secure
online
application

1) General Information

• 1.a) Definition of terms
• 1.b) Support contact
• 1.c) Billing contact
• 1.d) Manual feedback
• 1.e) Sales contact

2) Features offered by DGL

2.a) Web space

• 2.b) The "home" page and HTML
• 2.c) Ftp space
• 2.d) Telnet account
• 2.e) List
• 2.f) Domain name
• 2.g) Cgi-bin access
• 2.h) Emergency assistance
• 2.i) RealAudio
• 2.j) Mail forwarding
• 2.k) Mail redirection and autoresponders (infobots)
• 2.l) FTP Logging

4) Mail related items

• 4.a) mail
• 4.b) pine
• 4.c) Eudora (windows mail program)
• 4.d) .forward (forwarding mail to one separate email account)

5) Managing the Linux Account

• 5.a) ln (redirecting file access)
• 5.b) passwd (changing your password)
• 5.c) zip/unzip
• 5.d) du (disk usage)
• 5.e) locate (find files)

Section I. General Information

1.a) Definition of terms

Throughout this manual, you will be told to interact with DGL. This is the name of the machine you will be located on at DGL.

1.b) Support contact

For support questions, contact host@dgl.com.

Please include the domain name you are referring to when you send requests to support.

1.c) Billing contact

For billing questions, contact host@dgl.com.

Payments may be sent to:

Damar Group, Ltd.
PMB 616
6030-M Marshalee Dr
Elkridge, MD 21075-5987-157710

VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express payments are also welcome.

1.e) Sales contact

For sales questions, contact host@dgl.com.

2) What website hosting services are offered by DGL?

DGL offers hosting for web pages, enabling access to those pages via a redundant T1 connection. We also offer users their own cgi-bin directory and permission to execute their own scripts. Our three s are Pentium 200 machines running the UNIX and the superfast Apache web . Each has a dedicated high-speed, digital T1 line connecting it directly to the Internet backbone.

All features included in our service package for the low fee of $50 per month (plus a one-time setup fee of $50).

Features include:

• unlimited email aliasing
• email redirection
• unlimited autoresponders
• FTP directories
• RealAudio serving
• secure s

2.a) Web space

Every customer gets his own password protected userid under Linux. By logging in to his userid, the customer gains access to his web storage space. Every userid "owns" a structure of disk subdirectories in the Linux file system. The "root" of this structure is the "home" directory, found at path "/home/userid". Note that this is somewhat similar to the MS-DOS directory structure, except that there is no drive letter and forward slashes are used instead of backward slashes.

Inside the home directory is a subdirectory named "www". Every customer has his own separate "www" subdirectory. Files placed in "www" are visible to remote browsers over the Internet.

For example, when a browser asks for URL http://www.userid.com/page.html, Apache looks for the file /home/userid/www/page.html and sends it out. If you have not registered "userid.com" with InterNIC and specified DGL as its domain , then the remote browser must ask for the IP number to get the page (until the domain is registered.)

2.b) The "Home" page and HTML

The filename of your home page should be index.html. The web will automatically send the file at path /home/userid/www/index.html when a browser specifies http://www.userid.com.

To count accesses install wusage which is available at http://siva.cshl.org/wusage.html. You may also use our preinstalled wusage as documented in chapter four.

To rename files from *.htm to *.html type dos and return. That's right, just the word dos!

Log files are stored at /www/logs

2.c) FTP Space

This will appear as the 'anonftp' directory in your home directory.

"So what's the ftp directory?"

It's always the same as your www directory, and can be ignored.

2.d) Telnet Account

A telnet account is just another name for UNIX/LINUX userid. You need at least one to be able to upload/download your html files. When you sign up with DGL, you get a userid and password. You may ask for more than one such userid. Additional shell accounts (telnet, FTP) can be added for and additional $10 per month. Each telnet account has its own separate home directory but shares the same www and ftp directories.

Multiple telnet accounts are useful when more than one staff member will be working on the domain. You may wish to set it up so that different accounts have different security levels. For example, you could make it so only one telnet account could access your list data.

