Steps
by
Stepno

How to manage Web files at Radford using sFTP clients or myru.radford.edu

World Wide Web Publishing at Radford

Students and faculty at Radford University are issued network usernames that double as campus e-mail addresses ending in "@radford.edu." The single username and password also provides:

Access to a campus portal called MyRU.radford.edu
Space on a network storage disk, commonly referred to as the "H: drive" (for the school's Highlander mascot or for "Home" directory).
The ability to login on campus lab computers. Each lab computer creates a local home folder when the student uses that computer for the first time. The local home folder includes the "Desktop" folder, a Documents folder and other standard workspaces. However, lab computers may be erased or removed for service at any time, so you should never store your only copy of anything on them.
Public space to publish Web pages on the network server. It is a folder named "public_html" in your username folder.

The server folder named "public_html" is created automatically for every student account on the Radford system. It contains an "index.html" home page that says, simply, that the person has not created a home page. To have a personal home page, all you need to do is edit that index.html page with any text editor or HTML page-design program, or replace it with a page of your own design called "index.html" -- and use MyRU.radford.edu to give the public permission to see it on the Web.

To build a Web site for a class or project, create a folder inside the public_html folder with an appropriate name ("coms226" or "coms326"). Do not use spaces or punctuation marks in folder names.

Names and addresses

The Web address or URL for personal home pages at the university is http://www.radford.edu/username -- with "username" replaced by the person's I.D., such as http://www.radford.edu/rstepno

On some systems, personal folders are marked with a tilde symbol (~). Your Radford address will work with or without it: http://www.radford.edu/~rstepno

You can connect to your personal network space with SFTP (Secure File Transfer Programs) or SSH (Secure Shell) programs, connecting to the network server as either "username@ruacad.radford.edu" or "username@rucs.radford.edu"

Laboratory computers automatically "mount" the H:drive space when you login to the computer. It appears on Windows computers as drive "H:" and on Macintoshes as a network drive named with your user name.

Computers on the campus WiFi network or connected with a VPN (Virtual Private Network) client from off-campus can mount the H:drive space using SMB protocol with an address like smb://homedir.radford.edu/users/username (The word "homedir" is part of the address, but replace "username" with your I.D., such as "jjones99" or "jbrown55").

Instructions for copying documents to your Home drive,
or to your Web page space on www.radford.edu

You may already use your Radford H drive to avoid computer disasters by keeping a backup copy of your work. Everyone who has an @radford e-mail address gets storage space on a file server that we call your "H" or "Home" drive. (Or think H for Highlander.)

In Web production classes, you will use part of that H drive space, the "public_html" folder, for your personal Web site.

When you are using a computer on the Radford network, finding the H drive is similar to using the computer's internal disk (C drive), a USB drive or a Flash memory stick, or a folder in the Macintosh Dock. But what if you are off-campus, even off studying in London?

One solution is to connect to Radford's network using a Virtual Private Network or VPN program, if you have permission to do so on the computer you are using. See the ITEC help desk for assistance.

Another solution is to copy files to the H drive (your "file server share") with a secure File Transfer Protocol (sFTP) program, such as FileZilla, CyberDuck, Fugu or Fetch, or an sFTP system within HTML editor applications like Dreamweaver and TextWrangler.

Here is a basic file-transfer tutorial with the FileZilla sFTP client.

Radford students can access their server space with sFTP (or SSH) as "ruacad.radford.edu" or in some cases "rucs.radford.edu." You login with your usual Radford name ("rstepno" in my case) and your usual password.

The MyRU portal has a built-in FTP page that is handy for making simple website uploads. The portal also gives you an easy way to make new Web pages public, as described below, instead of the trickier Unix "change mode" (chmod) approach.

January 2013 update:

The Department of Homeland Security has advised Internet users to disable their Web browsers' ability to run programs written in the Java programming language, "unless absolutely necessary." The file-transfer tab in MyRU is a Java program, as are some office systems at Radford.

However, MyRU is not the only way to transfer files to your H drive, so you are free to disable Java on your home computer if you want. FileZilla is free for Windows and Macintosh computers, so I encourage you to give it a try as an alternative. It is now available on the Porterfield 173 iMacs.

MyRU File Transfer

The video illustrates copying documents and setting Web permissions as described below.

Here's the MyRU way to copy documents, pictures and other computer files to your "H drive" or "Home drive" space:

Go to http://myru.radford.edu
Login with the same name and password you use for Radford e-mail (don't include "@radford.edu")
Click the "File" tab on the right.

It may take a moment, if you have a slow connection, but you should see two windows on the screen, each showing a directory list of folders and documents: Local System on the left and Remote System on the right. "Local System" is the computer you are using at the moment -- at home, at the library, wherever. "Remote System" is your H drive. The H drive view will show some automatically created files whose names begin with dots; do not attempt to delete or move them. Some of those "dot files" configure server settings that you may need someday.
Under the left and right directory windows are six control buttons that allow you to make a new directory (folder), rename something, "trash" something, refresh, resume, upload (local to remote) or download (remote to local), or zip-compress a file for faster uploading.
Between the two directory lists are two buttons marked ( > > ) (which copies from left to right -- from "Local System" to "Remote System") and ( < < ) (which copies from right to left). These perform the same functions as the green "upload" and "download" arrows beneath the directory lists.

To copy something from your computer to your H drive, navigate through the Local System list to open the folder you want to copy from. (The folder icon with two dots after it allows you to move "up" to the folder containing the visible folders.)
Navigate through the Remote System list to open the destination folder that you want to copy into. Click on that folder to open it. (Remember, only documents or images you plan to share should go in the folder named public_html. Keep private information out of that folder.)
In the Local System list, click the name of the document or folder you want to copy into the Remote System. (You can use shift-click to select more than one file to copy.)
Click the left-to-right ( > > ) button or arrow.
Wait until you see the new item appear in the Remote System list. (If you have a lot of files, you may have to scroll the alphabetical list to find it.)
IF you get an "Unable to upload one or more files" error message, don't panic! It probably just means the portal has logged you out after the program's "idle" time limit. Just go back to myru.radford.edu and login again, then repeat the steps above.
When you're done, log out of the portal, especially if you are on a public-access computer in a lab. Otherwise someone else might access your files. (But if you're building a Web site, you're not done yet. Read on.)

Setting "worldwide" viewer permissions

To publish something as a Web page, put it in your "public_html" folder using a computer on Radford's network or with any of the methods mentioned on this page.
- Your "home page" (such as http://www.radford.edu/rstepno) is always a document named "index.html" in the "public_html" folder.
- The index.html file is what someone sees when they go to http://www.radford.edu/yourname (with "yourname" replaced by your e-mail name).
- Within your Web site, you can have many folders, each with its own index.html document, such as http://www.radford.edu/yourname/coms226 or http://www.radford.edu/yourname/coms326
- The Web address does not include the words "public_html"; instead it includes your login name ("yourname" in the examples).
After you put an html document, PDF document, picture, or other file in a public folder, you have one more thing to do to really make it public. This step is needed whether you put the material there with MyRU or by directly copying to the H drive.
From the MyRU portal page, click on the "My Accounts" tab to the left of "My Files"
In the "Quick Links" section on the right, click "Update Web Permissions," then click the button that says "Click here to set file permissions."

Note: You only have to do this once, even if you have uploaded a number of documents. That one click resets the permissions for everything in your public_html folder and its subfolders.
If you don't want something to be public, delete it or move it out of that folder.

When you're done, log out of the portal, especially if you are on a public-access computer in a lab. Otherwise someone else might access your files.