Airweb Frequenty Asked Questions
This page contains many of the answers to the most common questions people throw our way on a day to day basis. If you can not find the answer you are looking for, send us an email about it. Click here to go to the contact us page.
How do I get support?
What do the Airweb servers support, and what don't
they support?
How / Where do I upload my content?
How do I check to see how much space I have left?
How do I password protect a portion (or all) of my
website?
What should I know about using Frontpage with my website?
How do I access my log files?
Where are sendmail and Perl?
How do I upload a CGI?
Why isn't my CGI working?
Why are there broken links and images on my page now
after I've uploaded it?
Who owns my domain name, and who is responsible for
keeping it registered?
How do I add a counter to my page?
How can I add streaming audio to my site?
How do I use SSL on my site?
How do I change my FTP or Frontpage login or password?
A: First, try browsing around this site for answers to your questions. Check this (the FAQ section) and the How-To section for answers to the most common questions. If your questions are still not answered, feel free to either email or call us.
Email:
business.support@airmail.net
Phone:
Dallas: (214) 861-2760
Houston: (713) 830-3100 Option 5
Our phone support hours are from 8:00am to 6:00pm Central. Outside of these hours, a technician is available for emergency support. When you call, you will be greeted with a voice menu. Follow the instructions to have the on-call technician paged. (Please use this for emergencies only - this will contact the technician at his home, even at 3:00am!)
Q: What do the Airweb servers support, and what don't they support?
A: The Airweb platform is based on FreeBSD (UNIX), and any native and unprivileged programs compiled elsewhere can be uploaded to an Airweb account and run without change. If Airweb didn't come with some utility or program you need, you can compile and install it yourself. We run FreeBSD on the servers due to it's track record for security and stability.
Supported:
- Straight HTML
- PHP
- Frontpage Extensions
- Perl and binary CGI's
- ASP pages
- ColdFusion pages
- Server-Side Includes (SSI)
- The Microsoft .NET Framework
If you are unsure of whether or not a certain feature is supported on the Airweb servers, please contact us!
Q: How / Where do I upload my content?
A: Customers have access to a full UNIX file system once logged into an Airweb server. If using FTP, web content should be placed into the /www/docs/ directory. If using Frontpage, please see these instructions on uploading your website.
Q: How do I check to see how much space I have left?
A: To check to see how much space you are using on your Airweb account, you will need to telnet to the server. After connecting to the server with telnet, you will be shown a banner stating what your quota is, and how much of it you are currently using. For instructions on how to do this, please go here.
Q: How do I password protect a portion (or all) of my website?
A: If your site has Frontpage extensions installed, you MUST use the Frontpage password protection feature. If your site does not use the Frontpage extensions, instructions on how to use the UNIX .htaccess file are found here. (.htaccess is what Apache web servers use to set password protection and other options for subdirectories.)
Q: What should I know about using Frontpage with my website?
A: To use the special features of Frontpage with your website, or to be able to upload using Frontpage's "publish" feature, Frontpage extensions support must be added to your account. If you have Frontpage extensions enabled for your site, please bear the following in mind:
You must always use Frontpage to upload or change web content on your site. If you use FTP or Telnet to change or upload any files in the /www/docs/ directory, the Frontpage extensions will stop working. This is a common, known problem with Microsoft's Frontpage extensions for UNIX. You may, however, use FTP and Telnet to modify or upload files not residing in the /www/docs/ directory structure. (i.e. you may use FTP to upload CGI files to /www/cgi-bin/) If you accidentally change a file in the /www/docs/ directory structure using something other than Frontpage, and it breaks the Frontpage extensions, we can most likely get the extensions restored for you, but you must have a backup of your web page content in case you need to re-publish it afterwards.
Most of the special Frontpage features work with Airweb, but some do not. The following Frontpage features will not work on the Airweb servers:
- Subwebs (child webs)
- Active Server Pages
- ODBC and MS SQL
- Database connections (Access, FoxPro)
- ActiveX
- VBScript
- SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Forms Processing (using the WebBot Save Results component)
Q: How do I access my log files?
