Grid-Ireland

Grid-Ireland Website Help

This website can be accessed in non-secure or secure (HTTPS) mode. The secure version, starting with https://, allows you to use Grid-Ireland CA certificates to verify the server you're connected to really is cagraidsvr06.cs.tcd.ie and to authenticate yourself and subsequentially gain write access, etc.

For this to work, you'll need to load root Grid-Ireland CA certificate into your browser (otherwise your browser will complain about not having a recongnised host certificate). You'll also need to have your Grid-Ireland personal certificate imported into the browser.

To install the root Grid-Ireland CA certificate into your browser:

with Internet Explorer, you can do that by saving this file and then going to Tools | Internet Options | Content | Certificates | Trusted Root Certificate Authorities | Import, and then load the cacert file with the resulting file browser.
with Netscape and other browsers, you can do that by following this link (you can also find this link on CA Public Server page).

You might get warnings about not being able to verify the site's authenticity when doing this, but you can safely ignore those,

Authentication

To authenticate and get write access to the website you need to import your Grid-Ireland certificate into your web browser as a Personal Certificate. Once this is done, every time you visit the secure (https) version of the site, your Distinguishing Name (DN) is automatically made known to the server.

To import your Grid-Ireland certificate into the browser, use the "Get Requested Certificates" link on the CA Public Server page.

Authorisation

Authorisation is done on the per-directory basis, according to ACLs (access control list) that the site administrator defined.

If you require access to specific functions of the site, please mail webmasterTODO, stating your DN (e.g. /C=IE/O=Grid-Ireland/OU=TestGrid/L=RA-TCD/CN=John F. Kennedy), email address, and webpage URL (if you have one).

Editing Pages and Other Tasks

Once you have obtained authorisation and authenticated with the website, you can begin modifying and creating pages.

All the directories you have write access to will now include extra links in the footer of each page.

Edit allows you to edit the page you are currently looking at: it takes you to a form including the page text and the filename. You can use this to edit the current page or use it as a template for a new page and save it with a new name.
List allows you to get a listing of all files in the current directory, including images, file archives, etc. From links embedded in the listing, you can view, edit or delete files, and see their modification time. There is also a Create Page form which allows you to make new pages starting from a template. Finally, the Upload File form at the foot of the page allows you to upload webpages, images, files, etc into the current directory from your local machine.

HTML Page Syntax

HTML pages uploaded or written on the website are not displayed in their raw form, as they would be with most webservers. Instead, the system inserts a sidebar and footer with navigational links, colours and the links for page editing.

The system expects that the HTML pages you specify only contain code that would normally go between <body> and </body> tags. Everything up to (and including) <body> and everything begging (and including) the </body> tag should be ommited as it will be substituted with the standard template.

You can edit the template as it is located in the gridsitehead.txt and gridsitefoot.txt files in the current directory or in one of the upper directories.

Weblog Items Syntax

The system expects to see clean html. It does not attempt to perform any html translations except one -- outside html tags, '&', '"', '<', and '>' characters are converted to corresponding html character entities (but '<' is only converted if it's followed by a whitespace, to distinguish from start of tags).

Some Important Notes

group names can contain letters and digits only.
user and group deletion must be done locally on the server.
please write html according to HTML 4.01 specification and always make sure that pages fully validate with W3 HTML Validator.
always enclose html attribute values within quotes (") and provide termintating tags for the <p> tag.