Web

This document describes policies and procedures for the primary webservers for the EECS Department, people.eecs.berkeley.edu and apps.eecs.berkeley.edu (“the webserver”).

Web Accessibility

Whether you are creating your own personal webpage, or responsible for a research group’s website (on or off campus), it is important that your web presence is in compliance with campus Digital Accessibility standards. Often, a few simple edits can go a long way toward improving the accessibility of your site.

Please refer to the campus Digital Accessibility Program’s Website owner responsibilities page for information on requirements, guidelines, and links to training and useful tools.

EECS Homepages

User homepages are available under the URL http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~username. By default the webserver looks in the directory /home/eecs/username/public_html to find an index.shtml, index.html, or index.htm file. (Specifically, it uses username’s Unix home directory as specified in LDAP in the homeDirectory attribute, which may be different than the default by special arrangement).

The webserver is running under Unix and we recommend you set up your file permissions from a Unix host, not a Windows host. See Creating an EECS Homepagefor details.

SCRIPTING / DYNAMIC CONTENT

Anyone with a Full IRIS account can run scripts from their home directory from the server apps.eecs.berkeley.edu. The URL would be http[s]://apps.eecs.berkeley.edu/~username.

The server runs scripts using the Apache suexec environment, which enforces a strict security model. Be sure to check the Apache suexec documentation if you are having trouble getting your scripts to work. The most common problem are related to these rules:

The script must start with the correct line specifying the interpreter (see below).
PHP is running as a CGI and not a module which implies some differences in behavior. Consult the PHP documentation for details.
The directory containing the script must be owned by the username and be in a group that the user is a member of. The script must have the same username AND GROUP as the containing directory.
If the script was created on a Windows machine, extraneous ctrl-m characters can cause problems. We recommend you either create your scripts on a Unix machine or use the dos2unix command to convert it. You may ssh to the server apps.eecs.berkeley.edu to read the man page and run the dos2unix command.

At this time the following languages are supported. You script should begin with the proper shebang line to specify the interpreter you want to use.

Language	First line of script
PHP	`#!/usr/bin/php-cgi`
python	`#!/usr/bin/python`
perl	`#!/usr/bin/perl`

URL Forwarding/Redirection

All requests for URL forwarding or redirection should be e-mailed to help@eecs.

If your account is closed you may have your personal website redirected to an off-site location after the closing date of your account.

Project Web Hosting

There are two pieces of information needed to start having IRIS host your project website:

The location of the files for your website (we recommend requesting and using project space for this).
The hostname for your new website (i.e. happy.eecs.berkeley.edu).

Use our Project Web Hosting form to put in a request.

Privacy

It’s hard to find privacy on the web and we do not claim these measures are flawless. Nonetheless, they prove useful enough to document.

Posting complete e-mail addresses on your webpages can be an invitation for spam. Instead, use cgiemail to allow people to e-mail you.
Use a .htaccess file to provide access control for your files and subdirectories. We have examples elsewhere on our website.
meta tags can also stop robots from crawling or indexing a specific page, see Robots and the META element.