The old www.dcs.ed.ac.uk server

Historical Interest Only: The following dates from around 2004.

www.dcs.ed.ac.uk, the legacy DCS web site, has been moved to a .inf.ed.ac.uk DICE managed machine. It continues to respond to www.dcs.ed.ac.uk requests, however, due to the technical differences between the old DCS world and the DICE world an identical service is not possible. Particular difficulties are the changes to PHP (ie from version 3 to version 4) and user owned CGI scripts.

The legacy content is available in the file system as /legacy/dcs/public/ which was equivalent to the old DCS path of /public/. At some date still to be agreed, this will become read only, as all new/active official Informatics content should be hosted on www.inf.ed.ac.uk, and any personal pages on homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk.

Likely Pitfalls and Solutions

Some of the likely problems following the move from an old DCS Redhat 6.2 hosted service to the new DICE Fedora Core hosted service.

Absolute path names/symlinks referring to old DCS specific paths will no longer work. This include paths to binaries, including perl.
Solutions:
- Discover if there is an equivalent DICE path, eg /legacy/dcs/... and use that. Though this may work, it depends on /legacy/dcs/ persisting, which it may not.
  Any CGI scripts which expect binaries in a certain location, eg /usr/local/bin/perl need to be updated with the new DICE Redhat 9 location, in this case /usr/bin/perl.
- Copy the content into your /legacy/dcs/public/ area. This is the preferred solution.
- If neither of the above work, and it is important content, then contact webadmin@inf with the details and we may be able to provide a work around.
The PHP version will change from 3 to 4. The mime type that the php module recognises changes from "application/x-httpd-php3" to "application/x-httpd-php", so if you have any .htaccess file that have lines similar to:
```
 AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php
```
With the intention that your .php files will be parsed correctly, then this will instead bring up a "I don't know how to handle files of this type ..." type message box.
Solution:
- Either change the line to:
```
 AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
```
- Or better still, remove the line altogether, as the main server config already detects .php and .phtml files as PHP.
The user executable CGI mechanism requires that the script's, and parent directory of the script, uid and gid values match the passwd entry of the user.
Solution: We've changed users old 'cgi' directory, and the scripts contained within, to gid "people", from whatever the old DCS gid was. We have also removed group and world read permissions from the directory to help maintain any restrictions that may have existed.
As 'nsu' type pseudo users don't exist in the DICE world, any CGI scripts owned by old DCS pseudo users will not work.
Solution: This has be solved on an individual basis by making specific changes for those users. Some of which have been done, but some may have been missed. Contact webadmin@inf if you believe this is the case for your pseudo user web pages.

Redirecting to a new location

If you decide to move your content to the likes of homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk (the preferred solution), rather than fixing it to work on www.dcs.ed.ac.uk, then you'll probably want to automatically redirect visitors to your old URL to the new location of your web pages. To do this you can use the Apache Redirect permanent or RewriteRule directives in a .htaccess file in your old www.dcs home page.

For most cases, where you blanket move all your files from /legacy/dcs/public/<legacy_username>/web/ to /public/homepages/<dice_username>/web/, then the following lines in a .htaccess file, should do the trick:

# Redirect all requests to my new homepage
Redirect permanent /home/legacy_username http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/dice_username

This .htaccess file should be located at /legacy/dcs/public/<legacy_username>/web/.

Page last updated: 2012/10/02 12:34:15

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