1. About this manual

This is a very small portion of what we will eventually be proud to call our user manual. You are certainly welcome to ask questions any time, just take a look through here first.

Many sections are labeled (TB2+) or (TB4+). A section so labeled is likely to be of interest to certain account types only. A section labeled (TB2+) discusses features availible with all accounts except the TB1. A section labeled (TB4+) discusses features availible with full access accounts only. Note that the TB5 is restricted and should be considered equivalent to a TB2 for this purpose. A section with no such label should be read by everyone, TB1 included. At this time we go in order so sections 1-6 are for everyone (5 has TB4+ subsections), 7-8 are TB2+, 9-12 are TB4+, and 13 is actually TB5+.

For illustrative purposes this manual pretends that you signed up for schmoop.com and were assigned the login schmo001. From time to time we call your domain Domain and your login Login.

<support@trafficblaster.com> is the address for questions about using the service, <sales@trafficblaster.com> is the address for inquiries and orders for new or expanded service, and <billing@trafficblaster.com> is the address for questions about your bill.

2. Hostnames

If you are using a domain with your account, use the following hostnames when accessing various functions:

• http://schmoop.com/ will also work for web access.
• Contact support@trafficblaster.com if you need an anonymous FTP site.

You will find that most or all of the *.schmoop.com addresses are the same, nonetheless, that could change. Use the appropriate alias and you'll be ahead if we ever do change. Besides, RFC 2219 just makes sense. (Except that `mail' is ambiguous, so we use `smtp'.)

Most of this document will assume you have a domain and will refer to the appropriate hostnames. Change them all to valuline.trafficblaster.com if you do not have a domain.

3. Logging in to your account

You have been given a login id and a password. Use any FTP program to access your account. Connect to access.schmoop.com and give that program your login and password when prompted. You will then be looking at your home directory.

(TB4+) While much of this manual covers only FTP logins when that is all that is needed, part of what you have purchased is the use of a Unix shell. You may telnet to access.schmoop.com to make use of this.

4. Your home directory

Your home directory is a sort of base of operations. All the files you need to deal with are either in your home directory or in a subdirectory of your home directory.

Some of the subdirectories you will see are:

bin/ dev/ etc/ lib/ pub/

Please ignore bin/, dev/, etc/, and lib/. Their existence is for technical reasons only, and you can't do anything about them anyway. Those technical reasons are somewhat likely to go away soon anyway. (TB4+ accounts have no such technical reasons, so they're not there.)

Note that a standard Unix convention for representing your home directory is the tilde (by itself or followed immediately by a slash) and a nearly standard convention for representing Login's home directory is ~Login. This is why you see them in lots of URLs for peoples' home pages at ISPs, including this one. If you see us write ~/pub sometime, we're talking about the pub directory under your home directory.

Try changing into the pub/ directory. You'll see the index.html which we stuck in there to keep your domain from showing an error to anyone looking. This directory, a subdirectory of your home, is the top directory WWW browsers see. If you put foo.html in this subdirectory, its URL becomes <http://www.schmoop.com/foo.html>. You can make further subdirectories if you like to organize your WWW material that way, or you can put everything right in this directory.

5. Mail

5.1 Incoming Mail

Your POP host is pop.schmoop.com. Your SMTP host is smtp.schmoop.com. Your POP login and password are the same as the FTP login/password.

You can tell your mail program that your address is whatever you like @schmoop.com: see below. If your mail program does not prompt you for your POP3 login and your email address as seperate items, then we really think you should use a different program. (For Windows 95 users we suggest Outlook Express, which comes with MSIE 4.01. We hate Microsoft most of the time, but that is one surprisingly good email program. Shockingly so given their previous output.) If you insist on not switching software then enter Login@Domain as your address, i.e. schmo001@schmoop.com.

The remainder of this section only applies if you provide a domain name.

5.2 Mail Distribution

5.2.1 mailrte.txt

Change back into your home directory. This may involve changing to "Parent Directory", "Up one level", or changing to ../. See the file mailrte.txt? The mail system looks at that file to determine where to send mail. When your account was set up we set all mail to any address @your-business.com to be delivered in your single login's mailbox. This is probably quite reasonable for now, but if you want to change the behaviour, download the mailrte.txt file in ASCII mode, use a plain ASCII text editor (ex. Notepad) to make your changes, and upload it again in ASCII mode. You might want to leave a blank line at the end of the file, too - it's not supposed to be necessary, but it can never hurt.

