.
Publicize your individual home page
You have the following options for publicizing your individual home page:
- Create an email signature file that contains the URL for your home page. The signature file will be automatically appended to every email message you send.
- You may submit your web page's URL to a search engine such as Yahoo! or WebCrawler, but note that some search engines use robots to verify the address. By default, all Pages accounts have a
robots.txt
file in the~/web
directory that denies access to search crawlers. You can edit that file to allow certain search engines to index your website, or you can remove the file entirely to allow all indexing. For more about therobots.txt
file, see Introduction to robots.txt.
Archive and transfer your site
You may want to save your website or some files in your account for your instructor's use, for your own use after you leave IU, or as an additional means of backup. You can use the Unix tar
command to save entire directories or collections of files in one archive file that you can send to your personal computer or an STC workstation. You can also use the tar command to compress your archive to a smaller size, making it quicker to transfer. From your personal computer or an STC workstation, you can use Secure Share to share that file with someone such as your instructor.
Pages mail
Accounts have sendmail disabled by default and will not be able to send mail generated from the server, including from user-created scripts, web forms, and cron jobs running on the server. To request access to send email from Pages, account owners must submit a request from the WebTech website.
Virus scans and notifications
Enterprise Web Technical Services uses a virus scanning tool which scans accounts weekly for potentially malicious files and automatically quarantines detected files to maintain the security of the affected website and the hosting environment. If a file is flagged and quarantined, account owners will receive an email with the affected account name(s) and a list of files detected as potentially malicious. Scans occur during the weekend, and notification emails will be sent on Monday.
Accounts owners should review the list of files indicated in the email to determine if the files are truly malicious or not. If you need assistance to determine if the content is malicious, contact the University Information Security Office (UISO) at uiso@iu.edu
. Once all files have been investigated:
- If a file is malicious, contact the Support Center and provide the results. Administrators will permanently delete the file. Account owners should also review the account and address any site vulnerabilities the file may have caused.
- If a file is not malicious, contact the Support Center and provide the results. Administrators will release the file from quarantine and add it to an exception list so that it will not be flagged again.
Quarantined files are held for 30 days from the date and time they are flagged. If no action is taken, quarantined files will be permanently deleted after 30 days and will not be recoverable. Account owners will receive email notifications weekly until an action is taken or until the quarantined content is permanently deleted.
This is document alcr in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2023-07-24 12:16:19.