How to set up your own WWW pages with InterDomain
Because InterDomain does not provide Unix shell accounts, user WWW pages need to be set up and maintained via FTP.
We recommend that you set up all your html and image files in a directory on your computer, and test the files from there before uploading them to our server.
On our WWW server, each user has a home directory. The directory name is the same as your username. Inside this directory is another directory called 'public_html'. Any files placed in this directory can be accessed via the Web. The address of your home page is: http://www.interdomain.net.au/~username/
If you have a file in your public_html directory called either 'index.html' or 'index.htm' then that file will automatically load when someone accesses the above address. If this file does not exist, then accessing your address will just list all the files in your directory.
To put files into this directory, use your favourite FTP program to connect to www.interdomain.net.au. You must connect as a registered user using your username and password rather than using 'anonymous FTP'. While it is possible to do this with Netscape, it is much easier to use a dedicated FTP utility for this purpose.
I recommend using Fetch on a Macintosh, or WS_FTP on a PC. The InterDomain FTP server contains the latest versions of Fetch and WS_FTP. These programs can be downloaded using Netscape.
Once connected to the web server using your username and password, you will be placed into your home directory. You will not be able to access any other users' home directories, nor will you be able to access the public FTP archive on our server (you must connect anonymously to access the public area).
Inside your home directory, you will see a directory called 'public_html'. To make files accessible via the WWW, you must put them inside this directory. You can put any files you like into this directory -- text files, GIFs, JPGs, compressed archives -- anything you like. The most common things would be text files (in html format) and graphic files referenced by the html pages.
For information about writing your own html pages, check out the information at the University of Melbourne's excellent WWW resource site.
There is also lots of useful information on Netscape's web site.
InterDomain runs the Apache web server version 1.2 or above. The documentation for the Apache server is available. Most people will not need this documentation, but if you are planning to set up a very complex site, it will be useful.
Some things to be careful of are:
Last modified 30 August 1999.
- HTML files on our server may have the suffix .html or .htm.
- Unix file names are case sensitive. index.html and Index.html are different. I recommend using all lowercase file names to avoid confusion.
- Setting up CGI scripts and imagemaps can be rather tricky. There are a few examples in http://www.interdomain.net.au/~rha
- If you want to set up CGI scripts, please send a message to Richard Archer. CGI scripts can be a security risk, and they need to be installed by InterDomain staff.
- Make sure your FTP program transfers text files as text and binary files as raw data. If it tries to convert carriage returns and linefeeds in a binary file, the file will become corrupt. If your files become corrupt while being transferred (the graphics will show up with a broken icon), this is probably the reason.
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