Manual

About

Thank you for taking the time to read some or all of our user manual. If there's anything in here which you feel needs to be expanded upon, let us know so that we can help you learn what you need to know. Current clients should mail their comments and suggestions to support@support.ntdcommunications.com to get specific help as well as point out the deficiency in this manual. People who are not yet customers are welcome to give feedback to info@ntdcommunications.com so that we can do a better job of earning your business.

We're going to walk through all of our examples with a single domain and login in use: schmoop.com, which has been given the login schmoo01. Anywhere and everywhere you see schmoop.com or schmoo01, substitute your domain or login.

General

Send technical support questions to support@support.ntdcommunications.com. Send billing, service expansion, cancellation, and other such questions to accounts@support.ntdcommunications.com. If you're not sure, pick either one of those.

Hostnames

Your site is on the web at both schmoop.com and www.schmoop.com. They are equivalent and not distinguished by our system. If you wish, we can redirect hits from one to the other so that users always see your URL with or without the www, as you choose. This helps out with some packages using cookies -- if you're installing such a thing consider this.

Your mail server is mail.schmoop.com. Use this name for both POP3 ("incoming") and SMTP ("outgoing") settings in your mail software.

Use schmoop.com to ftp, telnet, or ssh to your account.

Anywhere you would use schmoop.com you can also use schmoop.com.ntdcommunications.com. Why would you want to do a thing like that? So you can get to our server while you domain is hosted somewhere else, or you're not sure where it's hosted at the moment during a change. The utility of this naming option will be obvious if you need to move a domain here from its old host, or if you ever need to move away.

Logging in and your home directory

Use any FTP program to access your account. Connect to schmoop.com and give your login (schmoo01) and password wherever your program takes them. You will be in your home directory. Your web documents are in the www directory. Various setup files are in the Config directory, and others are in your home directory itself. The Maildir directory contains your mailbox -- we highly recommend you not touch any of it but instead use a proper mail program!

Unless you have the Small account, you may also use any telnet program to log on to the system. Telnet to schmoop.com and use the same login and password. Again you will be in your home directory, ready to work.

Note that you may occaisionally see us write ~schmoo01 or ~/www. ~schmoo01 is a modern Unix shorthand for your home directory. ~/www refers to the www directory in your home directory, if you are logged on. The ~ by itself can't mean anything unless you are logged on, otherwise the system has no concept of "you". ~schmoo01 can be used by anyone on the system (including you, of course) to refer to your home directory.

Try logging on with FTP, or with telnet if you know Unix, and changing to your www directory. You'll see one file, index.html. This is what is being displayed at http://schmoop.com/ right now. You can delete it and upload your own "under construction" page, or just upload your site, any time now. If you put a hypothetical foo.html file in here, it will be on the web at http://schmoop.com/foo.html. If you're here to just to put up a static web site, that's all you need to know!

Mail

Incoming Mail

The answer to all your software's questions about hostnames or servers, both POP3 and SMTP, incoming and outgoing, is mail.schmoop.com. There's not much that you'll need to set up that isn't the default, but there is one thing.

Basic mail client setup

One more thing: if you have email waiting in your outbox when you first connect to your ISP, or when you first connect to our service, go to waldo.schmoop.com before sending your mail. The explanation follows.

The Internet in this century is a dangerous place. Ten years ago we could have told you to just type mail.schmoop.com for your SMTP server and that would have been the end of it. But SMTP is a completely anonymous protocol, designed way before anyone gave serious thought to Internet abuse. When you're out there "somewhere in the Internet", we don't know it's you sending that email with your address on it!

Letting your server forward the mail anyway categorizes us as an "open relay" -- a machine ready and willing to send email to anyone with all the resources at its disposal, no questions asked. There are many people on the Internet who would simply not see your email once we were tagged as an open relay in circles where such matters are discussed. You would also be unhappy when your web site went down, after our provider networks turned off our connections for providing such a service, if it were ever actually abused. (And the abuse is just a matter of time. NTD staff are battle-scarred veteans of email abuse.)

So you must do one of four things:

1. Set your email client to do POP3 before SMTP -- get new mail before sending out mail, or
2. Log on to the waldo before doing email, or
3. Use your ISP's SMTP server instead of ours, or
4. Forward your email to your ISP/free-web-mail account instead of using your POP3 account.

