Setting permissions for pages to be readable by others

Information Provider Usernames

If you publish by creating files on a mounted directory of a Web Information Provider username, the default permissions will be correct.

If you send the files to the location on the Web directory using FTP and you cannot see your files/directories, you may need to modify the permissions in the relevant directories as detailed below:

• Open a telnet connection to 'main'
• Logon with your Information Provider username, i.e. wxx
• type chmod 711 .
• type chmod 755 *

Personal Usernames

In order to set the permissions correctly in your own public_html directory you need to:

• If you are doing this for the first time

1. type mkdir public_html
2. type chmod 711 .
3. type chmod 755 public_html

• At the % prompt, type: cd public_html
• Type: publish (or /usr/local/web/publish )NB: publish needs to be run each time you add or change files to your site.

Running this script will cause the group ownership of the current directory and all its files and subdirectories to have the group permissions changed to the group is 'www'. This enables the files to be read by the www server (it runs under a username that is also a member of the group www) but it also means that the files in the relevant directories can still not be read by anyone with an account on the machine who might be able to guess the filenames (this is the case for the method described above). After running the publish script, the permissions of the files and directories in a public_ htm directory will appear as follows:

-rwxr-x---  1 username   www   15 Nov  8 17:45 home.htm

-rwxr-x---  1 username   www   15 Nov  8 17:45 anyothers.htm

drwxr-x---  2 username   www    0 Nov  8 17:45 subdirectory

Your site can now be viewed at: http://www.personal.reading.ac.uk/~username where username is your personal username.

If you make any changes to the site, you will need to run the publish command again.

Alternatively you can manually change the permissions of the files and directories in your public_html directory:

Your home directory and the public_html directory should have 'others' execute permissions set on; and files in public_html should have global ('others') read permissions set on.

i.e.

~username                            drwx--x--x

~username/public_html                drwxr-xr-x
~username/public_html/home.htm       -rw-r--r--

~username/public_html/anyothers.htm  -rw-r--r--