University Computing Services

Departmental Accounts on www.fsu.edu

UCS provides special accounts on www.fsu.edu for organizational World Wide Web sites. Only "official" FSU organizations such as academic departments or other units that report to deans, vice presidents, and so forth, qualify for those accounts.

NOTE: Student organizations do not qualify for this type of account. See Publishing Your Site, "Student Organizations" for more information.

How to Request a Departmental Web Account or Change Access to an Existing Web Account.
To request an account for a departmental web site on www.fsu.edu, send email to problems(at)UCS.fsu.edu. Include the name of the organization, the desired name of the account (which will appear after the '~' in the URL), and the names of all individuals who should have administrative access to the departmental WWW files. Departmental accounts are assigned names that reflect the departments' names, e.g., biology (Biological Science) and career (Career Center) and may only contain 8 characters.

Required!
All of the departmental account managers must have personal accounts on mailer.fsu.edu.

We can Help you Collect Form Data:
Many departmental sites need to set up onLine forms for obtaining information from users. UCS provides access to a program that extacts form input data and sends it to the department via electronic mail. Each department can request creation of a single eMail alias that points to one or more eMail addresses to receive the data. More information.

Departmental WWW Accounts differ from Individual Users' Accounts

Departmental WWW accounts are set up initially with a public_html subdirectory and appropriate directory permissions in place.
Departmental web directories created after February 21, 1996*, are accessible from the Internet via:
```
      http://www.fsu.edu/~deptacct
```
Where deptacct is the name of your department's account.
Departmental account managers cannot log in to the accounts. Instead, they must log in to their own individual accounts on mailer.fsu.edu and then use the cd command to change to the departmental directories. (More information about UNIX commands is here).
Departmental web directories created after February 21, 1996** , have "symbolic links" that make the departmental directories appear as subdirectories with the user's account on Mailer. Thus, those users can log in to mailer.fsu.edu and issue the command
```
        cd deptacct
```
from their home directories to reach the departmental site.

*Departmental web directories created prior to February 21, 1996, are accessible from the Internet via http://www.fsu.edu/~deptacct or http://mailer.fsu.edu/~deptacct

**Departmental web directories created prior to February 21, 1996, can be accessed from a mailer.fsu.edu log in with the command cd ~deptacct.

After your Departmental Account has been Created...
you will receive the following letter via eMail. It contains additional information about your departmental account. ("WEBACCT" will be the name of your departmental web account, "LOC" it's location, and "GROUP" the name of your webgroup).

  Your WEBACCT World Wide Web account is ready on mailer.  It is located
  at /u/web-accts/LOC/WEBACCT

  For ease of access, I have created a link in the home directory of each
  group member's mailer.fsu.edu account that points to the web account.
  The link is called 'WEBACCT', the same name as the web account.  To 
  use the link, simply treat it as you would an ordinary directory.  
  Some examples are:

  1) Copy a file called sample.html to the public_html directory in the
     web account:

            cp sample.html WEBACCT/public_html

  2) Do a listing of the files in the web directory:

            ls -l WEBACCT/public_html

  3) Change your working directory to the top level of the web directory:

            cd WEBACCT


  This is a no login account.  To place information in the account to be
  accessible to the web, you need to either create the information directly
  in the WEBACCT link directory or copy the files to this directory when
  they are ready.

  A job runs every three hours (0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21) that will change the 
  ownership and group membership of all files and directories in the web 
  account so that they belonging to the web account and web group.  
  (Cgiwrap requires that a script be owned by the account that runs it). 
  The job also changes the permissions to read/write/execute for the owner 
  and group categories and read/execute for the other category.  
  Once the ownership of a file changes, you will still be able to manipulate 
  it as if it was your own except you will not be able to change the permissions.   

  The URL for the account is: http://www.fsu.edu/~WEBACCT

  Please note that the WEBACCT web account resides on the www.fsu.edu
  computer but you manage it from your account on the mailer.fsu.edu
  computer.

  The following user ids on mailer are granted write access to the 
  WEBACCT web account:

   GROUP

  In order to have this site linked to the list of FSU departments, send
  email to problems(at)acns.fsu.edu.

Help is Available!
See University Resources for FSU Departmental Web-builders for links and eMail contact information.