A: You may download the raw log files by logging in with an FTP client and changing to the /www/logs/ directory on the server. Seven days of logs are archived and available to you in this directory. All but the current days logs are compressed using gzip. Programs such as WinZip can be used to decompress these files. Please note that these are plain text files and since they contain quite a bit of information, they can be difficult to read without using a program to parse them. A sample line from the access_log would look like this:
192.168.1.2 - - [03/Jun/2002:12:32:44 -0500] "GET /cando/faq.html HTTP/1.1" 200 3911 "http://cando.airweb.net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.03 [en]"
As you can see, it can be useful to have a program automatically make sense of these log files for you. Many of our Airweb plans include a stats generator program called Webalizer. To see if you have it, type in your websites URL and add /stats/ to the end, ie; http://www.domain.com/stats/ If nothing comes up, it is not included in your package, but we can install it for you! Contact our commercial support group to request this to be added to your account here. To see an example of Webalizer in action, go here.
Q: Where are sendmail and Perl?
A: Perl is at /usr/bin/perl This means that all Perl scripts should start with #!/usr/bin/perl
Sendmail is at /usr/sbin/sendmail
A: To upload a CGI script for your site, login to your site with an FTP client and change to the /www/cgi-bin/ directory on the server. This is where all CGI scripts must be uploaded. Use the FTP clients feature to set the transfer mode to ASCII rather then BINARY. Once uploaded, make sure not to forget to change the permissions on the file to make it executable! Most FTP clients have an option for a utility called CHMOD and that is used to tell the server this file is a script to be executed. the most common setting that should be used for CGI scripts is 755.
A: There can be several things to check for if a CGI script is not working. The most common problems are due to case-sensitivity, control characters, and file permissions. Our UNIX web servers are case-sensitive when it comes to filenames and directories; /usr/bin/perl is not the same as /usr/bin/Perl on a UNIX system. Also, make sure to save your CGI / Perl scripts in plain text - some editors such as Word or Wordpad insert ^M at the end of every line, and these control characters can cause some serious confusion on a UNIX system. Finally, make sure the CGI you upload is marked as executable. Most FTP programs have a function to change the permissions on files. If after checking all of these possibilities you are still seeing a problem, then you may want to review your CGI script itself for errors, or check the server error logs residing in the /www/logs/ directory on the server.
Q: Why are there broken links and images on my page now after I've uploaded it?
A: This is usually caused by a case sensitivity problem. If your website was originally hosted on a Windows NT web server, it may need some editing before moving to our UNIX web servers. UNIX is a case-sensitive OS, and therefore index.html is not the same as Index.html. Likewise, /images/picture.jpg is entirely different from /Images/picture.JPG. Double-check the case of all links and image tags in your html source, and the case of the filenames.
Q: Who owns my domain name, and who is responsible for keeping it registered?
A: You are responsible for renewing your domain name registration with the registrar. While Internet America may register your domain name for you and set it up initially, we do not receive the renewal notices for domains, and therefore do not renew them for you.
Q: How do I add a counter to my page?
A: Easy! Just follow this link, choose what style of counter you would like, and then copy and paste the code into your page.
Q: How can I add streaming audio to my site?
A: It is actually fairly easy to make a real audio file do streaming audio from your Airweb site. By default, Airweb does not have a Real audio server installed. The way to do this is through HTTP streaming. Find instructions on how to do it here.
Q: How do I use SSL on my site?
A: On secure Airweb sites, Airweb actually owns the site certificate. SSL security is an add-on to Airweb, and you must sign up for it to be able to use it with your site. To learn how to use your SSL services with Airweb, please see these instructions.
Q: How do I change my FTP or Frontpage login or password?
A: Your username cannot be changed as it is integral to your account. To change your password, please contact Commercial Support