You can also create a personal homepage. For this purpose, use the directory named public_html in your home directory and insert your html files there. The main page should be called index.html. Or you just place some files there or in a subdirectory you create to make them downloadable by other people. For this purpose, pay attention to the note on Directory listings below.

You can create html files much like you write a document in Word for Windows by using Netscape: From the file menu, choose New Document.

The URL for your home page will be

http://users.ictp.it/~username/

You can also restrict access to only a few users by creating a text file named .htaccess, which must be readable only by you (use the Unix command chmod 600 .htaccess) and should look like this:

AuthType Basic
AuthName Some-name

<Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
require user username1 username2 username3
</Limit>

In this way, whenever someone tries to access a file in this directory over the web server, a dialog box will pop up in Netscape or Internet Explorer asking the user to log in. Only the user names listed in the .htaccess file together with the corresponding ICTP passwords will be accepted.

Instead of writing a list of a few selected ICTP users, you can allow access to all ICTP users (after authentication) using this require line:

require valid-user

Another possibility is to set up arbitrary user names and passwords. For this purpose, set up the .htaccess file like this:

  AuthUserFile /full-path-to-web-dir/.htpasswd
  AuthName Some-name
  AuthType Basic

  require user user1 user2 ...

The .htpasswd file must look like this:

  user1:encrypted-password1
  user2:encrypted-password2

To encrypt a password, type in the following in UNIX/Linux:

  scs-2.ictp.trieste.it:18> perl
  print crypt("password","AB"),"\n"; CtrlD

AB can be replaced by any combination of two letters. You will get a result like AB8KU4ljUvzmU which you should copy and paste into the .htpasswd file:

  user1:AB8KU4ljUvzmU

Directory listings

You can also use a web directory to allow people to download files, without writing an index.html file. Whoever knows the full URL (including the file names) can view or download the files directly. If you want that Internet users see the file list of the directory and choose from there the files to download, you must explicitly tell our web server that this directory should be listable.

This is done by putting a text file named .htaccess into this directory which contains the following line:

  Options +Indexes

Whatever you write into a .htaccess file applies to this directory and to all sub-directories inside.