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UA1IX is a small UNIX machine that has been in use for many years. All of its applications are now available on the new UNIX server bama.ua.edu. Since it has become expensive to maintain and since this better alternative is available, UA1IX will be turned off at the end of this semester. On May 18, 1998, all user accounts left on UA1IX will be deleted. If you are using UA1IX, or have an account there that you used to use and may not have backed up, you should take steps immediately to move your files and applications to an alternate site, such as bama.ua.edu or a personal computer. If you are a faculty or staff member (including retired faculty/staff) or student of the University of Alabama, you may get an account on the new bama.ua.edu UNIX machine by simply taking your valid ACT card to the Helpdesk in Gordon Palmer and requesting the account. Owners of guest or special accounts that may have been set up on UA1IX in the past should locate an alternate service provider.
SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transport Protocol. An SMTP server is a program that accepts mail for transfer and sends mail out over a network. When you send mail from your mail program, if that mail is going out over a network, it first goes to an SMTP server. For example, if you dialup to the Internet using the University's limited modem service, and send mail using Netscape, Netscape passes the mail to your designated SMTP server, and the SMTP server decides where it goes next.
When you first set up Netscape for sending mail through dialup, you had to specify your SMTP server. Most people using the University's dialup or mail delivery service have UA1IX or UA1VM specified as their SMTP server. Since UA1IX is going to be retired in May (see related article this issue), and UA1VM is also scheduled for replacement (next year), this is a good time to check your Netscape (or other mail program) setup. If you use the University's dialup service, or if you are using Netscape, Eudora or a similar stand-alone program for on-campus mail handling, you should change your SMTP server to be bama.ua.edu (even if you do not have an account on that machine). If you use an alternate dialup service provider, you should use the SMTP server specified by your service provider.
Question: I recently installed the latest Netscape Communicator on my PC. I sometimes use Netscape to send mail. Now my friends tell me they can't read mail I send. Does Communicator have something to do with this? Can I fix it?
Answer: Yes, Communicator may be the culprit. Many people have found that the recent versions of Netscape Communicator come configured to send mail as HTML (web-page text). Your friends' mail programs may not be able to handle HTML correctly. To check the setup in your version of Communicator, go to Edit on the menu bar and select Preferences. Click on Messages under Mail and Groups. (You may need to click on the plus sign or arrow next to Mail and Groups to see the Messages choice.) Look at the Messages Properties box on the right, and see if 'By default, send HTML' is checked. You probably want to turn this option off. While there, also see if the 'quote original when replying' box is checked. You may want to turn that off also, as it can make your replies unnecessarily long.
NOTE: For more information about any question featured here, or to ask about something that might be answered here, send e-mail to Help.Desk@ua.edu
For more than a decade, The University of Alabama has been using software from Systems and Computer Technology Corporation (SCT) to support administrative activity in several areas. Among the systems licensed from SCT are the Financial Reporting System (FRS), the Human Resources System (HRS), and the Student Information System (SIS). All three of these systems are due for an upgrade, both to add additional services and to ensure that they are Year 2000 compliant.
The University is now in the process of upgrading these systems, with consulting assistance from SCT. Users of these systems will be seeing many changes over the next year, as these upgrade projects progress. The new on-line purchasing system is already in use in some departments. The upgraded Student Information System is expected to be ready by October 1998. Later, various web applications will allow web access to such information and services as address changes, account inquiry, course drop/add, update of tax exemptions, course rosters, and class schedules.
For more information about the Year 2000 administrative software project and the campus project teams, visit the project web page. (Editor's note: The Project 2000 Web site was removed during the spring 2000 semester.)
(This is the third in a series of articles on simple web page concepts.)
In our first lesson, we said a simple web page is a file in a specific place on a web server. In the second lesson, we talked about file names and extensions. This time we will look (briefly) at the server name and account name that is part of the address of a web page.
A web server is a program running on a computer. On this campus, the computer might be a Windows 95 or Windows NT machine, a Macintosh, a UNIX machine, or even an IBM mainframe. There are choices for web server programs which could run on each of these machines, so the web server program running on one machine may have different rules and expectations about where files should be placed and how they should be named than the server on another machine. The primary campus server bama.ua.edu is a UNIX machine with many user accounts. The University's home page server www.ua.edu is a Windows NT machine.
On a server machine with many user accounts, each of which can have its own web page space, the account name becomes part of the web page address. The tilde symbol (~) is usually used to indicate that an account is named. For example, Seebeck User News has web address http://www.bama.ua.edu/~usernews indicating that the web page belongs to the account usernews on the web server www.bama.ua.edu. By contrast, machine www.ua.edu does not have separate accounts that own web pages, but a given page may reside in a subdirectory of the web page space. No tilde symbol is used when the web page is in a subdirectory. For example, the local home page for the Internet2 project is in the subdirectory internet2 of the main page space on www.ua.edu, and its web address is http://www.ua.edu/internet2.
There are two other points to notice about these web addresses. First, notice that web addresses are most always written starting with the symbol string 'http://'. This string tells your web browser software what kind of address follows, namely, the address of a web page. Older browsers required you to enter this string as part of the address when you typed in a web address. Newer browsers understand when you are entering an address, and do not require this string to be typed. None the less, when addresses are written in text they are usually written with the 'http://' to show that this is a web address. There are other symbol strings that could be used to tell your browser that what follows is a different type of information. One you may have seen is the string 'mailto:', which tells your browser that what follows is an e-mail address.
The other point to notice is the use of www as the first part of a server name. It is commonly used, but there is no requirement that a server be named this way. For example, UA1VM is a web server, and its name is ua1vm.ua.edu. The name www.ua1vm.ua.edu is not an option. Bama.ua.edu is also a web server, and www.bama.ua.edu is another name for the same server. It has been set up so that you may use either www.bama.ua.edu or bama.ua.edu as the server name. They are equivalent.