As an example, if you wish to have your mail forwarded to your AOL account, change the file to read:

* your-handle@aol.com

If you want to get most mail in your mailbox normally but have mail for Tom, Dick, and Harry sent to their preferred mailboxes, it might look like:

* schmo001

tom tom@rocketmail.com

dick 10001.2345@compuserve.com

harry harry@ix.netcom.com

To have mail sent to a POP3 mailbox on our machine, write just

alias login

with no @ over there. Ex.

hillary schmo001

If you do not want any old address to work, do not include a * line. This is sort of recommended, actually. People who misspell a name will get a message telling them that there was no such user instead of one person getting all the misaddressed private mail.

If you upload a blank file (either zero length or with only blank lines) then no email will be received except for the postmaster exception. This is not recommended at this time, although every day it sounds better.

If you have any doubt whatsoever about how to handle your mail, let us know. We can do most anything.

5.2.2 Postmaster

If you do take out the * line then it is highly recommended that you have a postmaster line like

postmaster yourlogin

Every Internet domain that receives email at all is required to have postmaster@domain be a valid address. If you don't provide for this, the system will make us the postmaster. This will probably never make any difference to you, but we tell you for your information. If you want to throw any such email back to us (we are generally the ones in a position to respond to the technical type of email generally sent to postmasters) feel free to write

postmaster postmaster@trafficblaster.com

If you want to snub Internet standards and discard mail for postmaster (or any address), this would do it:

postmaster nobody

5.2.3 qmail (TB4+)

If you a) have a TB4+, b) know what .qmail files are and c) check with us to get your domain set up correctly for their use, then you can use this powerful mechanism to route your mail.

If you don't know what any of that means, ignore it. mailrte.txt provides simple, effective mail distribution and is all that most anyone but a confirmed power user needs.

5.3 Automatic Mail

One great way to provide information freely and easily but keep track of who's getting it is to set up a mail address for it. Invite people to send a blank message to info@schmoop.com. Now go into the automail/ sub-directory of your home and upload a file called info, or info.txt. Try sending mail to info@schmoop.com.

If you also have an info line in mailrte.txt their original mail will be forwarded in addition to the automatic response. You must have a seperate info line, however, and not rely on a * line.

You could use this fact to do a dumb vacation responder: upload a fred.txt explaining that you'll be back next week, explicitly route fred in mailrte.txt, and you're done. Do not do this if you are on any mailing lists as fred!!! There's a reason we wrote `dumb'.

You can make your own bounce message for mis-addressed mail within your domain. In mailrte.txt write

* badaddress@schmoop.com

You can have a badaddress line if you want copies of the mis-addresses mail, but you probably don't. Now upload badaddress.txt to the automail directory. Try sending mail to foobar@schmoop.com. You can inform people about what addresses are valid and what they might try to correct their error this way.

5.4 Majordomo (TB4+)

You need a TB4+ to make use of Majordomo. Be aware that mailing list traffic sneaks up on you: a nice open discussion list with people exchanging 3K messages 20 times per day does 1.8 MB of traffic per month per subscriber. If you have 550 readers that's approaching an extra gigabyte per month. Be prepared to pre-purchase extra gigabytes of traffic, and maybe start with a TB1000 while you're at it, if this is the kind of list you are thinking of.

OTOH, you could have 5,000 readers of a nice moderated announcement list getting 5K posts 10 times per month for just 250 MB, fitting in to a TB6 with room left over for some web hits. And a smaller, closed list with one tenth the readers of those examples will have only one tenth the traffic, therefore we allow majordomo's use even with the TB4 and its 70 MB monthly limit.

If you do decide to use it we think we have just about the best Majordomo setup around.

