Last revision July 28, 2004
The World Wide Web is the official name for the hypermedia based distributed information retrieval system that is now the primary interactive use of the Internet. In colloquial use, the Internet is often treated as a synonym for the Web, even though the Web is only one of many services provided on the Internet.
Folks in the School of Earth Sciences can easily create their own web pages and share them on the Internet. Pangea runs the industry standard Apache web server software. Departments and research groups can include their pages in the overall School web site by contacting our web master. Individuals can share web pages from their pangea personal home directories.
The page on basics of web publishing on pangea describes the basic features of pangea's web server, including how to use include files and restrict access to individual pages. It also has links to other web sites that describe how to work with the HTML language used in web pages.
The Information Technology Systems and Services group on campus also operates a web server for general use by all faculty, staff, and students. You can serve individual web pages from there, in addition to using pangea. Research group web sites should use pangea to maintain our School identity.
Many workstations and personal computers come with software to enable serving web pages directly from that computer. Unless properly configured, these individual web servers can be an avenue for hackers to break-in and compromise those computers. This is particularly true for the "Internet Information Services" web server provided in Microsoft Windows, which has serious well-known security flaws that have been widely exploited by hackers. The use of individual workstation or personal computer web servers is strongly discouraged on the Earth Sciences network because of these security problems. If you have a specific need to run such a server on a Unix or Linux workstation, please consult first with Kai Lanz. If you need to run a web server on a Macintosh or Windows PC, enter a request for configuration help via the HelpSU web site.