CHAPTER ONE - General Features
1.1) OVERVIEW
1.1.1) Domain Name Usage
& Activation
You will need to change
the name server information that is currently on your domain's registration
record so that it is pointing to our servers using the information that you
receive in your Welcome - Setup email. It will usually look like this:
NS1.THRIFTWEB.COM
NS2.THRIFTWEB.COM
You will need to make this Domain Name Server (DNS) change at the website where
you registered your domain.
*********************** VERY IMPORTANT NOTE *********************
You NEED to allow up to 72 hours for the new name server
information to fully propagate in order to access your account via your Domain Name (URL) through HTTP,
SMTP, and POP3. We have no control over DNS propagation... your domain
could resolve in 24 hours or take up to 72 hours. Domain name registrations and
transfers normally take 24-72 hours from the time you apply for your FYIWorld
account, until the time the registration is completed. You may be sent an
email from your Registrar to confirm the Name Server change. If you do not
confirm the transfer of the domain name, your registration will be delayed
until such time that you do such. If you are using Network Solutions (InterNIC)
and you do not have access to the email address that InterNIC has on file
for your account, if it is already registered (not applicable to new accounts),
you may need to fax them instead. Once your domain name is activated, you
will be able to use yourname.com instead of your IP number. We highly recommend
that you use yourname.com instead of your assigned IP number. As our customer
base grows, it is very possible that your domain might be moved from one machine to another, thus
changing your IP address from time to time. FTP access is gained via logging into
the IP address given in your Welcome - Setup email, with your assigned
username and password, until such time that your own domain name is
activated.
1.2) WHAT DO YOU OFFER?
FYIWorld offers storage space for web pages
with global public access to those pages over the Internet. We also offer
a limited form of program execution known as "cgi-bin". Our
computers are Pentium III, or Pentium IV, class machines running the
latest version of Apache web server software over the latest release of
the Red Hat Linux operating system. Apache responds to web page fetch
requests from remote browsers while Linux is one of several variants of
the Unix operating system.
1.2.1) Web space
Every customer gets his own password
protected username under Linux. By logging in to his username, the
customer gains access to his web storage space. Every username "owns"
a structure of disk subdirectories in the Linux file system. The "root"
of this structure is the "home" directory, found at path "/home/username".
Note that this is somewhat similar to the MS-DOS directory structure,
except that there is no drive letter and forward slashes are used instead
of backward slashes.
Inside the home directory is a
subdirectory named "public_html". Every customer has his own
separate "public_html" subdirectory. Files placed in "public_html"
are visible to remote browsers over the Internet. As many clients are used
to having their main directory refered to as "www", we have
created another directory as such. When www is attempted to be accessed,
the directory is automatically redirected to the correct public_html
directory.
For example, when a browser asks for URL
http://yourname.com/page.html, Apache looks for the file /home/username/public_html/page.html
and sends it out. Username/logins are always
the first 8 digits of your domain name, or the the domain name itself if
it is less than 8 digits.
Example:
The username for yourdomain.com would be "yourdoma".
The username for here.com would be "here".
Passwords are always 4-10 digits in length, as supplied by you.
Now that we know where the files have to
be located in order to be visible from the Internet, just how do we put
the files there? There are several ways, depending on the local computer.
For the MacIntosh, a program called "Fetch"
is used. Documentation on Fetch is not yet available. However, note that
the binary mode referred to throughout the manual corresponds to the 'raw'
mode in Fetch.
For MS-DOS systems, communications
programs such as ProComm emulate dumb terminals for connection to Linux. (See
1.2.1.1.)
For UNIX systems, use rlogin to connect. (See
1.2.1.2)
For Microsoft Windows systems, use FTP (See
1.2.1.3). This is the easiest method.
1.2.1.1) MS-DOS Dumb
Terminal Access
Set up your dumb terminal program under
MS-DOS to connect to your local access provider. Log into your UNIX shell
account and the use rlogin to get to your FYIWorld userid.
Now follow the procedures under 1.2.1.2
immediately below.
1.2.1.2) UNIX Shell
Access
After you have used rlogin to get to your
FYIWorld userid, you should be at the shell prompt in your home
directory. Type cd www to enter your www directory. Then use rz to
upload files into your www directory. Please don't upload web files into
your home directory!
You will need an FTP program, many of which are available at Download.com.
We recommend CoreFTP, CuteFTP or WS_ftp.
Then double-click on the FTP icon. This
will bring up a "session profile" form. Under hostname, fill in
your domain name (yourdomain.com, for example). Under username, fill in
your username. Under password, put in your FYIWorld password. Make sure
the checkbox for "Anonymous Login" is CLEARED.
At the bottom of the form, under "initial
directories", you may specify which directories you want to work with
on your local system and on your FYIWorld system. Under "remote
host", specify /home/username/public_html. Under "local PC",
specify the DOS path where your web files are located.
