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HOWTO Documents > Course Materials
Course materials can be easily placed on the web and access restricted to them in a manner of ways. We will be using the course CSU1234 as an example throughout this document.
Course Directory
The first requirement for placing materials on the web is to have a course directory on our NFS server. These are located under /course (example /course/csu1234/). If you need a course directory created, send an eMail to systems@ccs.neu.edu requesting that a directory be created. Be sure to let them know what course it is for.
Access Possibilities
Now that you have a course directory, there are 3 choices in how you want to make information available. Currently we support files viewable by the general public, files viewable only by machines located at CCIS (including dial-up), and files viewable only by students with a valid CCIS account.
General Public
In order to make files available to the general public a ".www" directory has to exist under the course directory. This can be accomplished by the command mkdir /course/csu1234/.www. Once this directory is created, any files placed there will be viewable on the web at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csu1234/. If an "index.html" file doesn't exist, a directory listing will be displayed.
CCIS Machines
For files that should only be viewable by machines located at CCIS, a "priv" directory will need to be created under the ".www" directory. This can be accomplished by the command mkdir /course/csu1234/.www/priv. Once this directory is created, any files placed there will be viewable on the web at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csu1234/priv/, but only from machines located at CCIS (including dial-up).
CCIS Users
Limiting files to valid CCIS students, requires using our SSL server. The reason for this is in order to authenticate a user their CCIS password must be sent. However, the standard HTTP password mechanism is very insecure. To minimize the risk of exposing a password, SSL is used to encrypt the communication.
You will need to create a directory called "ssl" under the ".www" directory. This can be accomplished by the command mkdir /course/csu1234/.www/ssl. Files placed in this directory will be available on the web at https://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csu1234/ssl/. In order to access them you will first need to supply a valid CCIS username and password.
If someone accidentally uses "http" instead of "https" when typing in the URL, the request will automatically be redirected to the secure server.
Once on the secure server, all documents not placed in the "/course/csu1234/.www/ssl" directory, will not be viewable. For example the URL https://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csu1234/ will not be valid. For this reason if a document under the "ssl" directory refers to a general public document, you will need to specify the complete URL (including http). This limitation is done to ensure documents can only served from one of our web servers.
Other Notes
As soon as you create a ".www" directory, the contents will be viewable on the web.
There is an official listing of CCIS undergraduate courses at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/ with links to the official University descriptions of our courses. At present, there's no automated mechanism for connecting those course description pages to your pages with actual current course material, but you can ask to have a link made by sending mail to systems@ccs.neu.edu.
Subdirectories can be created under any of the directories above and will inherit the same access restrictions. For example files in the directory "/course/csu1234/.www/ssl/lectures/" will only be viewable on the secure server and will require authentication.
Using symbolic links for directories is not recommended if you are placing material under a "priv" or "ssl" directory.