web services

With your ukfsn.org account you automatically get between 20MB and 250MB of web space depending upon your membership level.

All accounts can use Server Side Includes with this web space as well as perl, PHP and python to produce dynamic content.

Similarly all accounts have access to a MySQL database.

You can use this space to publish a web site for any lawful purpose that does not conflict with our Terms and Conditions of Service both for personal and business use.

Your home directory on our web server will be located at /users/[u]/[username] where [u] is the first character of your username and [username] is your UKFSN user account name.

If you are a Classic or a Standard+ member your web space is under the /website/ directory in your home directory on our server and the website is addressed as http://www.username.ukfsn.org (where username is replaced with your UKFSN account username).

Uploading your website files

You can upload your prepared website files using any good FTP client software. The settings you need to use are listed below:

Obviously you need to replace [username] with your account username.

You can also use SFTP, which is FTP over SSH and provides a fully encrypted session for your connection, if you have the software to support it. Many FTP clients support SFTP mode. Any decent implementation of SSH will include support for SFTP.

To connect using the sftp client with OpenSSH use the following:

The first time you connect you will receive a message stating that the authenticity of the host cannot be verified. Simply confirm that you want to continue the connection and the necessary key exchange will take place.

Then you'll be prompted for your password and you should then be connected and be able to manage your website in a secure fashion.

You can type help for assistance.

Please remember that if you are not paying a subscription for your membership you must be dialled into our access numbers in order to update your webspace.

Hosting Domains

If you have a hosting, premium or ADSL account you can host domains under your account.

To add a domain to your account you first need to either register the domain or transfer it to us via our Domain Management Service. If you need to transfer a .uk domain to us you should instead instruct your current domain registrar to change the Nominet Registrar Tag (IPS Tag) to 'UKFSN' and let us know once this is done.

Once the domain is registered or transferred to us please email support@ukfsn.org with details of your UKFSN account username and the domain name and we will add it to your account.

Website files for a hosting domain should be uploaded to your webspace on our server under domain/website where domain is replaced by the domain name (eg. example.com/website for www.example.com). You will need to create the directory first.

We organise your webspace in this manner so as to allow you to keep various files that your website needs to keep private, such as template files and configuration files, safe from prying eyes. You can do this by creating a directory outside of the website directory.

Securing your website

Usually, you want as many people as possible to read your pages. There are however some exceptions where you want only a select group of people to be able to acces your pages. For this purpose, HTTP user authentication was designed. This section describes how to set up HTTP user authentication for your website.

With User Authentication you can specify that only certain people can acces your pages, based on:

Access control for a given directory is controlled by a specific file in the directory with the name .htaccess. To protect a part of your website you simply create a .htaccess file in the directory that part of the site is served from. The file should look like this:

Remember that [u] and [username] should be replaced with the first character of your username and your UKFSN username respectively.

You also need to create the file you specified as AuthUserFile in the .htaccess file. This file should contain one line for each user that is authorised to view the secured parts of your website specifying the username and ecrypted password.

If you are running Linux or another UNIX OS and you have Apache installed locally your can use the htpasswd utility to create the file locally. If you do not you can create the necessary entries using this online tool - do note that this tool is not run by UKFSN so you use it at your own risk. Then simply upload the file to the location you specified in your .htaccess file.

CGI for your web site

We do not mandate a specific CGI area for any CGI scripts you wish to use in your web site. You can place such scripts anywhere you like so long as you remember that the location has to be with the website (ie under the appropriate /website/ directory).

You are, of course, free to create a cgi-bin directory for your site and put the scripts in there. Doing so is good practice but not mandatory.

You can use Perl or Python for your CGI scripting requirements.

The perl interpreter is located at /usr/bin/perl.
The python interpreter is located at /usr/bin/python2.

Do remember that your CGI scripts need end with a suffice of either .cgi, .pl for perl or .py for python. Also remember that you must set the permissions on any CGI scripts to 705 to ensure that they are executable.

In addition to perl and python you can use PHP to write dynamic content for your website. PHP support is loaded directly into the web server so you don't use it is CGI mode and thus don't need an intepreter to run your scripts. Simply name the scripts to end in .php.

The PHP PEAR library is available for you to use. You should not need to specify it's location in your script however if you find that you do the location is /users/common/pear.

Please don't try to use any C or C++ or other binary CGI scripts. Doing so would be a violation of our terms and conditions and the result will be the termination of your account.