Policies Regarding Student Use of the Computing Facilities

General

The Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering provides a variety of computing facilities available for use by its students, instructors, and staff which are intended to support course-related work or other activities related to the University. Any non-University related work performed on these systems, particularly of a business nature, is grounds for immediate account cancellation and possible legal action by the University. The general University Student IT policies may be found at http://it.jhu.edu/policies . These policies apply to all University systems.

Additionally, there are policies and guidelines that apply specifically to the Multi-User Unix Systems. These policies and guidelines are described below and may also be presented as part of the login banner as a “message of the day”.

Personal Home Web Pages

The server supports student home pages. By convention, these would be in a subdirectory called ‘public_html’ under your home directory. The main or beginning home page should be named ‘index.html’. The URL access to it would be “http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~<username>” where <username> represents your account or login name. Note that your home directory and the 'public_html' subdirectory must have at least execute permissions for "world" (i.e. 751 or 755 permissions).

Server-Side Programs

Use of cgi scripts, server-side includes, Java servlets, etc. have the potential of creating security problems on the Server. Because of this, some limitations have been imposed.

Individual students do not have permission to run scripts from within their local public_html area. Yet we recognize that class assignments may require this capability. We’ve compromised by setting up a general area for instructors from which cgi scripts may be run. For those instructors who request this functionality/capability for their students, we set up a directory named for the instructor under this CGI area. The instructor will own the directory and only he/she can write into it. The instructor must therefore grant the student permission to place his/her script in that area (i.e. copy it over to that area for the student). It then becomes the instructor's responsibility to verify that the cgi scripts created by students cause no harm before placing them in this directory for the world to use. Bottom line is that the instructor is held responsible for any mis-behaving scripts. The same constraints and compromise apply to server-side includes as well.

Java servlets are currently not supported, but there are plans to support this in the future. Check with your Lab Instructor.

Suggestions for Good Web Pages

• Keep it simple! Avoid gaudy and flashy, especially blinking and scrolling text.
• Keep large graphics to a minimum--remember those can slow remote access.
• Also you might want to minimize Browser-specific Html functionality. Your reader shouldn’t be required to use a certain browser.
• Short and sweet is best and helps the reader keep track of where he/she is.
• Creating good Web pages is a lot more like creating a good magazine article than it is exercising multimedia or networking.