General notes on LiquidWeb environment

• The Web server is Apache, running on a Linux box which we can access via telnet or SSH. The latter is preferable for security reasons. You can get a very nice free SSH client for Windows called [PuTTY].
• Telnet/SSH sessions time out after a relatively short idle time. Very annoying. However, output activity seems to defeat the timer, so running e.g. "top" will prevent timeout. I found a setting in PuTTY that will send periodic null "keep-alive" packets. Annoyance banished.
• The shell environment is missing most (all?) man pages. Annoying. If you have access to a more conventionally configured RedHat Linux system, you can look stuff up there.
• See SDx Internet Services for information about the admin account.
• Once logged in, the root of our Web site is accessible as ~/public_html.
• LiquidWeb admin tools allow you to set up standard web-server based password protection for a directory very easily.
• The LiquidWeb admin tools also include a means to backup and restore our entire environment on their server. Make liberal use of this. :-)
• All of our CGI scripts run under suexec as user spookydi, group spookydi.

Current security setup

All CGI scripts run as spookydi.spookydi, so file permission management is simple.

All Web pages and CGI are under ~/public_html. Relative to this root:

• The root directory is public and unsecured, i.e. it can be served up to anyone.
• cataclym-secure is a wiki we provide to JG squad Cataclyme. Probably defunct. It is secured by its own username/password database.
• cgi-bin is the normal location for unsecured CGI programs. For instance, the program for updating your password is here.
• developer is an artifact of early experiments with FTP. Probably defunct.
• tools contains many compressed toolkits for SDx software development.
• secure contains secured programs and subdirectory. Access to files directly in this directory require your SDx username/password.
• secure/mgr contains a private wiki used for some non-SDx stuff, and is secured by its own username/password database.

Notes:

• There is currently a directory named ~/old-wiki-data which has funny ownership and permissions. It's an artifact of an earlier setup that had to work around LiquidWeb's use of cgiwrap. This directory can be removed once I'm confident that the new setup is OK.