The Centre for IT Services provides central space for the creation of personal websites for NTU staff and students during their course of study/work in the university. Some official websites for NTU organisations are also housed here.
This document addresses the procedures for creating and maintaining web pages in NTU. It includes general information on web page creation for personal web pages, web pages of student organisations, as well as those official web pages for schools and admin departments not on CMS (Content Management Server) or MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). [More specific information for staff official websites can be found in another document.]
Web Accounts General
Connection to Web Folder
Space Quota of Web Folder
Technicals on Web Page Creation
Web Accounts General
- Who can create personal web pages?
All NTU staff and students who have a Network account (the account name is the same as the Microsoft Exchange email account name) is also given a personal website folder on the university's web server.
No.
If you already have a Network account, you do not have to apply for a separate account. NTU organisations (e.g. student organisations) have to apply for a separate account.
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- What is the URL of my personal website?
|
For: |
URL: |
Effective date: |
| All staff |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/<username> |
Immediate for existing staff, and upon getting their Network account for new staff |
| Students admitted in academic year 97-98 |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home1/<username> |
Immediate |
| Students admitted in academic year 96-97 |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home2/<username> |
Immediate |
| Students admitted in academic year 95-96 |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home3/<username> |
Immediate |
| Students admitted in academic year 94-95 |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home4/<username> |
Immediate |
Postgraduate students
(including SMA postgrads) |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home5/<username> |
Immediate for existing students, and upon getting their Network account for new students |
| Newly-joined students |
http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home<X>/<username> |
When they have their Network accounts |
<username> is the Network username as well as Exchange Email username.
<X> takes on the value of the year of admission regardless of the students' year of admission and level of studies. This applies to all undergrads and some postgrads. E.g. students admitted in the academic year 98-99 will have home98; those enrolled in the year 99-2000 will have home99, etc.
This new rule is effective from 23 July 98.
However, students admitted in academic year 2000-2001 onwards will have home2000 and so on.
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Connection to Web Folder
- Get to a Windows PC which is connected to NTUNET (the campus-wide NTU network).
- Logon to your Windows domain (staff/student) with your Network username and password.
There are two main methods of getting to your personal web folder. [Note that the old method of connection via drive H is no longer in use.]
Method 1: Via command line shortcut on the Run dialog box
You will need to know your directory name. This method is very good for those using a later version of Windows. The reason is because the operating system keeps a very large record of past command line typed and has a smarter identification for folder names -- it automatically lists available folder names on the remote file source that best match what you have currently keyed in.
E.g. if your home directory name is homeX and your username is testing, then type this at the Run... dialog box in the Windows Start button menu area.
file://web/homeX/testing
Method 2: Via shortcut on desktop
If you like to drag and drop files to folders on your desktop, this method is most suitable. This is especially so when the PC is for your personal use.
Create a shortcut to the personal web folder. You only have to do this ONCE.
- Right click on any empty area on the desktop.
- Select New -> Shortcut
- Type in the path to your web folder. E.g. if your home directory name is homeX and your username is testing, then type \\web\homeX\testing at the command line (or location of file) dialog area. Then click Next.
- Give a name to the shortcut you have just created. You can name it anything you want.
- Click Finish.
A new shortcut icon folder will be created on your desktop. Subsequently to edit files on the web folder, you simply double click on it to open your personal web folder on the Web server. You can edit the files there as per normal. You can also drag and drop files to this folder just as you would for any other folder that resides on your own PC. You can even personalise the look further by changing the icon for this shortcut folder!
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- How can I manually connect to the home drive?
For Mac users, please refer to this site.
For Windows users, you can 'map' to the home drive by typing the following command at the Tools --> Map a network drive option in the Windows Explorer (note: this is not the Internet Explorer!).
- Select a drive letter.
- For the file location, type \\web\home
The above is an example to map to the staff home directory, for student home directory, replace 'home' with the appropriate directory as documented in the table above.
Note:
For staff, this should already be setup for you if you are using the standard configured PCs in the office.
If you are accessing from outside NTU campus network, you have to first access via VPN.
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Space Quota on Web Folder
All personal web folder for staff and students have a quota of 10MB each.
The quota covers creation of simple web page of interest to anyone in NTU or even the World Wide Web. For staff who want to publish research articles and books that require disk space more than the quota, please check out
mySite, another facility provided by CITS.
When the quota is exceeded, you will not be able to modify or add in new files until you delete some of the unwanted files. You may get an error message like "There is not enough free disk space" when your quota is exceeded, or simply cannot add any new files.
Note that if you display the drive properties for this H: drive, the available free space displayed is NOT what is available to YOU. That is the total disk space on the hard disk of our server!
Warning: Users found to have blatantly exceeded their quota can have the contents in their folder deleted without prior warning. Requests to restore these deleted items will not be entertained. Should the quota tracking system be down for maintenance, users who have abused the system during the down time to upload hundreds of MB of files, can also have their entire web folder access removed without warning. Reinstating the access will only be done upon request to Helpdesk.
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- Go to the top-most level of your web folder (also called the root directory). E.g. \\web\home3\myname
- Select all files and folders.
- Go to Files -> Properties.
- After a while the system will show the total disk space consumed for all those files and folders in your account. (Remember to select the folders as well since there are files WITHIN those folders too!)
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Yes, but this is subjected to approval. No additional disk quota will be granted to personal websites of students unless it is absolutely needed for projects. To apply for additional quota, look for Application for Computer Account/Additional Quota on Stafflink (for staff), or Application for Additional Quota on Studentlink (for students). Requests for temporary increase in quota limits by email or phone will not be entertained.
An acknowledgement from CITS will be generated once the application is submitted. The application will normally be processed within 3 working days. Results of this application will be emailed to your NTU email account.