(4) makes it hard to send out mail using your domain, even though it makes receiving easy. (3) is a problem if you switch amongst multiple ISPs -- you have to reconfigure every time you dial in to a new ISP. It is also not allowed by a few ISPs, although most do and all should. Many even require this -- for example, MSN users must use the MSN SMTP server. (1) is usually not the way email programs work -- you need to manually make sure you have nothing in your outbox the first time you start up the email program and "send and receive". Happily, recent versions of Outlook Express seem to work this way, and you can choose to "Receive all" manually if you have to. Outlook 97 (newer versions: unknown) doesn't have that, but you can create a temp folder, move our message from the outbox to temp, Send&Recv, then move the message back and Send&Recv again. (2) means you have to remember to open a web browser before opening your mail program, and it only works for the main account holder.

Hence the summary: if you have something in your outbox as you're dialing in the first time, visit the Waldo first, and have your mail program check for new mail at least every 30 minutes.

Routing Mail

From your home directory, go into your Control directory. See the file mailrte.txt? The mail system looks at that file to determine where to send mail. When your account was set up we set all mail to any address @schmoop.com to be delivered in your first or only mailbox. This is probably quite reasonable for now, but if you want to change the behaviour, download the mailrte.txt file in ASCII mode, use a plain ASCII text editor (ex. Notepad) to make your changes, and upload it again in ASCII mode. You might want to leave a blank line at the end of the file, too - it's not supposed to be necessary, but it can never hurt.

As an example, if you wish to have your mail forwarded to your AOL account, change the file to read:

* your-handle@aol.com

If you want to get most mail in your mailbox normally but have mail for Tom, Dick, and Harry sent to their preferred mailboxes, it might look like:

* schmoo01

tom tom@rocketmail.com

dick 10001.2345@compuserve.com

harry harry@ix.netcom.com

To have mail sent to a POP3 mailbox on our machine, write just

alias login

with no @ over there. Ex.

hillary schmoo01

If you do not want any old address to work, do not include a * line. This is sort of recommended, actually. People who misspell a name will get a message telling them that there was no such user instead of one person getting all the misaddressed private mail.

If you upload a blank file (either zero length or with only blank lines) then no email will be received except for the postmaster exception. This is not recommended at this time, although every day it sounds better.

If you have any doubt whatsoever about how to handle your mail, let us know. We can do most anything.

Postmaster Email

If you do take out the * line then it is highly recommended that you have a postmaster line like

postmaster schmoo01

Every Internet domain that receives email at all is required to have postmaster@domain be a valid address. If you don't provide for this, the system will make us the postmaster. This will probably never make any difference to you, but we tell you for your information. If you want to throw any such email back to us (we are generally the ones in a position to respond to the technical type of email generally sent to postmasters) feel free to write

postmaster postmaster@ntdcommunications.com

If you want to snub Internet standards and discard mail for postmaster (or any address for that matter), this would do it:

postmaster nobody

qmail

The mail system of choice at NTD is qmail. If you know how to work on a qmail system, you'll figure out how to use .qmail files for schmoop.com's email with just the smallest bit of poking around. If you don't know what qmail is, don't worry about it. Just don't touch the .qmail-default file, or any other .qmail files, in your home directory.

Automatic Mail

One great way to provide information freely and easily but keep track of who's getting it is to set up a mail address for it. Invite people to send a blank message to info@schmoop.com. Now go into the automail/ sub-directory of your home and upload a file called info, or info.txt. Try sending mail to info@schmoop.com.

If you also have an info line in mailrte.txt their original mail will be forwarded in addition to the automatic response. You must have a seperate info line, however, and not rely on a * line.

You could use this fact to do a dumb vacation responder: upload a fred.txt explaining that you'll be back next week, explicitly route fred in mailrte.txt, and you're done. Do not do this if you are on any mailing lists as fred!!! There's a reason we wrote `dumb'.

You can make your own bounce message for mis-addressed mail within your domain. In mailrte.txt write

* badaddress@schmoop.com

You can have a badaddress line if you want copies of the mis-addresses mail, but you probably don't. Now upload badaddress.txt to the automail directory. Try sending mail to foobar@schmoop.com. You can inform people about what addresses are valid and how they might try to correct their error this way.

Majordomo

This is not ready yet! While the code is written and long since proven to work well, it has not yet been tested on our current system, which is just slightly different than the systems where it was developed and used. Email us to give us a little kick if you want it up faster. Or, if you're adventurous, you can just try it and let us know what happens.

The Majordomo setup at NTD is rather unique. Many ISPs and WPPs will set up Majordomo for you, but they may do only one list. Frequently every major change requires administrator intervention, and sometimes you don't even get regular list owners' control. NTD Commurications' mission is helping people communicate, and if starting up 1,000 five-person mailing lists helps you communicate, we're the host for you.

