Infra for hosting web pages on CMU web servers is a little complicated and confusing, and I waste some time figuring it out every time I need to change something. These are notes to make my life easier in the future, and may be relevant for others. This is from the perspective of an ECE student, adapt to your needs.

AFS Cells

I get to have a home directory on two CMU cells – andrew.cmu.edu and ece.cmu.edu. I don’t know how to discover all the cells you have a home directory in.

ssh [email protected] # give them your andrew password
$ pwd
/afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr18/ankushj
$ cd /afs/ece.cmu.edu/usr/ankushj
$ ls
Permission denied
$ aklog ece.cmu.edu
$ ls
top_secret_infiniband_content.txt
$ tokens
<all the cells I'm authenticated for>

# random AFS commands
$ fs listaliases
$ fs listquota

Hosting on ECE

This is straightforward. Your public_html is available on users.ece.cmu.edu/~ankushj

ECE also respects .htaccess

$ ls -a /path/to/ece/homedir/public_html
.htaccess index.html

Hosting on Andrew

This is more confusing. Target address is https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ankushj/.

$ ls -a /path/to/andrew/homedir/www
.htaccess index.html
  1. Andrew does not use .htaccess.
  2. index.html is not automatically available. You have to go to https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/server/publish.html, type your username, hit publish, and the data gets copied to some “real hosting destination”.
  3. .unpublish is a thing1

Redirects

On ECE, I can set up a HTTP-level redirect via .htaccess.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/$ https://my.real.website

I previously tried the following, but it would redirect to https://my.real.website~ankushj. I am pretty sure that ChatGPT is just giving me a stupid redirect command, but the version above works and the version below does not — that’ll have to do for now.

Redirect 301 / https://my.real.website

From Andrew, I had to set up a HTTP redirect.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
        <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https//my.real.website">
            <title>Redirecting...</title>
  </head>
  <body>
        <p>If you are not redirected, <a href="https://my.real.website">click here</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Troubleshooting

# Permissions
$ fs sa www system:anyuser rl

References

  1. https://www.cmu.edu/computing/services/comm-collab/websites/user-course-web/how-to/publish.html ↩