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If you need more space to store non Web-based files for your projects or even personal photographs, we are unlikely to grant you more space on the Web server as it is meant for Web-related files. However, we have an online storage facility for you to store and share your documents and photographs.
It is called mySite. All students have 200MB of space and all staff have 1GB of space. Documents stored under Shared Documents folder will be automatically searchable by everyone in NTU. You may create personal folders for restricted sharing to selected groups of people in NTU. With this, you do not even need to write your own web page in order to share your files. Just give your friends the file or folder URL.
Again all photos stored in the Picture Library is searchable by our search engine and accessible by all. But you can also remove the access and allow public access only. This will be akin to putting your photos on your web folder in your website whereby only people who know your URL may access the files.
With mySite, you no longer need to carry a ZIP disk or CDR to store documents as you move about on campus. You just need to access a computer connected to NTUnet.
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Technicals on Web Page Creation
There are some links to websites in the Internet that feature stuff related to web page creation, including online tutorials. These links are periodically updated in the Getting Help -> References -> Web Page Creation and Web Publishing sections of the CITS website. NTU-related specifics for web tools and settings can be found the Web Publishing section.
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The default home page is the file that will be displayed when surfers type up to the directory names of your website. And they do not have to type in the filename of the first page. E.g. http://www.ntu.edu.sg/cits displays the CITS website. With a default home page, there is no need to type in a file name like http://www.ntu.edu.sg/cits/index.htm The browser will automatically display the full path when the first URL is typed, if the directory has a default home page file.
The advantages are that the URL is shorter, and not everyone remembers the filename. E.g. calling your first page as homepage.html is not a good idea as people may not know if it is homepage.htm or homepage.html or even homepage.asp The shorter the URL, the better.
To have a default start page, the file has to be named specially. The allowed names are default.asp (for an ASP page) default.htm, index.html or index.htm. In other words, the content of this file will be displayed when net-surfers point their browser at your URL. E.g. There is no need to state the file name if you name your first file to be displayed as index.htm. [Note that no scripting, including ASP scripting, is generally allowed.]
There can only be one file called index.htm in each directory. If you have multiple directories, you may like to call each of the first files as index.htm
Try not to have more than one default file in a single directory. Because any one of them may be displayed as the default page depending on how the web server is configured. And if the default file display order is changed on the server, you may not get to have the right file displayed.
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Some users have complained that their web home directories are over the quota because of some strange files and directories that appears in there. User.dat, History, Microsoft, etc. The reason why the user.dat and folders are created is that Win95/98 will allow user to store their profile on their network logon home directory and be able to logon to any network computers and use their personal profile. This preserves their look and feel of their computer so that users can get the same environment everytime they logon. this is the roaming profile feature. This option is customised on the client computer. In Win95/98 you can enable this by going to Control Panel --> Password.
Select the User Profiles tab.
You can select either
- all users of this PC use the same preferences and desktop settings OR
- users can customise their preferences and desktop settings. Windows switches to your personal settings whenever you login
Those users who select (2) will have the User.dat and personal folders created in their home web directories. Those users using computers on campus that has (2) selected will have the same problem. These can be deleted away without any adverse effect.
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For security and server stability reasons, no scripting, including ASP scripting, are allowed for personal websites of staff, students and industrial-partners (Note: applies to industrial partners who use web hosting service on CITS servers). If however, you really need it for project purposes, please send an email to the Web Administrators at webadmin@ntu.edu.sg This is subject to approval on a case by case basis.
No, we do not support FrontPage Extensions as it does not work well for such a large legacy website such as NTU's. However, we have other scripts that you can use like Counter, Guestbook, Submission Forms (Formmail and Surveymail). See our Web Publishing section of the Getting Help section in the CITS website. At the moment we have no search engine that can search just your site (i.e. search only your site, apart from the entire NTU website).
Even though we do not have FrontPage Extensions, you can still use FrontPage as an authoring tool, and still be able to use the software's Publish feature. Just map the destination to the server. [Note: you must be on the Intranet for this to work.]
E.g. the destination is \\web\homeX\yourname\sub-foldername
if homeX is your home directory (click on My Computer to see which home drive you belong to if you are unsure), your staff or student account is called "yourname", and you are placing the FrontPage website in a sub-folder called "sub-foldername".
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The redirecting of URLs taxes the server. It also increases the administrative workload. As such, no personal URL is allowed.
No, for security reasons, you cannot simply setup your own server and plug it anywhere into the NTU campus network (NTUNET), this also includes Halls' JCRC. Clubs belonging to schools have to seek the school's webmaster to see if their server can be plugged into the school's network. Similarly, if you need to have a web server for your project, you will have to seek your school's webmaster to see if you can plug that into your school's network.
For those who setup their own servers (e.g. in schools' network), they will have to support their servers themselves. CITS will not assist in their setup or maintenance. However, should they be found to compromise the campus network security or performance, CITS reserves the right to remove the offending servers.
No individuals are allowed to set up your own servers in NTUNET for whatever reasons.
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Anonymous FTP service actually compromises security on the server. As such, we do not provide any FTP service. Please use the normal NT file transfer methods outlined above.
After you have done up your personal website, it will automatically be listed in the NTU website A-Z Website listing if the root directory has a default file (see section on default home page) of the names index.htm, index.html, default.htm and default.asp
However, if your personal website is not ready to be listed (e.g. if it is still under construction ), or if it is only for private viewing, or if you think you do not want email spamming programs to pick them up when they scan websites, you can choose to delist your personal website by clicking on a link on the web page where your site is listed.
Automatic listing and manual delisting only applies to personal websites hosted in the NTU web server. It DOES NOT apply to sites hosted on external servers.
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