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collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
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ibiblio Frequently Asked Questions
for Contributors
Hopefully we have the answers.
Some general questions are answered in the visitor FAQ.
ibiblio maintains login.ibiblio.org to provide shell and sFTP access for its many contributors. You should use it for ssh, sftp, and scp connections. SCP/SFTP can do everything telnet and FTP clients can do, but they are encrypted and secure. UNIX and Linux Windows: Macintosh:
To set up this utility in your /public/html/ directory, first login to login.ibiblio.org, then cd into the web directory that you want to password-protect: $ cd /public/html/<login>Then create the .htpasswd file (which will contain the username and the password (in a hash)) with this command: $ htpasswd -c .htpasswd MyLoginName(the name you use above will be the username that others will use to access the page; when it prompts you for a new password, type the password you want people to use with the username 'MyLoginName') Next, in the same directory, create an .htaccess file using vi (or another text editor): $ vi .htaccess(use i to insert, then paste in these lines:) AuthType Basic AuthUserFile /public/html/<login>/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName MyLoginName <limit GET> require valid-user </limit>Use Esc to save what you have pasted; then type :wqNote: whatever you insert where 'MyLoginName' in the .htaccess file will show in the dialog box that asks for the username and password when people try to access your site. If you want to password-protect a subdirectory of /public/html/<login>, you will need to do this process within the subdirectory, and change the path for its AuthUserFile in its own .htaccess file. For example, if you have a subdirectory called 'test,' you would use this in your .htaccess file: AuthUserFile /public/html/<login>/test/.htpasswd If you run into trouble, this page will give you plenty of information on the topic - and if you can't figure it out, use thehelp from an email. How do I set up email forwarding? If you would prefer to consolidate your mail accounts (and we would prefer this as well), you may easily forward your ibiblio email to another address by logging in to login.ibiblio.org and issuing echo email@address.com > .forwardat the prompt, so that email@address.com matches the address to which you'd like to forward your mail. How do I set up an automated vacation message for my ibiblio email account? This can be done in two steps: First, create a .vacation.msg file in your home directory on login.ibiblio.org: $ pico .vacation.msg It might look like this: Subject: Nancy's at the beach Hello, I will be out of the office from friday, June 6th until monday, June 9th. I may not be able to check mail while I'm away. I assure you though, that I, Nancy, will be having a great time at the beach. If you need assistance with ibiblio.org, please use the help form or call the ibiblio office at 919-962-5646. Thank you, Nancy Next, create a .forward file: $ pico .forwardwith this line: \[youruserid], "|/usr/bin/vacation [youruserid]"To stop sending your vacation message, just remove the .forward file (or rename it if you wish to reuse it later). I'm getting too much spam...can you help me? ibiblio does not place global spam filters on our mailserver. We do this for a number of reasons. Due to the extremely diverse nature and of our collections, we cannot risk mail discard false-positives. Instead, we ask you to install a local spam filter. Here is our spam information site, with documentation and resources for fighting spam. How can I add searching to my web pages? If you'd like to offer full-text searching of your site, you should probably use what we use: google. As we're an educational institution, google allows us some free use of their search facilities. We've tried various free, open source solutions to searching through our vast collections and so far, nothing scales to the level we need. To use google, if your site is a directory off the main ibiblio.org domain, use this HTML:
<form name="search" action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get">
<input size="12" name="q" />
<input type="hidden" name="hq" value="/sitename" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="ibiblio.org" />
<br />
<input type="image" height="22" width="55" src="/images/search_blue.gif"
alt="search" border="0" name="search-image" />
</form>
Where "/sitename" is the name of your actual directory on ibiblio.
How do I add my ibiblio site to the ibiblio collection index?
