FAQ on Home Portal

What is the purpose of this Portal?

1. This portal can be used to host your personal website.
2. For any conferences / workshops / short term courses you plan to organize and wish to have a website for that event, you can host it as a subfolder within your personal website.
3. If you are planning to send across a mail on announce / faculty mailing list with a large attachment, consider uploading that file onto this portal and including only a link to the file in your email. This saves replication of data in about 1700 inboxes and conserves resources.

Why openldap for login?
Each registered user on the home portal is given a linux system account. There are compatibility issues to link ADS authentication with a linux system account. Hence openldap to authenticate for ftp.

Can I get shell access?
If you have a strong reason to have it, yes. By default, all users are given only ftp (port 21) access to transfer files and web access via phpmyadmin to manage their database.

Can I have a quota higher than 1 GB?
If you have a good reason, yes. By default, all users are given a uniform disc quota of 1 GB.

Can I get another account to host a website for a centre / conference?
Try hosting these as subfolders in your personal website. Try creating a content management system for your personal website. If the site requires multiple persons to have access to modify and the site url should look neutral, you can take a separate account for such purposes.

Can I get support from e-services to create my personal website?
We do not have adequate resouces to offer this service. The support from e-services is limited to any changes in the system and to get you going with accessing your account. Content will have to be generated and maintained by the end user. There are a number of small web development companies and freelance developers who could create a website for you for a small fee.

What kind of content is allowed on this portal?
Though this will be your personal website, the server, the connectivity and the resource belong to IIT Madras. You are advised to keep the content as official as possible. In any case, the end user is responsible for the content hosted in his/her folder.

Will e-services take a backup of my data?
Right now, there is no regular backup for the home folders. Occasional backup does exist. Users are expected to have a copy of their web folder on their desktop computers as backup. If there is sufficient usage of this portal, this policy will be reviewed shortly.

Will e-services protect my website from being hacked?
Well, the web server has only two ports (80 and 443 for http and https, respectively) open to the rest of the world and can be considered as relatively safe - atleast for those web sites that have static pages. File transfer and database access is available only from intranet. The portal will be monitored regularly and e-services will support any user who faces issues such as this. Needless to say, please do not share your password with anyone.