Internal Users

University Links

Notes on the CSWeb architecture

Access Permissions

The web server runs as a special user, wwwuser, which has minimal privileges. Because of this, any files or directories in the server's document root must have their permissions set in a particular way.

Directory permissions: Directories must have at least world execute permission set (i.e. chmod o+x). This is so the web server can access any files in that directory.
The directory does not need to have any read permissions set, as the server does not need to list the contents of the directory; it only accesses specifically named files within it.
File permissions: Files must have at least world read permission set (i.e. chmod o+r). This is so the web server can read the contents of any given file.

Logical site layout

The logical layout of the site (i.e. from the document root) is as follows:

/people/

People pages and any automatically generated indexes to those pages.

staff/: Staff web pages, including their "business card" pages.
rpg/: Research postgraduate web pages, including their "business card" pages.
tpg/: Taught Postgraduate "business card" pages.
ug/: Undergraduate "business card" pages.
student_resources/: E.g. useful contacts, etc.

/research/group/

Research group web pages (including their "business card" pages). Note that all research group directories (listed below) are writeable by members of cur.

aii/: Applied and Interdisciplinary Informatics.
compedu/: Computers and Education Research Group.
crg/: Concurrency Research Group.
netdist/: Networks and Distributed Systems Group.
sse/: Software and Systems Engineering.
tcs/: Theoretical Computer Science Group.

/pubs/

Contains one directory for each year which, in turn, contains a directory for each publication published in that year. Each "publication directory" contains the web pages for an individual publication, together with its abstract and full text, if these are available.
Also contains any automatically generated indexes to those pages.

/tours/

Guided tours

tour_frameworks/: Frameworks files listing the pages in each tour.

/dept_info/

Departmental information: documentation, etc.

documentation/: CSWeb site documentation.

/national/

National and international services and facilities based at UKC.

There are other directories in the document root that you shouldn't need to worry about:

/search/: Front pages for search engines.
/buttons/: House buttons, as used by the #buttons mechanism.
/icons/: Default (Apache) web server icons.
/images/: Common images, such as the UKC crest.
/styles/: Contains cascading style sheets. Currently there is only one, house.css, but with the provision for supporting more in the future.

Physical site layout

This section describes the physical layout of the site -- information that will help you in creating your own web pages for the CSWeb site.

Note that only directories relevant to the page creation process are described.

The web server's file root is at /web/cs on metis (and on myrtle, where it is NFS mounted), which is where the following directories may be found.

bin/

Home of the following command line user tools: bap, bipi, bp, Rbrgp, brgpi, btp, chin, chrg.

docs/

The web server document root. All files that can be served on the web are in here.

For example, if you wish to update web pages in the TCS research group's area, you'll find them in the directory named /web/cs/docs/research/groups/tcs/.

The TCS business card web page can be found on the web at http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/research/groups/tcs/index.html and http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/research/groups/tcs/index.local.

includes/

Common include files (for use with the #include control).

man/

Brief manual pages for the command line user tools.

templates/

Templates for every page on the CSWeb server.

public-logs/

Web access logs to specific areas of the web site which are accessible by staff.

Glossary of terms

Document root

The document root of a web server is the root directory of the server's web space (rather than its file space). For the CSWeb server, the document root (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/) maps to /web/cs/docs/ on the Unix host's file space.

"Business card" page

The name given to the home page belonging to either:

a member of staff or research postgraduate (~/webpages/index.*), or
a research group (/web/cs/docs/research/groups/<group_name>/index.*, where <group_name> is the abbreviated name (or directory name) of a research group. E.g. tcs = "Theoretical Computer Science").

Computing at Kent