No e-mail (electronic mail) accounts are created for you by default. An e-mail account is an actual mailbox/inbox where e-mail is received and stored until you log in and retrieve it with an e-mail client program. You can create e-mail accounts by specifying usernames that you wish to be able to receive e-mail. Once setup, any e-mail client with access to the Internet can send electronic mail to that user by specifying username@yourdomain.com as the recipient address.

You should be able to retrieve the e-mail that the account receives by using any POP or IMAP email client with access to the Internet by using username@yourdomain.com as the username and your password to log into the account.

Important:: When setting up your POP3/IMAP client to authenticate with the POP3/IMAP server, you must specify your username in email address format (username@yourdomain.com).

See the step by step instructions on configuring Outlook or Outlook Express, below if you need further help.

You can create your e-mail accounts, e-mail aliases, and configure a few other options by using your FTP username and password to log in to your bitAdmin account at http://admin.yourdomain.com. If you need help with using the bitAdmin interface, click on the [HELP] button once you've logged into it.

Attachments: There are no size restrictions on the size of e-mail attachments; however, they do use your webspace while being trasmitted, or while sitting in one of your users' inbox. Therefore, your disk quota will limit the size of an attachment.

No e-mail aliases are created for you by default. An e-mail alias is not capable of storing e-mail. Rather, when the alias receives an email message, it is forwarded to an actual e-mail account that you specify. You can specify e-mail aliases and the address that you would like e-mail to be forwrded to by creating e-mail aliases in bitAdmin. When an e-mail is sent to alias@yourdomain.com, it will be forwarded to the e-mail account of your choice. An e-mail alias does not need to point to an e-mail account hosted by bitServe. It can point to any valid Internet e-mail account, or even another alias (which will then forward it on to an e-mail account, or another e-mail alias).

You can create your e-mail aliases, email accounts, and configure a few other options by using your FTP username and password to log in to your bitAdmin account at http://admin.yourdomain.com. If you need help with using the bitAdmin interface, click on the [HELP] button once you've logged into it.

With your setup letter, you should have received all of the server information that you need to configure your e-mail client. If you need this information sent to you again, please contact us.

If you're having problems configuring your POP/IMAP client, please follow these instructions:

UNIX commands and filenames are case sensitive. The most basic web site maintenance you will be performing is the uploading of your HTML and graphics documents into your web directory so that the web server can display them to visitors.

You can upload any documents that you do not wish to publish to your web site in your root (home) directory. These may be password files, or other such backend website files that need the additional protection of not being accessible by the world wide web. You should already be at this directory when you first connect to the FTP server.

You will want to upload your HTML and PHP files into the /htdocs directory.

Important: All text files (.cgi .pl .txt .html .htm .php .htaccess) must be uploaded in ASCII mode (TEXT mode for Fetch users)to work properly. All graphics and compiled executables (.exe .zip .gif .jpg .png .class .bin) must be uploaded in BINARY mode (RAW mode for Fetch users) to work properly. Refer to the documentation for your FTP client software to see how to do this. If you are using a UNIX/Linux workstation, you can upload everything in BINARY mode.

All of your website graphics, HTML documents, and PHP scripts should be uploaded to this directory. The index.html (the default page that is displayed when you access your web site with a browser) file will be in this directory. This file will be displayed at both of the following URLs:

http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
http://www.yourdomain.com/

[ Note: When a directory is specified instead of a document, the web browser will actually search for one of the following files, and display the first one that it finds:

index.htm index.php3 index.php index.shtml index.html default.html default.htm index.cgi ]

If you were to place a file named test.html in this directory you would access it with the URL of http://www.yourdomain.com/test.html.

If you were to create a directory in the document (/htdocs) directory named stuff, and upload a file named test.html into this directory (/htdocs/stuff/) the file would be accessed with the URL of http://www.yourdomain.com/stuff/test.html.

You could also put another index.html file in this subdirectory and access it with both of the following URLs:

http://www.yourdomain.com/stuff/index.html
http://www.yourcompany.com/stuff/

This is the directory defined for your CGI scripts, and is where they should all be uploaded so that they can be executed. All CGI scripts should be uploaded in ASCII mode (TEXT mode for Fetch users). All compiled C and JAVA programs should be uploaded in BINARY mode (RAW mode for Fetch users). The cgi-bin directory is located inside the /htdocs directory. All CGI scripts must end with the extension of .cgi or .pl if they require being passed to the CGI handler in Apache.

There is a shorthand way of setting permissions by using octal numbers. Read permission is given the value 4, write permission the value 2 and execute permission 1.

r  w  x
4  2  1

These values are added together for any one user category:

 1 = execute only
 2 = write only
 3 = write and execute (1+2)
 4 = read only
 5 = read and execute (4+1)
 6 = ad and write (4+2)
 7 =   read and write and execute (4+2+1)

Therefore, access permissions can be expressed as three digits. For example:

                   user   group   others
 chmod 644 file1   rw-     r--     r--
 chmod 750 file1   rwx     r-x     ---

You will use this command on all of your cgi scripts to make them executable, such as helloworld.cgi:

chmod 750 helloworld.cgi

This command is only available from within an FTP session. It will peform the <command> locally as if from a shell session.

site chmod 750 hellowworld.cgi

The above command executes the chmod command inside of the FTP session on helloworld.cgi.