First step - go to the collection page. Click on the category(s) that describe your site and check to see if it is there. If it's not, make a note of what categories you think should have your site, but don't. Second step - go to collection admin page, log in using your ibiblio (metalab, sunsite) user name and password. After login, you can add a new site or modify the description of an existing site (Think you can describe your site better than we can? You're right! You probably can - make any changes to your site description there.) When you've completed the changes, mark the collection as 'ready'. It will be instantly added to the collection index and pages and will appear in the 'collection additions' section on the home page within a day. Do you do virtual hosting? We will be happy to host your files under www.yourdomain.org , .net, or .com. To set up virtual hosting, you must register the domain with a network registration service. A domain registrar is a company that sells the service you need for domain hosting. There are a number of these companies on the net, so make sure to shop around for low prices!Look over the ibiblio Collections Criteria to make sure you qualify for hosting. If you do, drop a note in the help form with a proposal for your site. Let us know what you want to do, and what you'll need to go about doing it. Once you've been approved, it's time to get started on the technical details to make things happen. To run a website, you need a few different things, all working together: a DNS server, a web server, and whatever content you've got to publish. New Site StepsIf your site is going to be at a new domain, you'll need to go through a few more steps to set up your new domain. (So, if you're just now setting up http://www.example.org/ for the first time, and your site has never been at http://www.example.org/, you'll need to do these steps.) First, you need a domain name, like "ibiblio.org." To have a domain, you need someone to run your domain server (DNS server). This is just like how an email address requires an email server. You can run your own DNS server, or use one provided by your domain registrar. In that case, you'll want to ensure the following settings:
Alternately, UNC can run your DNS server. This service is free, but they have stringent requirements:
Whether you're hosting with UNC DNS or not, email us to let us know that your DNS should be set up. We will look things over and let you know if we see any problems. Steps for everybodyOnce you're ready to start testing out your site, we can set up a
testbed for you. After your project is approved, you can request a
test setup. Also, after your DNS is set up, we'll create one for
you. We'll send you information on where you should upload content
for your site. You will then have a "live" test site, which will
work with or without DNS. It will probably be something like
Checklist
We don't offer ftp statistics, sorry. How much do your services cost? We offer these relatively standard services at no charge and in the spirit of open information exchange. As we are not-for-profit and a part of the University, we are not allowed to sell things from ibiblio servers and are not allowed to house pages that display banner ads for commercial websites. If you would like to request a service you believe we should provide, wish to report a problem with our machines or recommend that we upgrade something, please use thehelp form. How can I repay you? We would be honored if you included one of our "Hosted by ibiblio" images at the bottom of your site's home page. You may choose an image size and format from http://www.ibiblio.org/hosted/.
You can also contribute to ibiblio. Send your or your organization's tax-deductible contributions to:
If you've got something culturally cool and need a place to go, check out the ibiblio Collections Criteria to see if your collection would qualify for hosting. If you do think it does, follow the procedures outlined there for contacting us about contributing. If you've got software that you think would go great with our already humongous collection of free software, read our directions on properly uploading software and having it added. How do I set up Server Side Includes on an ibiblio-hosted web site? Server Side Includes (SSI) are configured for .shtml pages with the IncludesNoExec option. This means that pages with SSI directives must be named with the extension .shtml (e.g. index.shtml). The NoExec portion of the configuration means that the web server will not run cgi scripts or other executables from with SSI pages. Please send a message via the help form if your SSI pages require the ability to execute scripts. Does ibiblio have an IRC Channel? Yes, there is a channel for ibiblio staff, contributors, and visitors. This channel is created to increase communication, and is not supported by ibiblio. The channel is #ibiblio, located on irc.freenode.net. Can I have access to my web site's Apache transaction log files?Yes, however, access to log files is restricted to the maintainer of a given site. Send an email message via the help formrequesting access. After you have been set up, log files will start to appear in /public/var/log/sites/<site directory>. Each night, the previous day's log file(s) will be copied into the site directory. In addition, log files more than a week old are removed. Where can I access my site's error log files? Error logs on the cluster nodes are deleted nightly, but you may view error logs on our development server. Here are the steps:
The ssh host keys for login.ibiblio.org are as follows. The key you receive depends on which encryption algorithm is used. Note that we only support SSH version 2.
