Ocean 506B: How to set up your University of Washington Oceanography web space

The Internet simplified:

A quick review of how the Internet works will help you speedily understand how to present your web pages to the world as a member of the UW School of Oceanography. The diagram below depicts the Internet as a network consisting of 2 types of computers and the "wires" that connect them.

The dark blue computer contains information that is intended to be shared with another computer, like the cyan one. A computer that serves information are called server; a computer that requests and receives the information, or data, are dubbed clients. The black lines that connect these two types of computers actually take many forms: telephone lines, ethernet cables, routers, modems, microwave and radio signals, satellites, antennas, fibre optics, cable TV wires, and most recently point-to-piont lasers.

For this discussion, the most important software (aka program or application) on clients is a web browser. You can use the browser to request information from any server on the Internet, if you know the name of the server and the location of the information you want on the server. For instance, if point your browser to http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/index.html you are sending a http request (hyper text transfer protocol request) to the server known as www.ocean.washington.edu (aka tsunami) for the index.html data file that is stored in the people directory. The format of this request is standarized across the Internet, and is often refered to as an URL (pronounced "earl" or "U.R.L.," and standing for Uniform Resource Locator -- really a fancy word for "address").

Software on servers known as daemons keep track of what requests are made of the server. There are many types of daemon, but each one knows how to listen for requests and respond to them, usually by sending data back to the client. Continuing the above example, when the http daemon on tsunami gets the request from the client's browser, it knows that it should go get the file called index.html and send it to the client to be read, interpreted, and displayed by the browser. Importantly, it knows that the people directory is actually a specific directory on a specific disk drive on tsunami; the people directory on tsunami is actually inside the www and htdocs directories (its full path name is /www/htdocs/people).

The UW Oceanography situation

As a member of the UW community and the School of Oceanography, you have access to a number of servers will store and server your information. You can use servers designated for UW faculty, students, etc. You can used the School of Oceanography server (known as tsunami.ocean.washington.edu or ocean.washington.edu). Or you or your lab may have a computer that is acting as a server. In order to access any of these servers, you need an account (a username and password).

This page describes only how to use the tsunami server.

If you are a faculty member:

You already have a web page! You can view it by pointing your browser to http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/ and clicking on your name. You will see that the page displayed has a more specific URL, with your user name and the name of your default web page appended to the above URL.

This URL specifies a directory on one of tsunami's hard disks where all of your web files (text, images, sub-directories, or whatever) must be stored. It is crucial to remember that there are 2 ways to describe this directory. It is associated with a "base" URL

http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/faculty/your_user_name/

and also an absolute path:

/www/htdocs/people/faculty/your_user_name/

When you are requesting the file with a browser you must use the URL. When using a file transfer program to add or retrieve files from the directory you must use the path.

If you are a graduate student:

Your situation is similar to the faculty situation described above, but you will not initially get any result from clicking on your name on the graduate student page:

http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/grads/

At the top of that page, however, you will find a link to instructions that will connect your name with your default web page that is already located at the absolute path:

/www/htdocs/people/grads/your_user_name/

In fact, you can view your default page directly by pointing your browser to the associated URL:

http://www.ocean.washington.edu/people/grads/your_user_name/