Telnet in. A Waldo for Majordomo commands will come eventually -- let us know if it's significant to you. Run

majordomo-init

once, forever more, and then add a list by running

majordomo-newlist List Owner

where List is the name of the list and Owner is the email address of the list owner (whether you or someone else). For example, if you, hillary@schmoop.com, are making an announcement list for your site it might work out to

majordomo-newlist announce hillary@schmoop.com

You (or the designated Owner) should check your mail for instructions. You will need to learn about majordomo, at least a bit, before going public. The mail that just arrived has instructions, and majordomo's home page is found at www.greatcircle.com. After spending some time playing with it you can ask us for help if you're in trouble.

The great thing about this installation is that it's entirely in your home directory! Want to make an info file for that new list? Majordomo doesn't normally provide a way to do that, but you just upload it into ~/majordomo/lists/announce.info. Have a subscriber list you want installed? (Plain text, one address per line, no additional punctuation or spaces at all. In other words this is not a toy. :-) Just upload it to ~/majordomo/lists/announce. Want to change the owner of the announce list? Edit ~/majordomo/owner-list (and probably ~/majordomo/approve-list too). There's nothing you can't control.

There's a majordomo-dellist command too. Remind us to document it when you need it.

The WALDO (Web Analouge for Long, Displeasing Ovations)

Waldoes are the products of a system in development at NTD that allow you to administer your account entirely from within your browser. It's what you see referred to as a "control panel" or another more clever, more trademarked name at other hosts.

The entire system is in constant development. Go to waldo.schmoop.com to see what we have so far and don't be shy about suggesting the most important new feature you need added. The two things most users do there are authorize yourself to the mail system and change your password. Our virtual POP3 users can manage their users there as well. At the other end of the spectrum, Small accounts don't have waldoes at all.

Standard CGI

Mailmerge: set up your template file as, say, t.txt in your pub/ directory. In your HTML form set your action to http://www.schmoop.com/cgi-std/mailmerge/t.txt. Read about mailmerge at ... hmm, it doesn't seem to have a homepage any more?

Formmail: we use mailmerge, so while we have installed formmail we're not certain it works. It looks easy enough to use - easier than mailmerge although missing a bit of flexibility. Refer to http://www.schmoop.com/cgi-std/formmail. Read about formmail at <http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml>.

Cgiemail: is available in case you like it but not recommended - mailmerge is a better one to learn. Nonetheless, you may read about it at http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/cgiemail/.

Count: Insert references in your HTML something like <img src="/cgi-std/Count" alt"-counter-">. Read about the counter at http://www.muquit.com/muquit/software/Count/Count2.6/Count.html.

(Let us know if there's anything else you'd like us to consider offering. Our criteria are 1) it must be easy to install once for all users and 2) must be lightweight, quick, and simple.)

Imagemaps

Create your map description in the NCSA format, and give it the extension .map. Then simply reference the .map file in your <a>, as in <a href="main.map"> (if you uploaded main.map to the same directory as the page that refers to it) and the server takes care of the rest. If your favorite book tells you to write something more like <a href="/cgi-bin/imagemap/main.map"> that's a hint that your book is getting ludicrously dated. It's been almost five years since most servers have had an actual CGI to handle imagemaps.

Programming

Unless you have a Small account, you have the priviledge of uploading programs to run on our server.

Upload CGI programs anywhere under your www/ directory, just like HTML files or whatever else, but give them .cgi extensions so that they will be recognized as CGI programs. For example, use a text editor to put the following in a file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI ':standard';

print header, start_html('Hi!'), h1('Hi!'), p('Hi!');

Then log on with FTP, change to the pub directory, and upload hello.cgi. Now you additionally need to use chmod to mark it as a program; the command might be `chmod 755 hello.cgi' or `site chmod 755 hello.cgi' and users of GUI FTP programs probably need to find the option to directly enter text commands. (If you can't find it in your FTP program then it's time to use the telnet program. Log on and `cd pub; chmod 755 hello.cgi; exit'.)

Now call up <http://www.schmoop.com/hello.cgi> with your browser to see that it works.

If you must have a CGI directory, log on, create it, and tell the system that it is a CGI directory like so:

cd ~/www 

mkdir cgi-bin 

cd cgi-bin 

echo "SetHandler cgi-script" >.htaccess

There is nothing special about the name `cgi-bin', although you are certainly welcome to continue that tradition.

