WWW server upgrade

HTTPd (the web server) on kernighan and ritchie has been upgraded to NCSA version 1.5.2a, a more robust, featured, and (it is to be hoped) more secure version than the 1.3R that we were running previously. For the most part, this upgrade should be transparent to you.

One important difference is that URL redirection can now be performed transparently via the .htaccess file in a user's public_html directory, a feature that was broken in versions previous to 1.4. This should be of interest to those of you who maintain a home page in a location other than ~/public_html/ on giane, freya, and friends. As an example, the URL:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~olc/cscfacil.html
will now automatically redirect a browser to the URL:
http://www-cscf.cs.umass.edu/facil.html
The line in my ~olc/public_html/.htaccess file that performs this is:
RedirectPermanent /~olc/cscfacil.html http://www-cscf.cs.umass.edu/facil.html

For more information on using the Redirect feature, point your browser at: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/howto/Redirect.html