Personal Home Page

Your CS Unix account can also host your personal web page. The web page URL will be http://www.cs.uh.edu/~username

Web page creation

After you login to  your CS account, you must create a folder called www under your  home folder to store your home page files. Execute the following commands in your home directory after you login to create the www folder:

chmod o+x .
mkdir www
chmod 755 www
cd www

Within the www directory, you can create a file called home.html with your default webpage.

CGI

To run CGI programs from your webpage, you have to create a file called .htaccess in the directory with your cgi scripts (typically called cgi-bin under your www directory) The file should consist of lines of the form:

AddType application/x-httpd-[type] [extension]

Where [type] can be cgi or java, and [extension] can be whatever file extension you want to associate with the executable type. For example:

AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .pl
AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi
AddType application/x-httpd-java .class

For more information, see the Apache Manuals at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/

CGI Debugging

Sometimes it is difficult to debug web applications when all you get are 500 Internal Server Errors. You can try to reproduce the environment a CGI is run under by setting environment variables and running it interactively from a similar machine. (Our webserver is a Linux machine running CentOS 4, so a similar environment can be found in the linux login machines, linux01 through linux04.cs.uh.edu.)

If you are having no luck with this method, you can see a little more information from the server by using a special error document to view your CGI's errors. More information can be found here.

If all else fails, email the sysadm@cs.uh.edu address and ask for the error logs for your CGI.