For a comprehensive introduction to using Athena, read Working on Athena. For specific information on managing Athena course lockers, read the Course Locker Maintenance Guide, and for instructions on how to create HTML files and other content for the Web, see the Building Your Pages section of Web Guide.
Use the Course Locker Request Form if you do not yet have a course locker, or to request modifications to ownership or quota of existing course lockers.
This link takes you to a summary and diagram of the steps in creating and maintaining a Web site. (The Overview should open in a separate browser window, so that you may refer to it as you proceed; if it does not, use the browser's Back button to return to this page.)
If you are familiar with Unix, much of how you work on Athena will be the same; this link takes you to a summary of some important differences.
The general naming scheme for a course URL is:
http://web.mit.edu/subject-number/www/This corresponds to the full AFS path of your Athena course locker:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/course-number/subject-number/www/A shorter path, known as the /mit path, may be used:
/mit/subject-number/www/Continue reading for further details, including an explanation of the short path, and examples of the correspondence between URLs and Athena lockers.
http://web.mit.edu/29.123/www/This corresponds to the www directory of the 29.123 course locker, where the Web files are actually stored. The full Athena path of the www directory (i.e., its actual location in the AFS filesystem hierarchy) is:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/29/29.123/www/You would need to use this path in certain maintenance tasks, such as file transfers. In other cases, when working directly on Athena you can use the short path, as follows:
athena% attach 29.123
/mit/29.123/www/
In the examples that follow, the short /mit path is shown for convenience, except when the full path is necessary.
A convention of the Web is that the starting point for a site is a file named
index.html
. This file is known as the index or top-level page. If it
exists, it is displayed by default when a URL of the following format is typed in
the
browser's Location: or Go to: line. For example:
http://web.mit.edu/29.123/www/
Another convention of the Web and most recent browsers is that you do not need to include the prefix http:// when typing a URL in the Location: line. For example:
web.mit.edu/29.123/www/
Either way, the file displayed by default is:
/mit/29.123/www/index.html
This is equivalent to entering the following, but without the extra typing:
http://web.mit.edu/29.123/www/index.html
Should the URL's directory not contain a file index.html, the browser displays a listing of the contents of the corresponding directory instead. For example, if the directory /mit/29.123/www/ contains a file named test.html, and two directories named exams and images, the browser would display a list similar to the following:
Index of /29.123/www/ Name Last modified Size Description ------------------------------------------------------------------ Parent directory test.html 23-May-99 06:04 4K 29.123 Home Page exams/ 01-Jun-99 12:22 - images/ 23-May-99 06:00 -
The correspondence between the URL and the Athena path holds for individual files and subdirectories as well. For example, the following URLs relate to their corresponding files, respectively:
URL:
http://web.mit.edu/29.123/www/syllabus.html http://web.mit.edu/29.123/www/exams/
File:
/mit/29.123/www/syllabus.html /mit/29.123/www/exams/index.html
mit.edu/29.123/www/
Course Web sites may also be accessed through the SIPB Web server, with the URL format:
http://www.mit.edu/~lockername/ http://www.mit.edu/~29.123/
Shortcuts and alternate URLs may be useful for your maintenance and testing purposes, but you should not burden your students with multiple URL formats for reaching the same Web site.
URLs to course lockers may be set up without the /www/ directory indication; for example http://web.mit.edu/acs/ instead of http://web.mit.edu/acs/www/. You can also designate a directory name other than www; for example, http://web.mit.edu/29.123/Web. For details, see the section on Changing ACLs.
You can access the Athena course locker that hosts your Web site in one of two ways:
athena.dialup.mit.edu
.
express.dialup.mit.edu
. This connects you
to a machine with a smaller
load, but it also limits you to 15 minutes of connect time when there are
more than 10 users logged simultaneously.)
pwd
(present working directory).
For example, when J. Q. Prof first logs in:
athena% pwd /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/q/jqprofTo change to your course Web directory, use the command
cd
(change
directory), with the following format:
athena% cd pathFor example, change to the www directory for 29.123, then type the command pwd:
athena% cd /mit/29.123/www athena% pwd /afs/athena.mit.edu/course/29/29.123/wwwNote: The pwd command always shows the full path of a directory, regardless of whether or not you used the short /mit path in your commands.
The underlying operating system of Athena is Unix. Lockers are stored in Athena's centralized AFS file system, which handles permissions differently from other Unix file systems. Information on AFS permissions, Athena directory paths, and some useful shortcuts is summarized below.
Under AFS, permissions are managed by access control lists (ACLs), which apply to directories rather than individual files (as on the local disk or in NFS). For more information, see Access Control in the Course Locker Maintenance Guide.
The general naming convention for a course locker gives it the path:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/course-number/subject-number/www/For example:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/29/29.123/www/For information on how the Athena path maps to a URL, see URLs and Athena Directory Paths in this guide.
athena% attach 29.123For the rest of the session you can use the path:
/mit/29.123This replaces:
/afs/athena/course/29/29.123
~29.123This replaces:
/afs/athena/course/29/29.123