WWW2 upgrade differences

The current www2 server will be turned off on March 00(?), 2001 (called below the switchover date), and replaced by a new server of the same name. Here are some of the differences that you can expect with the new server.

The new server runs Solaris 2.6 on a Sun 220R, replacing an Athena enabled version of SunOS on an aging Sparcstation 20. It also runs the Apache web server instead of an Athena enabled version of NCSA httpd. The older www2 server delivered both individual and unit web pages. The new server will split this use among two virtual servers: people.ucsc.edu will deliver individual pages, and www2.ucsc.edu will be restricted to deliver only unit pages. Individuals will now have as URL:

  http://people.ucsc.edu/~username

where username is their CATS username (aka email account name). This will be the only way to display individual pages after the switchover date; the older notation http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/username will no longer work. This split may also have some subtle side effects depending on your use of absolute vs. relative URLs in your links (in your <A> and <IMG> tags), and in your server side includes. See below for more details.

Those maintaining scripts for their unit web pages need to test that their scripts are still working correctly due to the change in the operating system. We recommend that you test your scripts before the switchover date by substituting coricopat0.ucsc.edu for www2.ucsc.edu. A reminder: this doesn't apply to individual users since they are not allowed to run their own scripts.

If you prevented direct AFS access of your web pages by removing the system:anyuser permission, you will need to add read (and maybe write) permission for the new web server user:

  % fs sa directory wwwadmin.coricopat read

where directory is the name of the directory containing web-only pages.

List of differences

Since individual pages are no longer on the www2 server, you must use absolute links in your individual pages to refer to pages on the www2 server. And vice-versa, you must use absolute links in your unit pages to refer to pages on the people server.
Since the pages are now split between several virtual servers, server-side includes work only when including pages on the same server. For example, do not use:
```
  
```
in individual pages, since individual pages are delivered by people.ucsc.edu, and the page included above is on www2.ucsc.edu, hence not visible from people. You will need to copy the file in your local directory.

Also watch out for /people in URLs, since these no longer work everywhere; they still work from www2 because of a redirect. So:

  http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/username	-> redirected
  http://people.ucsc.edu/~username	-> preferred URL
  /people/username			-> works only on www2
  /~username				-> works only on people

If you have an account on coricopat (this applies to very few people), you need to make a link to your public_html directory, like this:
```
  % ln -s /afs/cats.ucsc.edu/users/x/username/public_html ~/public_html
```
(replace x with the actual letter in the pathname of your AFS home directory) otherwise your web pages will not be visible when using people.ucsc.edu/~username.
Be aware that if you have UNIX links (i.e. created with the ln command), the new web server will no longer follow them if they point to files or directories not owned by you (i.e. both the link and the file/directory must have identical usernames).