Setting up your Career URL with PH

Purdue Computer Network

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While the instructions below are still a valid way to create a web page on ECN's system, we recommend that you use Zope to create your website instead. Zope allows more power and security in web site creation and maintenance than the old system. More information about creating and maintaining web sites in Zope can be found in the Zope FAQs. If you would prefer not to use Zope, continue by following the directions in this article.

If you are hosting a web site on an ECN server, you may have a URL that looks like this: http://computer_name.ecn.purdue.edu/~ph_alias. This can pose a problem because when a machine is retired from service, all of your files, including your web pages, are moved to a newer machine. Your new URL becomes http://new_computer_name.ecn.purdue.edu/~ph_alias. Once the old machine is taken offline, browsers that requested a machine specific URL will return an "Unable to locate the server:" error message with no information about where your web page now resides. You may then have to inform all of your site visitors of the URL change.

The solution to this problem is always direct visitors to your ECN career URL, which is http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~ph_alias or http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~ph_qualified name. A career URL allows you to move your web page from one ECN machine to another without having to inform anyone that your URL changed. The PH information, once updated with the name of the new machine, will automatically direct users to the new location.

Setting up the URL field in your PH record

Your PH record has many fields of information. The one pertinent to this FAQ is the url: uniform resource locator. In this PH field, you will need to enter the URL of your web page that contains the name of the machine serving your web page. Here is an example:

• PH ALIAS: harley
• ECN LOGIN: harley
• PH qualified name: joshua.p.harley.1
• Location of public-web directory: shay.ecn.purdue.edu
• URL with machine name: http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/
• PH URL field: http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/
• Advertised URLs: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/ or
• Advertised URLs: http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~joshua.p.harley.1/

Since my web page is stored in a public-web directory on shay, the direct URL to my web page is http://shay.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/. In order to use the universal URL of http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/, I have to set my PH URL field to point to my web page on shay.ecn.purdue.edu. Now, I can tell everyone that my web page can be found at http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~harley/. It will always be active even if I move it to another machine, as long as I update my PH information with the new URL that contains the machine name.

We recommend that you change your PH alias to be the same as your ECN login, if possible. The alias field is the first field of information on the page. If your PH alias and ECN login are different, be sure to use the ECN_LOGIN in the PH URL field in the PH database and the PH_ALIAS or PH_QUALIFIED_NAME in the advertised URL that you give out to the public.

The PH information can be edited from the SSINFO site. Click on "Purdue Directory Search" from the left side-bar of the main ssinfo page.