Other

This information only pertains to Hurricane Electric's Shared Web Hosting package. There may be different information in our other categories.

How do I add the VRML MIME type?

We have already added the following definition to the system MIME types:

x-world/x-vrml wrl vrml

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file tells search engines which of your web pages you would prefer not be indexed. There's more information at:

http://www.robotstxt.org/

Do you index and catalog your pages automatically so that they can be picked up by a database without you having register them?

No, you must register your pages yourself.

Can I read Usenet newsgroups through your server?

We offer news feeds, which are batch transfers of all internet newsgroups and runs on the order of 300GB of information per month. This is something that is generally intended for other ISPs. Our current rate is $495/month for this service.

We generally suggest that our customers look into www.supernews.com for their internet newsgroup reading needs.

I'll be using this service to mirror my commercial WEB servers. Is that a problem for you?

No problem. If fact, we would like to do anything we can to support you so that you can use our web servers.

How do I change my user name?

The only way to do that is to cancel your current account and order a new one.

How do I change my password?

Our security policy requires that you respect the good password selection rule of avoiding using English words as your password in the interests of a minimum level of security. A good password must be at least 7 characters in length and should contain at least one letter and at least one number. Passwords should not be based upon common sayings or anything recognizable.

You may change your password. However, if you do change it, please make sure to follow our password creation guidelines.

To change your password, log into the account management system and click on "Issue New Password" from the list of commands.

There is a way to come up with a password you can remember that meets our guidelines. If you think of a sentence of about seven words that has a number in it, and take the first letters of the words, and using the number instead of the word for the number, you have a password that you can remember as long as you remember the sentence. For example, a good sentence might be "One fine day, I picked a password." This would translate to "1fdIpap" (one is a number, isn't it?), which looks like utter gibberish, but can be remembered, because you know the sentence. When you need to enter your password, just think of the sentence, which can be as weird or wacky as you want it to be.

If I forget my password how do I go about finding out what it is?

Our client's passwords are so secure that not even we know them. However if you do forget you password, just send an email to support@he.net and we'll assign you a new password. Make sure to send the email from the email account you specified when you set up your account. Include your account name and what server your account is on.

Why couldn't I get a prompt when ssh-ing in?

You may occasionally experience a delay of 15 to 30 seconds while our system is doing a reverse look up to get your site name. If the name server that is authoritative for your IP address delays or fails to answer you can expect a long lag until the request times out and our server presents you a log in prompt anyway.

For incoming systems with healthy DNS services there is no delay because the look up is instantaneous. Try again and let it sit for a while. Also try ssh-ing to another system on a different net, if you can, and then ssh from there to our server.

Can I use crontab to mirror our existing site elsewhere on a Hurricane Electric server?

No problem. crontab is there to be used!

Please don't schedule your crontab job to run more than once per day. Also, it is good to schedule crontab tasks between 10pm and 6am Pacific Standard Time (the time on the server) because the load on the server is lower.

Can I run a IRC bot, MUD, MOO, or MUSH 24 hours a day?

Not in a regular web hosting account. However, you could run them on a dedicated server or a colocation server. For more information about colocation read our colocation page.

Is it possible to redirect all HTTP requests that come in for http://mydomain/mydirectory/* (including subdirectories) to the same directory structure at http://anotherdomain/mydirectory/?

Yes. Put the following in your .htaccess file:

Redirect /mydirectory http://anotherdomain/mydirectory

It will traverse symlinks as they existed in the public_html directory.

How do I set up an html page to automatically redirect a browser to another page?

You can do that with a META Redirect. In your HTML documents between the<HEAD> and </HEAD> tags, put the following code:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.yourdomain.com">

Make sure to replace where it says http://www.yourdomain.com with the URL you want to redirect them to.

Is it possible to personalize the File Not Found page?

Yes. Add the following line to your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 URL

Please replace where it says "URL" with the URL of the document you'd like to be shown.

What UNIX command do I use to unzip a file?

unzip filename.zip

How do I access Turbo C Shell?

1. edit the file .bash_login (ie: pico .bash_login)
2. insert this into the file:

/bin/tcsh
exit

3. exit the editor
4. type: source .bash_login

...and you will be in tcsh shell.