Hit the OK button. This will cause you to
be connected to your FYIWorld acount. The right side of the screen will
show the files in your public_html directory while the left side will show
your local PC files. To send a file from your local PC to your FYIWorld
public_html directory, click on the file you want to send and then click
on the right arrow button. To send a file the other way, click on the left
arrow button.
You will see two option radio buttons under
the right window labeled "ASCII" and "Binary". For all
text files, including html files, and perl cgi programs, be sure to select
"ASCII" so the end-of-line conventions are handled correctly.
Graphic/image files and sound files should be transferred in binary mode
1.2.1.4) The "home"
page and HTML
The filename of your home page should be
index.htm or index.html. You must try them both, for each account may be
set up differently., however, one of the two is sure to work. The web
server will automatically send the file at path /home/username/public_html/index.htm
or /home/username/public_html/index.html when a browser specifies http://yourdomain.com.
To learn how to write HTML, get Laura
LeMay's books "Web Publishing with HTML in a Week", and "More
Web Publishing with HTML in a Week" . Both are published by SAMS.
Then find out about the latest Netscape
extensions.
1.2.2) FTP Space
All accounts, except non static IP accounts,
come preset up with an ANONYMOUS ftp area where files can be uploaded or
downloaded by anyone in the world without a password. This area is
necessarily separate from web space and password protected ftp space for
obvious reasons. If you want both upload and download anonymous ftp, you
may want a read-only subdirectory for distributing files and a separate
write-only subdirectory for receiving files. This is to prevent files that
you are distributing from being destroyed accidentally, and to prevent
files uploaded to you from being distributed to others before you examine
them. The location of this directory is /home/username/public_ftp/
Thru the browser control panel, you may also
set up individual logins for extra FTP users, whom can have acces to a
special subdirectory of your public_html directory. See the control panel
instructions for informatioon how to go about this.
1.2.3) Telnet/SSH Account
A telnet/ssh account is just another name for a
Unix/Linux username. You need at least one to be able to upload/download
your html files. When you sign up with FYIWorld, you get a username and
password. You may ask for more than one such username. Regular accounts
include one, Additional setups are available for an additional charge.
Multiple telnet/ssh accounts are useful when
more than one staff member will be working on the domain. You may wish to
set it up so that different accounts have different security levels. For
example, you could make it so only one telnet account could access your
listserver data. For those of you wishing sophisticated access control, we
will be happy to create additional groups for your domain. That may not
make sense to those of you who are not Unix veterans, but it can allow you
to have one account able to access only one directory while your others
can access all directories, including that one.
Some of the programs available at the
shell prompt are mail, a primitive email program, and pine,
a much more powerful email program, ftp, to FTP onto other sites, telnet,
to telnet onto other sites, and lynx, a text-only WWW browser, pico,
an easy to use text editor.
NOTE: Telnet is disabled due to
security reasons - Please use SSH access.
1.2.6) Cgi-bin Access
"CGI" stands for "Common
Gateway Interface", a fancy name meaning computer programs running on
the web server that can be invoked from a WWW page at the browser. The
"bin" part alludes to the binary executables that result from
compiled or assembled programs. It is a bit misleading because cgis can
also be Unix shell scripts or interpreted languages like Perl.
A typical use for cgi is the processing of
online forms. When the user fills in the boxes on the form and hits the
SUBMIT button, the cgi program specified in the html will be run at the
server, and the information in the boxes become available to the program
as parameters. The program, being a program, can then do anything the
programmer wanted it to do.
"cgiemail", for example, is a
canned program written in C that gathers up the contents of the boxes on
the form and emails them to a specified destination, then sends a WWW page
confirming the action.
"imagemap" is another common use
for cgi. Here, the X-Y coordinates of the pointer on an image are
correlated with a specification table, so that clicking on different parts
of the image will result in different links being followed.
Other cgis might ask for a password, check
the password, then access a database for requested information. What it
does is up to the programmer, but we do ask that the cgis are reasonable
in their usage of CPU time and memory. While we do not require that they
be submitted for approval first, out of control programs that hog the CPU
and system resources will be hunted down and killed by our system monitors.
Standard pre-installed system cgis reside
in the FYIWorld public cgi-sys subdirectory. Your presonal cgis reside
in a web subdirectory named cgi-bin directory under your public_html
directory. If your domain is named company.com, you would then access your
scripts as http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin, while the pre-installed
system scripts are located at http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-sys. You may
need to set up the preinstalled scripts thru your browser control panel to
see the correct HTML that is used for such. The browser control panel will
walk you thru the simple processes.
See chapter four
for more details on CGI.
1.2.10) Real Audio(
Server & Real Video( Server
Real( Servers
are real time audio and/or video transmission/playing systems. A digital
audio or video stream is transmitted from the server over the internet to
the destination and played immediately, rather than being stored to disk
first and then played. With this feature, visitors to your
website need not wait for several minutes, or longer, to listen to an
audio file, or view a video file, while the large file is downloading.
