The department provides web-hosting for research groups and collaborations. This page describes the old hosting service, which is now deprecated. If you want to set up a brand new group website please contact support@ch.cam.ac.uk .
Normally each web server is hosted on an individual machine, to reduce the chance of interference between the sites. However sites with purely static content may be placed on a shared server.
The (hypothetical) Oakenfield research group would be given a web server called www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk or placed on the shared server www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk. Either way their web site would be made visible to the world at http://www-oakenfield.ch.cam.ac.uk/.
Those members of the Oakenfield group who are expected to maintain the webserver will be added to a group called, appropriately, oakenfield-webmasters and only members of this group may edit the files on the webserver - by accessing smb://www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/WWW, ssh://www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/var/www//html or \\www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk\WWW.
The equivalents for a static site are smb://www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/www-oakenfield, ssh://www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/var/www/html/www-oakenfield and \\www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk\www-oakenfield.
Access to all of these would be controlled by using the Active Directory.
To connect from MacOS:
- Click the Finder icon in the Dock.
- Choose Connect to Server from the Go menu.
- In the address field of the Connect to Server dialog, type either 'smb://www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/WWW/' or 'smb://www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk/www-oakenfield'. (Don't forget to change oakenfield to something more appropriate!)
- Click Connect
- (On some machines, you might need to put "AD\" before your user ID)
To connect from Windows:
- Either open Windows Explorer and find the 'Map a network drive' option, or click on Start, Run
- In the box type either \\www-oakenfield.ch.private.cam.ac.uk\WWW or \\www-static.ch.private.cam.ac.uk\www-oakenfield .
- If you are having trouble logging in, try putting 'AD\' in front of your username.
Other software can be installed, if needed by the site. As an example, some sites require:
- MySQL
- cgi
- Raven authentication
- Details of how to set up local access control with raven
- Blogs, at (for example), http://www-oakenfield.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/news-from-the-bench
- Wiki, at (for example), http://www-oakenfield.ch.cam.ac.uk/wiki
The webservers are implemented on virtual machines. It is possible to reboot your own virtual machines from https://apps.ch.cam.ac.uk/domus/.