Some of the programs available at the shell prompt are:

• mail -a primitive email program
• pine -a more powerful email program
• ftp -enabling ftp access to other sites
• telnet -allowing telnet access to other sites
• lynx -a primitive text based web browser
• pico -an easy to use text editor
• vi -a not so easy to use text editor.

At the shell prompt, type "man" and the name of the program to get instructions for that program online.

2.e) List- Majordomo

We use a customized version of majordomo, an unbreakable version of this list that was written in Perl. It has undergone multiple changes to both make it more secure and more powerful. Our version allows users to enter commands on either the subject line or in the body of the message, to subscribe without using their full name, and to subscribe from World Wide Web pages. To setup a mailing list, tell us the name of the list and any special options that you want set for it.

2.f) Domain Name

Domain names are being processed pretty fast these days. We can register the domain name with Internic and activate it on our . (New accounts and domains are not processed until initial payment is received.)

EXPLANATION OF PROCESS WHEN DOMAIN IS REGISTERED

As soon as you register an account with us, you will be given an IP number with which you can access this account via the WWW, FTP, and telnet. After your domain is officially registered with Internic, you will no longer need to use this number and you can use your own domain name. Your IP number will continue to work however, if you ever decided to use it.

Note that InterNIC charges $50/year for every domain. When you first apply for a domain, InterNIC will bill $100 for the first two years.

2.g) Cgi-bin Access

"CGI" stands for "Common Gateway Interface", a fancy name meaning computer programs running on the web that can be invoked from a WWW page at the browser. The "bin" part alludes to the binary executables that result from compiled or assembled programs. It is a bit misleading because cgi's can also be Unix shell scripts or interpreted languages like Perl.

A typical use for cgi is the processing of online forms. When the user fills in the boxes on the form and hits the SUBMIT button, the cgi program specified in the html will be run at the , and the information in the boxes become available to the program as parameters. The program, being a program, can then do anything the programmer wanted it to do.

"cgiemail", for example, is a canned program written in C that gathers up the contents of the boxes on the form and emails them to a specified destination, then sends a WWW page confirming the action.

"imagemap" is another common use for cgi. Here, the X-Y coordinates of the pointer on an image are correlated with a specification table, so that clicking on different parts of the image will result in different links being followed.

Other cgi's might ask for a password, check the password, then access a database for requested information. What it does is up to the programmer, but we do ask that the cgi's are reasonable in their usage of CPU time. While we do not require that they be submitted for approval first, out of control cgi's that hog the CPU will be hunted down and killed by our death robot.

Standard cgi's reside in the DGL cgi-bin subdirectory.Your cgi programs reside in a cgi-bin directory under your www directory.

See Section III for more details on CGI.

2.h) Emergency Assistance

2.i) RealAudio

RealAudio is a real time audio transmission/player system. A digital audio stream is transmitted from the over the internet to the destination and played immediately, rather than being stored to disk first and then played.

Each audio clip requires two files: a metafile with extension .ram, and the digital audio clip itself, with extension .ra. The .ram file holds one or more lines of ASCII text, each of which references the .ra file to be played when the .ram file is accessed by the browser.

Entries in .ram files have the form:

pnm://your-domain.com/realaudio/your-domain/name-of-clip.ra

Place your .ram and .ra files in the realaudio subdirectory under your web directory. Contact host@dgl.com if you have not been supplied with the realaudio subdirectory and it is part of your monthly package.

.ram files must be uploaded in ASCII mode while .ra files must be uploaded in BINARY mode.

You may then access these files at realaudio/file.ram under your www directory.

2.j) Mail forwarding

At your request, we will forward all mail for a domain to one email address. This service is free.

2.k) Mail Redirection and Autoresponders (infobots)

REDIRECTION EXAMPLE

eric 73452.452@compuserve.com
susan susan.simpson@mci.com
kim goddess@afterlife.com
* crazy@bob.com

If you would like email to go to your account on our s, only put the first part of your domain name. For example, if your domain is xyz.com, you would put the following to forward sales@xyz.com to your pop account on the :
sales xyz

The last entry is a '*' and serves as the default. Any mail not sent to one of the addresses listed in the file will default to the redirected address placed after the '*'. Mail to a user that was not in this list would be sent to the default user, crazy@bob.com.