First, check with us to get your account ready. In the future this shouldn't be necessary, but it is now. Second, telnet in. Run

majordomo-init

and then add a list by running

majordomo-newlist List Owner

where List is the name of the list and Owner is the email address of the list owner (whether you or someone else). For example, if you, hillary@schmoop.com, are making an announcement list for your site it might work out to

majordomo-newlist announce hillary@schmoop.com

You (or the designated Owner) should check your mail for instructions. You will need to learn about majordomo, at least a bit, before going public. The mail that just arrived has instructions, and majordomo's home page is found at www.greatcircle.com. After spending some time playing with it you can ask us for help if you're in trouble.

The great thing about this installation is that it's entirely in your home directory! Want to make an info file for that new list? Majordomo doesn't normally provide a way to do that, but you just upload it into ~/majordomo/lists/announce.info. Have a subscriber list you want installed? (Plain text, one address per line, no additional punctuation or spaces at all. In other words this is not a toy. :-) Just upload it to ~/majordomo/lists/announce. Want to change the owner of the announce list? Edit ~/majordomo/owner-list (and probably ~/majordomo/approve-list too). Everywhere else some if not all of these tasks require manual intervention. We enable you to do it by yourself.

If you need a list removed, let us know. Writing a majordomo-dellist would be easy just as soon as there is demand.

6. AACK!

Go to <http://www.trafficblaster.com/aack/> and if we've done our job, everything will be self-explanatory. If you have no domain you can leave that box blank and all you can do so far is change your password. If you have a domain you must enter it, then you will have a couple more options.

Everyone should go there at least once a week to check on news, and while there should probably log in and check their domain's traffic levels to know what kind of bill (if any) to expect.

Lots more to come.

If you have a domain, traffic from your use of Aack! will be charged to your account. This seems fair to us as you'd ultimately pay for it anyway. The login page is not charged that way, so you can read the news as often as you like, and the other pages are built to be small so you'll hardly notice the traffic. If you don't have a domain, as long as total Aack! use among non-domain accounts stays reasonable we will not go to the effort of charging it to you.

7. Availible CGI (TB2+)

Mailmerge: set up your template file as, say, t.txt in your pub/ directory. In your HTML form set your action to http://www.schmoop.com/cgi-std/mailmerge/t.txt. Read about mailmerge at <http://www-genome.wi.mit.edu/ftp/pub/software/WWW/mailmerge/>.

Formmail: we use mailmerge, so while we have installed formmail we're not certain it works. It looks easy enough to use - easier than mailmerge although missing a bit of flexibility. Refer to http://www.schmoop.com/cgi-std/formmail. Read about formmail at <http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml>.

Cgiemail: is availible in case you like it but not recommended - mailmerge is a better one to learn.

Count: let us know how many counters you need set up. We will give you one or more id tags like you.1. Insert references in your HTML something like <img src="/cgi-std/Count?df=you.1">. Read about the counter at <http://www.fccc.edu/users/muquit/Count.html>.

(Let us know if there's anything else you'd like us to consider offering. Our criteria are 1) it must be easy to install once for all users and 2) must be lightweight, quick, and simple.)

8. Imagemaps (TB2+)

Create your map description in the NCSA format, and give it the extension .map. Then simply reference the .map file in your <a>, as in <a href=''main.map''> (if you uploaded main.map to the same directory as the page that refers to it) and the server takes care of the rest.

9. Your own CGI programming (TB4+)

Upload CGI programs anywhere under your pub/ directory, just like HTML files or whatever else, but give them .cgi extensions so that they will be recognized as CGI programs. For example, use a text editor to put the following in a file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI ':standard';

print header, start_html('Hi!'), h1('Hi!'), p('Hi!');

Then log on with FTP, change to the pub directory, and upload hello.cgi. Now you additionally need to use chmod to mark it as a program; the command might be `chmod 755 hello.cgi' or `site chmod 755 hello.cgi' and users of GUI FTP programs probably need to find the option to directly enter text commands. (If you can't find it in your FTP program then it's time to use the telnet program. Log on and `cd pub; chmod 755 hello.cgi; exit'.)

Now call up <http://www.schmoop.com/hello.cgi> with your browser to see that it works.

