ISRL Web Servers

The long term goal of having development web servers as well as a production server has been realized with the server rotation that happened at the "beginning" of the fiscal new year

The servers

To test whether your home directory conforms to the convention for new user accounts, run the script /content/web/users/systems/public_html/scripts/testPublicHTMLs. To run the script, open a terminal window on any Linux or Solaris system in the ISRL (either SSH into one of the servers or open an xterm on a Linux workstation) and type the full path and program in at the user prompt. This script will advise you on how to make your home directory conform to the standard. It is recommended that users completely understand the behaviour of the commands recommended before they attempt running them.

Determining Which Servers to Use

Both www.isrl.uiuc.edu and www3.isrl.uiuc.edu are RedHat Linux-based systems. Each system is identical with respect to versions of the Apache web server, Perl libraries, versions of PHP, and versions of gcc. Migrating between the two should be as simple as copying the relavent files between the different /content/???/users/username directories. On the other hand, soldev.isrl.uiuc.edu is a Solaris 8-based system. While it is running similar versions of Apache, Perl, PHP, and gcc, additional work may be required to port software to/from this system

Any changes to dynamic HTML scripts, whether Perl or PHP based, should be done on developmnet servers. Only code that is stable and has been tested to assure it will not have a negative effect on the web server should be moved to the production server. By first testing scripts on the development servers, it is possible to login to the server and monitor its log files by taking the following steps:

1. Open a second SSH window to www3 and login.
2. To start a continuous monitoring of the error log, at the command prompt, type:

            tail -f /var/log/apache/error_log
   

3. To exit the continuous tail when you finish testing your changes, type:

            Control-c 
   

You can repeat the above steps, substituting access_log for error_log to monitor the successful accesses of web pages on www3 as well. Thus, by having 3 SSH windows open, you can be changing code and monitoring both the successful accesses and errors in the script.

When your scripts are no longer reporting errors and are running stably, it is time to migrate them from a development server to the production server www.isrl. You should again check the log files after running it the first on www.isrl to assure that no new errors have cropped up. Since you can't login to www.isrl directly, you'll need to run the script, available to authenticated ISRL users only, at https://www-s.isrl.uiuc.edu/systems/isrl-only/report.cgi. This dynamic page shows the last 20 lines of the HTTP and HTTPS access and error logs.

Examples

As an example, if you wanted to edit content on the solaris developement server, you could edit files in public_html2. If you wanted to actually test running programs, or had to compile code for the solaris development server, you would have to run your programs on soldev.isrl.uiuc.edu by either logging into the server using ssh and executing the code at the command prompt, or by accessing them via a web server (if they are meant to be a dynamic HTML page) at http://soldev.isrl.uiuc.edu/~username

As annother example, if your username were usersix, then you should have a link from ~usersix/public_html to /content/web/users/usersix/public_html. Documents that you place in /content/web/users/usersix/public_html whether directly or via the link ~usersix/public_html should appear at the URL http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~usersix. If the links from your home directory follow convention, then placing files in ~usersix/public_html will be sufficient.