MSU Physics-Astronomy Web Server Service Notes

These are notes concerning the operation of the Web Server software and hardware used by the MSU Physics & Astronomy WWW Service.

General Notices

-*- We are now operating WWW service using NCSA httpd 1.3a (with the recent security patch) on the default network port 80.

-*- We will be upgrading to NCSA httpd 1.5.x some time in July 1996, after the hardware upgrade (www.pa.msu.edu, currently a Sun SPARC Classic, is going to be replaced by a new Sun UltraSPARC 1 Model 170E some time in late June or early July).

-*- Test access via port 82 is now closed -- please redirect any http://www.pa.msu.edu:82/ links to http://www.pa.msu.edu/.
Service via the old NCSA httpd 0.4 has been discontinued on port 81 as well, as of 19 March 1995. Please update any port 81 link addresses.

(If all of this is just gibberish to you, you probably don't have to worry about it...).

Updates

25 June 1996

Small modifications to htmlchek.pl to
  1. allow for new HTML 3.2 TABLE tags CELLSPACING, CELLPADDING, and WIDTH, and
  2. get around bug which kills most legal TABLEs due to losing track of the tag level for "canpair" items TH and TD under TR.
    Note 1: A side effect of this change will be to require the use of the normally-optional </TR> tag to end rows in TABLEs. Otherwise, htmlchek.pl may claim to find tag ERRORs (even when there are none, really) and webput will reject the HTML file submission. The </TH> and </TD> will remain optional.
    Note 2: The author of htmlchek.pl is advertising a new release with full HTML 3.2 compliance soon, now that it is an official standard. With luck, he will fix the current bug in his code.

05 June 1996

-*- Automatic redirection of "/nuclear/*" to the NSCL's web server.

-*- More of the standard upper-level pages on the P-A server (including this one) have had their "Update" lines redone to use the server-side "moddate" cgi script, so they will automatically show the last file revision date. (Drew Flickema has assisted with this project).

-*- robots.txt file created to tell ethical robots & web crawlers to not bother with certain directories in our web area.

May 1996

-*- Added server recognition of Adobe Acrobat "*.pdf" files (via commands in srm.conf & mime.types files in /usr/local/etc/httpd/conf).

-*- Wrote "moddate" cgi script to allow for automatic display of a page's most recent modification date. This may be used by anyone on the P-A Web Server.

Basic instructions for "moddate"
Put the following into your page:
<!--#config timefmt="%Y.%m.%d (%A) %T %Z" --> [an error occurred while processing this directive] Tuesday, 25-Jun-1996 21:47:28 EDT by GJP.