ARCHIVED: About the Mypage migration

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

On June 23, 2008, UITS moved the Mypage service from Steel to a new virtual web server environment, Mercury. UITS has migrated your Mypage web pages, and for most users, this migration will require no changes. See the information below for details about the new system and the migration.

If you have questions about the information below or need further help, contact your campus Support Center.

On this page:


What was migrated

Only Steel accounts that were serving Mypage web pages via the www directory were migrated to Mercury. (No Steel accounts were migrated to Quarry, Indiana University's new general-purpose Unix computing environment. For information about getting an account on Quarry, see ARCHIVED: Quarry at Indiana University.)

Although you may have been able to access Mercury at mercury.uits.indiana.edu before the migration, any changes you made there were lost with the migration on June 23. Changes you made through your Steel account before the migration were transferred to Mercury.

The new environment

What has changed

  • Each account has a 1GB disk quota.
  • Your new host for publishing pages is mercury.uits.indiana.edu. For more about Mercury, see ARCHIVED: About Mercury at IU For information about publishing web pages on Mypage, see About pages.iu.edu
  • Your new home directory is /fs/username.
  • Your pages are served only from the /fs/username/www directory of your account on Mercury, no matter the location on Steel.
  • Outbound email is not available with the new Mypage environment.
  • A VPN connection for off-campus or wireless access to Mercury may be required at some point.
  • The default Red Hat Enterprise Linux install of Perl will remain at /usr/bin/perl. That version will not be updated or have modules added to it. An up-to-date Perl installation is available at /usr/local/bin/perl. For information about how to see which modules are available, visit the IU Webmaster's perldoc perllocal page. (This page refers to Webserve, but the procedure it describes will work on Mercury.)

What stays the same

  • Pages are served from the same URLs as before (http://mypage.iu.edu/~username).
  • If your Steel account was serving a web page at mypage.iu.edu, all of your files from your account on Steel were transferred to Mercury.
  • You have the same shell as with your Steel account, and your login initialization files were migrated. The default shell for new accounts is bash.
  • The spinweb and ARCHIVED: ezreset utilities are still available.

Possible concerns

Directory indexing is turned off in the new environment. This means that for your home page to appear at http://mypage.iu.edu/~username (where username is your username), it must be named home.html, home.htm, home.shtml, index.html, index.htm, or index.shtml. In the old environment, if your home page did not have one of those names, the URL would have returned an index of your www directory. In the new environment, it will return an error. To fix the problem, rename your home directory with one of the above names. If you use home.html, your page will appear in the Directory of Personal Home Pages. If you don't want this, choose one of the other names. For more about directory indexing at IU, see About web page directory indexing

If your web pages had links that use ARCHIVED: absolute URLs, the links will no longer work in the new environment. Also, some .htaccess files may require changes in server name, especially if they contain absolute URLs.

Changing absolute URLs

Change your absolute URLs to relative URLs as follows:

  1. Search your web pages for any links with absolute URLs similar to these:
      <a href="/N/fs2/username/Steel/www/images.html">My pictures</a>
      <a href="/N/u/username/Steel/www/images.html">My pictures</a>
  2. Then:
    • To link to a file that's in the same directory as the referring page, use the filename as the URL:
        <a href="foobar.html">The Wonderful World of Foobar!</a>
    • To link to a file in a directory within the directory where the referring page is, use the directory information and the filename:
        <a href="foobar/foobar.html">The Wonderful World of Foobar!</a>
    • To link to a file in a directory above the directory with the referring page, use .., which means to go up a directory:
        <a href="../home.html">Go back to my home page</a>

This is document avlz in the Knowledge Base.
Last modified on 2018-01-18 15:39:51.