You could also have a different extension be interpreted as meaning the file is a CGI program. For example, to say all .pl files anywhere under your pub directory are CGIs:

cd ~/www

echo "AddHandler cgi-script .pl" >>.htaccess

CGIs are run as nobody. Feel free to write a little suid wrapper if they need to write to a file. Or you can make a file or a subdirectory world writeable. Do not make your home directory itself world writeable.

PHP3

Just do it! All .html files are run through the PHP3 engine unless you have a Small account. (You can name them .php3 if you prefer. Actually, you can name them .foo and .bar and put

AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .foo .bar

in your .htaccess for all we care.)

Read about this language at www.php.net. Note that this is version 3 of the language, not version 4. In the future we will have seperate servers supporting PHP4. Unfortunately the php.net site deals exclusively with version 4 now, so you'll want to look at our local copy of the PHP3 documentation for reference.

SSI

Give the files which have SSI commands in the comments the extension .shtml and they will be interpreted. Or name them .html but mark them executable:

chmod 755 index.html

Yes, you may use include and exec. You did buy a full access account, after all.

If you are writing new code use PHP3 in preference to SSI. It's a real programming language, a bunch faster, and you'll be glad you did. Support for this language is common enough that you're not locking yourself in to our servers.

MySQL

Business class accounts may request a MySQL database be set up. You will get one database which happens to match your login name. We can set up multiple database logins if you need them, however multiple databases will require an additional charge. Disk space used in your database comes out of your general disk allowance, like everything else.

Currently you should have your programs connect to the database on port 3306 (the default) on localhost, or use /tmp/mysql.sock. For example, in PHP write $db = mysql_connect("/tmp/mysql.sock", "schmoo01", "database-password");.

FrontPage Extensions

If you use FrontPage and you don't have a Small account then by requesting FrontPage setup you can use FrontPage the way it was built to work. We do not support the FrontPage program itself although if it looks like something is wrong on the server you can ask. There just isn't that much for us to look into.

You can still use FTP, telnet, and everything else along with FrontPage. There are few problems with this. However, don't FTP and expect WebBots to work. Publish.

You can create child webs (sub-webs if you have FP2000). You can assign security any way FrontPage will let you. You can use this for resale. Enjoy. (You are completely responsible for disk space used, traffic consumed, and policy violations committed by child webs in your domain. Such is parenting.) You can't use the few database features that are so tied up with the Microsoft server platform they'll never be supported. These are the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions, but you can use any release of MS FrontPage to the extent of it's features.

You can upload other CGI programs with FrontPage extensions active. However, they will not work quite as described elsewhere in this manual. We cannot run them under your user ID as we can with normal accounts, so you may need to watch permission issues more carefully than you otherwise would. Most FrontPage users won't be uploading any other CGIs, so this isn't a big priority to fix.

SSL

If your account type includes secure server access then you should have a www-ssl directory next to your www directory in your home. A foo.html put in there can be accessed as https://ssl1.ntdcommunications.com/~schmoo01/foo.html. It can also be accessed as http://ssl1.ntdcommunications.com/~schmoo01/foo.html, enabling easy support when customers with non-SSL capable browsers want to use your site.

(ssl1 may have a different number in the future, but all accounts set up now will be ssl1 and that will not change.

(If you want to force people to use a page only over a secured connection, it's probably easy with a touch of PHP3 code. Not sure about the details. Ask if you really need this implemented and we'll figure it out.)

Giving you access to a secure server does not mean we are providing you with a complete e-commerce solution any more than giving you access to an ordinary server means we are providing you with a corporate presence. It's amazing how often that is assumed. We give you tools and freedom. We will be happy to do e-commerce design but do not think that a total package is going to cost just a few dollars more than the bare web hosting. Of course, there are certainly reasonable shopping cart programs freely usable that you can try.

You can use FrontPage extensions in combination with the secure server. Your unsecure web is accessed normally. To access your secure web, open ssl1.ntdcommunications.com/~schmoo01/. Do not check the SSL box, it won't work. (Or at least it didn't in FP 98. This is a major reason why we set up the server to give parallel secure and unsecure access to the secure areas.) Then when you write links into the secure site, use https: and the pages will be served securely.

FrontPage generally writes relative URLs in intra-web links, which is perfect. If you catch it writing http://ssl1.ntdcommunications.com/~schmoo01/page.html for a link, delete the http://ssl1.ntdcommunications.com part (leave it starting with /~schmoo01) or the user will suddenly not be using a secure connection.

If your web identity requires that you get your own certificate and host under https://www.schmoop.com/ instead of https://ssl1.ntdcommunications.com/, we can do that. The cost is on the main web site. Please allow two weeks to get it all set up.