See also the same keys published on secure.ibiblio.org. I just received a message telling me my account was going to be deleted. Is this true? And more generally, how will Ibiblio contact me if it does need to get in touch with me? Ibiblio will only contact you via the following channels: The ibiblio-announce or webgroup mailing list, or personally from an employee. What this means is that ibiblio will never contact you using an alias address "admin", "support", "root", "info" (the list literally goes on and on).If you have recieved a strange email from one of these addresses, telling you your account is suspended or revoked, it is a virus, and not from ibiblio. Again, to be extra clear, ibiblio will not contact you with strange aliases. You will only receive personal contact from ibiblio staffers, directly to your account, or via the ibiblio-announce or webgroup mailing lists. Is there a development server? We currently run a full-scale development environment, which is available to all contributors. If you run a site in our /public/html directory, you can access a dev version of the site by browsing to www-dev.ibiblio.org/your_directory If you currently are virtual hosted, you can access your dev environment by browsing to http://www.yourvhost.org.test.ibiblio.org/ Realtime logs for the dev server can be found on login.ibiblio.org, in /public/var/log/www-dev. Virtual hosts get their own logs, and the ibiblio main log is called www-dev_combined_log and www-dev_error_log. Please see Where can I access my site's error log files? for more info. How do I change my password? After you log into login.ibiblio.org via SSH (see How do I connecto to ibiblio?), you may type the passwd command at the prompt. You will be prompted for your current password and to enter your new password twice. A typical session looks like the following:
$ passwd Changing password for user <your username>. Changing password for <your username> (current) UNIX password: New password: Retype new password: passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.This will also change the password for your ibiblio email. How can I contribute a collection to ibiblio? Check out the ibiblio Collections Criteria to make sure you qualify for hosting. If you do, follow the procedures outlined there for contacting us about contributing. How can I connect to my MySQL database with a GUI client? Our firewall will not allow you to connect a MySQL client directly to any of the ibiblio MySQL servers. However, you can establish an SSH tunnel that will allow you to connect indirectly. How it worksAn SSH tunnel is an encrypted channel between two machines; in this case between your computer and mysql.ibiblio.org. SSH connects the two machines by using a third machine as the tunnel; in this case login.ibiblio.org acts as the tunnel. Your computer sends encrypted information to the tunnel machine and the tunnel machine forwards the data to the remote machine. When you establish a tunnel you assign a local port number that will be forwarded via the tunnel to a port on the remote machine. This allows you to pretend that a service running on the remote machine is actually running on your computer. So, to connect your MySQL client to mysql.ibiblio.org, create a tunnel on local port 3306 to port 3306 on mysql.ibiblio.org using login.ibiblio.org as the tunnel. Setting it upOn Linux, Mac OS X, or Cygwin, you can use SSH command line client create an SSH tunnel: $ ssh -T -L 3306:mysql.ibiblio.org:3306 username@login.ibiblio.org & This establishes the SSH tunnel and backgrounds the process. The -T option suppresses the TTY allocation meaning you will not start a new shell with this SSH session. The -L option establishes local port 3306 as the local end of the tunnel, mysql.ibiblio.org as the remote end of the tunnel, and 3306 as the remote port. The final parameter, username@login.ibibilo.org, tells SSH to use login.ibiblio.org as the tunnel and names your account as the requesting user. Now, any packets that I send to local port 3306 will be encrypted and sent to login.ibiblio.org where they will be decrypted and routed to mysql.ibibilo.org on port 3306. On Windows, use PuTTY to create an SSH tunnel. Excellent instructions are available here. The MySQL port number on all ibiblio MySQL servers is the default: 3306. Once the SSH tunnel is established direct your MySQL client to connect to localhost port 3306. Why can't I use FTP to access ibiblio.org? We have disabled FTP access to ibiblio.org for security reasons. With FTP, the entire transmission made between the host and the user is sent in plain text. Anyone who has the ability to snoop on the network packets can read the data, including the password information. An unauthorized user can use this information to compromise the system.Instead of FTP, we recommend you use SFTP or SCP. PuTTY offers free SSH, SFTP, and SCP tools. These tools can be downloaded here. If you're more comfortable using a GUI under Windows, you might try WinSCP. OSX users can use Fugu for SFTP. |
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