This page is out of date

The Student Activity Server has been renamed to the Penn State Student Organizations Web Service and is under new management. These Web pages are out of date and will be removed in the near future. Please read http://www.clubs.psu.edu/info/ for information about the new service.

Special directory configurations - htaccess

The Stage 3 server has support for directory specific configuration using .htaccess files. By placing a properly written text file called ".htaccess" in a directory, that directory and all sub directories will be affected.

Installation recommendation from Windows

Windows has trouble dealing with filenames that start with a ".", therefore we recommend using the name "htaccess.txt" when writing it. After it is uploaded to your website, rename it to ".htaccess" (everything inside the quotes including the initial period).

Available options

The following options are allowed for setting in .htaccess files. If an option is not allowed or the syntax is incorrect, you will receive the cryptic "500 Internal Server Error".

• Web Site Password Protection

  It takes 7 lines, a second configuration file, and permission changes to properly set up a password protected directory. Because of this ordeal, we have made a tool to help automate this process. We hope to provide full documentation of this soon for the "do-it-yourself-ers".

• Directory Index Page

  We have info here

• Custom error pages

  The most commonly customized error page is "404 File Not Found". The club called "myclub" may link 404 errors to their page "my404.html" with the following line in .htaccess:
  ErrorDocument 404 /myclub/my404.html
  As described in the documentation, the path must be the full local URL-path starting with the first "/". Thus www.clubs.psu.edu/myclub/my404.html can be writen as /myclub/my404.html.

• The Options directive

  The Options directive is not allowed to be set, however the following are already enabled:
  • FollowSymLinks
  • IncludesNOEXEC (see our ssi page for usage)
  • Indexes (usage)

Troubleshooting

• 500 Internal Server Error

  If you try to set an option in .htaccess that is not allowed, or in proper syntax, you will get this error. All the useful notices about what's wrong go to the server logs.

• Permission Denied on Password Protected Pages

  The permissions used on these directories restrict access to designated web servers. Our stage 2 server, http://clubs.sa.psu.edu/, does not honor this password scheme, and is denied access on purpose.

• Features no longer work after reading an ASP or CGI page

  Pages ending in .asp or in the /cgi/ or /cgi-bin/ directories are automatically referred to our Stage 2 server, http://clubs.sa.psu.edu/ for processing. It does not read .htaccess files, or honor SSI. Thus linking from an ASP page locally to an .html page may cause problems due to the referral. If your club uses either of these on your site, you may need to resort to use absolute URLs on .asp and CGI pages until we migrate them to the stage 3 server.

Last modified Thursday, 27-Mar-2003 12:50:56 EST. Student Activity Server Committee