With Real( technology, the audio/video starts playing from the first few
bytes of data that is downloaded. This is called streaming technology.
Each Real( audio or video file you wish to
transmit requires two files: a metafile with extension .ram, and the
digital audio or video clip itself, with extension .ra. The .ram file
holds one or more lines of ASCII text, each of which references the .ra
file to be played when the .ram file is accessed by the browser.
Entries in .ram files have the form:
http://yourdomain.com/realaudio/filename.ra
or
http://yourdomain.com/realvideo/filename.ra
Place your .ram and .ra files in the
realaudio, or realvideo, subdirectory under your public_html directory.
.ram files must be uploaded in ASCII mode
while .ra files must be uploaded in BINARY mode.
You may then access these files at http://www.yourdomain.com/realaudio/filename.ram
or
http://www.yourdomain.com/realvideo/filename.ram
1.2.13) Capture Mail for
Domain
Thru the browser control panel, you can
configure your account to redirect all mail for your domain to arive at
one email address. You may also configure all mail not specified otherwise
to arrive at the "default" address. If no mail address is
specified to capture all your non-specified mail, the mail will
automatically default to your account username mailbox.
1.2.14) FYIWorld SMTP
Mail Server(tm)
In addition to being able
to have nearly unlimited auto-responders by simply adding text files to
your browser control panel, you can also redirect mail for everyone in
your domain by simply clicking a few buttons.
Auto-Responder Example
A auto-responder is set up thru the browser
control panel with the email address of help@yourdomain.com and says: We
offer you help. Mail to
help@yourdomain.com will return the message "We offer you help".
These messages can be any size, even
100K!
Alias/Forwarding Example
Set up thru the browser control panel mail
from "fred@yourdomain.com" to be redirected to "73452.452@compuserve.com
", by simply clicking a button This
would redirect mail for fred@yourdomain.com to 73452.452@compuserve.com,
etc.
Mail to a user that was not set up
as a pop account, nor as a alias/forwarder, would be sent to the default
user
1.3) HOW TO SET UP E-MAIL IN OUTLOOK
Setting up email accounts in Outlook is actually quite easy, but it is probably NOT the same as what you would do to set up an email account provided by your ISP in a few ways. I'll go over this step by step, so just follow along and you should be reading email in about 5 minutes! Be sure you have created your email account in Cpanel before you begin these steps.
1 - Get online, and then with Outlook open, go up to the top and click on Tools--->Email Accounts
2 - Under the 'Email' heading, make sure that the button next to 'Add a new e-mail account' is checked and click 'next'.
3 - When the next menu appears, select 'POP3' as the server type, and click 'next'. Our servers also have IMAP installed, but for simplicity we will stick to a POP3 account here.
4 - Fill in your name and email address. Now this is the part that confuses some users. After you have filled in your email address, the 'username' field is normally filled in for you, however Outlook DOES NOT put the correct info in the box. You must place your FULL EMAIL ADDRESS in the 'username' field, ie if your email address is 'user1@abcdomain.com' then you must have 'user1@abcdomain.com' in the 'username' box. Using only 'user1' WILL NOT WORK. After you have entered the correct username, type in the password you have set up in cpanel in the appropriate box, and click 'remember my password'. If you don't do this, you will be prompted for your password every time you check your email. Please note that some versions of Outlook or other mail clients will not allow you to use the '@' symbol as part of your username. If you run into this problem, you may use the '+' sign instead, such as 'user1+abcdomain.com'
5 - Next, fill in your email server info. If you aren't sure what to use here, just put in the main domain name on your account WITHOUT the www in front - i.e. for the example above, you would use 'abcdomain.com' under the mail server name. You may also use 'mail.abcdomain.com' if you like - it makes no difference. You can use this for both the POP3 and SMTP servers, or you may want to use your ISP's SMTP server for better reliability when sending email. Your ISP should be able to provide you with a server name to use if they allow SMTP mail. Please note that AOL, MSN, and some other ISP's don't allow SMTP. If your ISP won't allow SMTP to be used, I recommend finding a new ISP.
6 - BEFORE you click on 'next', you need to click on the 'more settings' button. When the pop-up window appears, click on the second tab, titled 'Outgoing Server'. Put a check in the box next to 'My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication', then down at the bottom of the window click on the button next to 'Log on to incoming server before sending mail'. This is VERY IMPORTANT if you wish to use our servers to send email. Click 'OK' once you have completed those changes.
7 - Now we are ready to test our new account. Click on the button that says 'Test Account Settings' and watch for any errors. You should not see any errors. If you do, go back and check all of your info to be sure you haven't made a typo or anything. If you have checked your info and are still recieving an error, please refer to the 'Help' menu of Outlook. Also, be sure your internet connection is active when you are trying to test.
8 - As long as everything finished without any errors, go ahead and click 'next'. This should bring up a window that shows you your new email account. Click 'Finish'. You are now ready to send and recieve email on your new account!