Perl 5.8.5 is installed for your use. You can also upload C and Java programs for compilation. We are not responsible for the damage that you do to your files, or any downtime of your web site caused by executing CGI scripts. All CGI scripts are run as you, and should always be owned by you, and the group of the same name, in order to be executable and prevent CGI errors.

Many scripts that you download off of the web ask that you enter absolute path names. The absolute path to your home directory is:

/home/username/htdocs

Where username is your FTP username. Therefore, the absolute path to your htdocs directory would be:

/home/username/htdocs

Following are the absolute paths that you may need to configure your CGI scripts:

sendmail binary: /usr/sbin/sendmail
perl binary: /usr/bin/perl

Important: You never want to use the permissions of 777 on your CGI scripts. You should be using permissions of 750. If the permissions are set any lower than 755, they will not execute for security reasons. The only message that you will get in your error logs is "Premature end of script headers".

The directory in which your CGI scripts are located in can not be set any lower than 755. Since your htdocs directory should be writeable by the group apache, this prevents you from putting any CGI scripts in your htdocs directory. If you will not be using PHP scripts to write to files inside of your htdocs directory, you can disable write access for the apache group.

You should be able to execute CGI scripts in htdocs subdirectories provided that the permissions are 755 on the directory.

The /ftp (anonymous FTP) directory

If you have the Enterprise Package, you can upload the files that you wish to make available via anonymous FTP to this directory. Anonymous FTP servers are accessed by using an FTP client and connecting to ftp.yourdomain.com with the username "anonymous" (without the quotes) and your email address as the password.

You should have received information on how to access your secure order form with your account setup letter. If you need the information again, please contact us. We don't put this configuration information on the web site, for added security.

Server Side Includes (SSI) are enabled by default. All HTML documents are parsed for SSI parameters. All you need to do is put your SSI directive inside your HTML document at the place you wish it to run.

For example, to create a custom footer at the bottom of an HTML document, you could create a file named footer.txt containing the text that should be used as a footer, and then place this line at the bottom of the HTML document that requires the footer.

<!--#include virtual="footer.txt"-->

Using this method for all of your page footers can make it easy to quickly update the copyright notice or other information at the bottoms of all of your pages.

The current month's log files for your web site is in the /logs directory. The logs for the previous months are in /lastlogs. The logs are also available in bitAdmin by clicking on the LOGS button.

These logs are generated by the Apache web server, and are made available to you for analysis.

You can have these log files analyzed by our statistical software by clicking on the ANALYZE button under STATS. Also, there are various free log analysis programs that you can find on the Internet that do a really great job at running statistical analysis on your log files. You'll need to download the log files to your local computer to run these types of programs against your data.

On the first of every month, your current log files are copied into the /lastlogs directory to be displayed to you as "Last Month's Logs", and the old log files are deleted. If you wish to archive these logs, you will want to download your prior month's log files during the 28-31 days that they're available as last month's logs.

The times on the reports and in the logs are in Eastern Time.

Knowing who is visiting your web site is more than likely going to be very important to your Internet marketing plans. Also, the error logs are very useful in finding bad links and other web usage problems.

Most people do not require MySQL, and so it is not setup by default. You should use bitAdmin to setup your MySQL database. If you have programs or scripts that need to access the MySQL server, they will have to reside on the server and access the MySQL database by referring to the MySQL database located at the hostname of "localhost" (without the quotes) or the IP address of 127.0.0.1. Additional access information is in bitAdmin.

You will need to specify your username and password with every mysql connection to your database.

Many new users assume that they will be able to do things with their MySQL database that are similar to what they do with Microsoft Access(tm). However, MySQL is just the backend database that is capable of powering your database enabled applications. It is not an application in itself.

A web based GUI is availalbe for database administration in bitAdmin by clicking on the pencil icon next to the database name.

Shell access is also available to those who require it to maintain their MySQL database. Although most applications that are written to use a MySQL database will have a certain amount of admin functionality, you may find it necessary to perform MySQL commands from within the shell to perform more advanced functions, such as repairing your database.

The commands you will mostly use for administration are:

mysql
mysqladmin
mysqldump
mysqlshow

There are many ways to password protect directories. One of the easiest methods uses the HTTPD Basic Authentication that is built into the Apache web server. Although this is arguably not the most secure method, it is commonly used for non-sensitive information.

The process really only involves two steps.

Step 1: Create a file named ".htaccess" (without the quotes, with the period) in the directory that you want to protect that contains the following lines:

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
require valid-user
</Limit>
<Limit PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>
AuthName "Yourdomain.com Members"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/username/myusers

Where username is your username, myusers is the name of the file that contains your authorized users and their passwords. For this example, we've placed it into your home directory, but it can really be located anywhere. It is not recommended, however, to put this file below your document directory (/home/username/htdocs).

Step 2: Create a file named myusers (or whatever you choose to name the file) in your home directory.

The users file has to contain username:password pairs. Like this:

phil:ROvlOQaMVQia2
sue:rywLNhBadJo.k
mark:jHSQ17lt81yeI

Make sure there is no white space (spaces, tabs etc) at the end of the password, and make sure each line ends with a carriage return.

Java is available for use as CGI servlets, and of course as applets.