Also, you may redirect mail to multiple addresses by separating each destination email address with a comma.

You may modify your mailredirect file at any time. Changes will take effect within 5 minutes as stated above.

Autoresponder EXAMPLE

1) Go in to the mailredirect file mentioned above and add
   an entry like the one listed below.

info autoresponder

(Any autoresponders you use must be noted in the mailredirect file with the 
 alias followed by a space and then 'autoresponder' in lower case.)

2) Create a file in the directory "infobots" off of your home directory 
named info, type in your autoresponse message, and save the file.

This will cause all emails sent to info@YourDomain.com to be responded to by your autoresponder and have a copy of the original message sent to you.

These messages can be any size, even 100K!

Furthermore, you can set up multiple autoresponders in this same manner. Just follow the steps above and everything will work smoothly.

*** Note ***

Our checks every 5 minutes for changes made in the mailredirect file. Your autoresponder will not be available immediately after creating it. It will, however, be functioning fully within 5 minute's time after the has noted the mailredirect changes.

2.l) FTP Logging

This feature enables you to track how many people access your site via FTP and which files they decided to download. A seperate log file is created for each domain.

Let us know if you want us to add FTP logging to your site for free!

Note that with the exception of the description of using Eudora, the commands you are told to type in this section assume you have logged on to the DGL with telnet or rlogin.

4) Mail related items

4.a) mail

READING
Type mail to see if you have any mail. If you have any mail hit enter a lot and all your messages will be displayed.

SENDING
type mail -s "music" camper@camper.org<music.msg to send the message music.msg with the subject music to camper@camper.org

Type

    mail -s "music" camper@camper.org
    music is good
    .

Type

    mail camper@camper.org
    music is good
    .

4.b) pine

Type pine to enter a more advanced mail program.

Type L to select Folder List and then inbox to see what messages that you have received.

The rest of this program is quite easy to use. Why use mail instead? Mail has the advantage that it is easy to send files that you composed off line plus it is easy to read many files at once into a log file that you then read off line.

4.c) Eudora is a mail program that runs under MS Windows.

Eudora connects to the mail over the Winsock. Mail may be composed and read offline, but make sure that Winsock is running before attempting to send or receive mail.

After Eudora has been installed, it must be configured to point to the DGL mail . To do this, start Eudora and select "Special" from the menu bar. Then select "Settings". Most of the options are self explanatory.

• Leave the entries for SMTP, PH, and Finger blank.
• Fill in userid@company.com for your POP account (with userid replaced with your userid and company.com replaced with your domain name).
• Under advanced network features, select 90 seconds for your network timeout.
• The option save password should be checked.
• The authentication style should be password option.
• Under connection method, do not check the offline option.

Eudora "Light" is freeware offered by Qualcom and can be downloaded over the net. Eudora "Pro" must be purchased. Get a copy at http://www.eudora.com/.

4.d) .forward (redirecting mail)

Create a file named .forward in your home directory. Enter oceania@oceania.org in this file. Now all your mail will be redirected from your user account to oceania@oceania.org!

Note that files that start with a "." are hidden files. To see them, type ls -al.

5) Managing the Linux Account

5.a) ln (redirecting file access)

Type ln -s fred.html index.html to redirect all file accesses from index.html to the file fred.html.

5.b) passwd (changing your password)

Type passwd to change your password.

5.c) zip/unzip

Type zip to zip files and unzip to unzip files. This program is compatible with the zip program for DOS. For example:

$ zip myzip file1 file2 file3

This puts the files file1, file2, and file3 into a new zip called myzip.zip. On the other hand, if you had the archive myzip.zip and wanted to get back the files:

$ unzip myzip

Typing zip or unzip by itself will give you a usage summary, showing nearly all the options availible.

5.d) du (disk usage)

The Unix command

du -s directory

du -s /www/htdocs/domain

If you have an anonymous FTP area, also check

du -s ~ftp/my.domain

du -s /www/htdocs/camper
du -s ~ftp/camper.com
du -s $HOME

5.e) locate (find files)

Type locate file_name and DGL will immediately locate all files that contain the file_name. (Provided such files have been on the machine at least one day.)

This page maintained by host@dgl.com