Airweb How-To's

Here you will find a variety of useful walk throughs regarding some of the more commonly asked about topics. If you find any topic lacking or unclear, or if you would like to see another section added, please send us an email to let us know.

Most commonly requested How-To guides:

Use email forms on your website
Secure your website using password protected areas
Upload your webpage - FTP
Upload your webpage - Frontpage
Add a counter to your page

Other topics:

Upload and use your own custom CGI scripts
Make and use custom error documents
Stream Real Audio from your site
Use SSL encryption
Telnet into the server Decommissioned
Get around in the UNIX OS on Airweb Decommissioned
Check your disk space quota Decommissioned

Q: How do I use email forms on your website?

Many companies need a way for their clients or prospective clients to contact them. Using web based questionnaire's is a great way to get the information you need! This tutorial will create a web-based form and scripts, in three easy steps.

Q: How do I password protect a directory?

Password protecting a directory or entire site is easiest done by using a .htaccess file. This is the standard way to control access on the UNIX Apache web server. This method actually requires two files, .htaccess, which specifies the usernames that are allowed to access the directory, and .htpasswd, which contains the encrypted passwords for each username. The .htaccess file must be placed in the directory you want to protect. The .htpasswd can be placed in any directory, but you may wish to keep it in the same directory as the .htaccess file for easier file management. The web server will not allow visitors to access either of these files, so they are secure wherever you put them (as long as you name them .htaccess and .htpasswd!).

A word about the filenames: you will notice that these files have an extension, but no filename. This is perfectly acceptable on a UNIX computer, and on some Mac operating systems, but is not valid in Windows. Later on we will show you how to change them to the correct filenames, but for now, if you are using Windows, you can name the files whatever you like. (htaccess.txt and htpasswd.txt are good choices.) It is imperative that the filenames are changed to the correct names once on the server, though, so please read through this entire tutorial.

The first thing you want to do is create the encrypted password file. There are a few ways to do this. You can use this form to fill in the username and password you want, and simply copy and paste the one line output into a textfile and upload it to the server, then rename it to .htpasswd

The other method involves downloading an executable and use it on your Windows computer. It is called htpw-dos.exe. You can find that program here. To make things simple, you will probably want to download the file to the root directory of your C: drive. Once downloaded, open up a command-line prompt. The easiest way to do this is from the Start -> Run dialog. Click on Start, and then choose Run. In the dialog box, type in command if you are running Windows 95, 98 or ME, or cmd if you are running Windows NT, 2000 or XP. Click Okay, or press the enter key. You will be presented with a window, with a command prompt. If you downloaded the htpw-dos.exe file into the root directory of your C: drive, then type in:

cd \

and press Enter. This will change you into the root directory. If you downloaded the file into a different directory, change to that directory using the cd command. Now you are ready to create the htpasswd.txt file, which will later be named .htpasswd on the web server. To create the file, type:

htpw-dos.exe -c htpasswd.txt username

And replace username with the username you want to create a password for. The program will come back with:

Adding password for username.
New password:

At this point, type in a password. Remember that the password is case-sensitive. The program will hide the text you are typing, so it asks you to confirm the password:

Re-type new password:

Type the password in again, and you are done! The program will create the file called htpasswd.txt, which will contain the username you specified, and then some garbled text, which is the encrypted password. Be warned that the -c tag in the command is telling htpw-dos.exe to create a new file! To add user/password pairs to this file, simply type:

htpw-dos.exe htpasswd.txt newusername

Replace newusername with the username you want to add, and it will prompt you, again, twice for the password. Now the new username is added to the password file. You must do this with every new user that you want to add. If you accidentally use -c, it will create a new, blank file with your new username, and all your old usernames and passwords will be lost. In this case, they are unrecoverable, and you will have to add them all back in by hand.

Next you will need to create the .htaccess file. This is a simple text file, that contains the following:

AuthUserFile /airweb/username/www/docs/secret/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName Restricted
AuthType Basic

<Limit GET>
require valid-user
</Limit>

Feel free to copy and paste that into a new text document in Notepad. Notice the first line. This line points to the location of the .htpasswd file on the server. You will want to replace username with the username you use to access the site via FTP, and you will want to replace secret with the name of the directory you want to protect. The username in this file must be your FTP username - not the username you added to the password file. You may replace Restricted with any one word that you would like the password window to display when your visitor tries to access the protected section of your site. Save this file as a text file called htaccess.txt.

Now you are ready to upload your files. Connect to your site with an FTP program such as WS_FTP_LE (instructions here), and change to the directory on the server that you wish to password protect. Upload both the htpasswd.txt and htaccess.txt files into this directory. Now you will need to rename the files to make them active, and also ensure that no unscrupulous visitors may access the files. Click on the htpasswd.txt file on the right-hand side of your screen, then click the Rename button in WS_FTP. Rename it to .htpasswd and click Okay. It is very important to have the period at the beginning of the filename. Next, rename the htaccess.txt file in the same way: click on the filename on the right-hand side of your display, and then click the Rename button, rename it to .htaccess and click Okay. Depending on your version of FTP program, the files may disappear when you rename them. Once the filenames are changed, the directory is protected. Try pulling it up in a webbrowser, and you will be presented with a username and password window. Type in the proper username and password pair, and the server will allow you to see the requested files. If you do not have a valid username and password, you will not be allowed access to the directory.

.htaccess has many other uses such as restricting by domain, IP range, or changing how your visitors see the site, but those are beyond the scope of this document. To see how to use .htaccess to show your users a custom 404 error page (the page that displays when the visitor requests a file that isn't there), see this page. For more information on the capabilities of .htaccess, you may wish to start with this page.