If you must have a CGI directory, log on, create it, and tell the system that it is a CGI directory like so:

cd ~/pub 

mkdir cgi-bin 

cd cgi-bin 

echo "SetHandler cgi-script" >.htaccess

There is nothing special about the name `cgi-bin', although you are certainly welcome to continue that tradition.

You could also have a different extension be interpreted as meaning the file is a CGI program. For example, to say all .pl files anywhere under your pub directory are CGIs:

cd ~/pub

echo "AddHandler cgi-script .pl" >>.htaccess

CGIs are run as nobody. Feel free to write a little suid wrapper if they need to write to a file. Or you can make a file or a subdirectory world writeable. Do not make your home directory itself world writeable.

10. Your own PHP3 programming (TB4+)

Just do it! All .html files are run through the PHP3 engine if you have access to it. (You can name them .php3 if you prefer. Actually, you can name them .foo and .bar and put

AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .foo .bar

in your .htaccess for all we care.)

Note: many TB4+ accounts set up before June 1998 are not set up for php3. You can remedy this without waiting for us by putting

AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .html .php3

in .htaccess.

Read about this language at www.php.net.

11. SSI (TB4+)

Give the files which have SSI commands in the comments the extension .shtml and they will be interpreted. Or name them .html but mark them executable:

chmod 755 index.html

Yes, you may use include and exec. You did buy a full access account, after all.

If you are writing new code use PHP3 in preference to SSI. It's a real programming language, a bunch faster, and you'll be glad you did.

12. FrontPage Extensions (TB4+)

Nothing much to document. If you use FrontPage and you have a TB4+ account with your own domain name then for a one-time $5 fee you can use FrontPage the way it was built to work. We do not support the FrontPage program itself although if it looks like something is wrong on the server you can ask. There just isn't that much for us to look into.

You can still use FTP, telnet, and everything else along with FrontPage.

Don't FTP and expect WebBots to work. Publish.

You can create child webs. You can assign security any way FrontPage will let you. You can use this for resale. Enjoy. (You are completely responsible for disk space used, traffic consumed, and policy violations committed by child webs in your domain. Such is parenting.)

13. SSL (TB5+)

If your account type includes secure server access then you should have a pub-ssl directory next to your pub directory in your home. If you don't you can just make it. A foo.html put in there can be accessed as https://ssl1.trafficblaster.com/~schmo001/foo.html. It can also be accessed as http://ssl1.trafficblaster.com/~schmo001/foo.html, enabling easy support when customers with non SSL capable browsers want to use your site.

(ssl1 may have a different number in the future, but all accounts set up now will be ssl1 and that will not change.

(If you want to force people to use a page only over a secured connection, it's probably easy with a touch of PHP3 code. Not sure about the details. Ask if you really need this implemented and we'll figure it out.)

Giving you access to a secure server does not mean we are providing you with a complete e-commerce solution any more than giving you access to an ordinary server means we are providing you with a corporate presence. It's amazing how often that is assumed. We give you tools and freedom. We will be happy to act as a VAR of our own services but do not think that a total package is going to cost just a few dollars more than the bare web hosting.

Sorry, that paragraph belongs in the pre-sale section of the web site, not in the manual. Unlike other web hosts our manual is a product of the technical support department, not the marketing department. But it's a Work in Progress, too.

If you have a TB6+, you can use FrontPage extensions in combination with the secure server. (The usual $5 one-time setup fee applies, no more, no less.) Your unsecure web is accessed normally. To access your secure web, open ssl1.trafficblaster.com/~Login/. Do not check the SSL box, it won't work. (This is a major reason why we set up the server to give parallel secure and unsecure access to the secure areas.) Then when you write links into the secure site, use https: and the pages will be served securely.

FrontPage generally writes relative URLs in intra-web links, which is perfect. If you catch it writing http://ssl1.trafficblaster.com/~Login/page.html for a link, delete the http://ssl1.trafficblaster.com part (leave it starting with /~Login) or the user will suddenly not be using a secure connection.

We can probably set up a virtual secure server with your own certificate if you want. We don't know how much to charge or just what the procedure will be, but since we probably won't find out until we do it, just ask us when you're ready to do it and we'll get going on it.

14. ???

Support is an e-mail away: <support@trafficblaster.com>.

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