Frequently Asked Questions

Alumni Accounts

  • Who can get an alumni account?
    To be eligible for an alumni account from the School of Engineering, you must have obtained a degree from the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
  • Do I have to be a member of an alumni association?
    No, you simply need to meet the eligibility requirements for a UCSC School of Engineering alumni account.
  • What do I get with an alumni account?
    You get to retain your existing BSOE e-mail address (username@soe.ucsc.edu) and your personal home page.
  • How do I access my alumni account?
    You will be able to access your BSOE e-mail through Google Apps.  The Alumni machine runs an SSH server that you can use to log in and update your personal home page.

The Alumni Machine

  • What type of machine is the alumni machine?
    The alumni machine is currently a VMWare virtual machine running CentOS 7.9.
  • How much disk space do I get?
    Users receive quotas of 100MB on the root partition, which includes your personal web pages.

World Wide Web Questions

  • What can I put on my home page?
    There are no restrictions on user home page content other than disallowing any commercial or illegal activities from the alumni machine.
  • Who can access my home page?
    Anyone who has access to the WWW can access your home page.
  • I don't know anything about html! Where do I start?
    To start learning about the basics (HTML 2.0), try looking at NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML. For a HTML reference, try the HyperText Markup Language from Wikibooks. For the more complicated stuff (HTML 3.0), try the HTML 3.2 Specification.
  • Can I write my own CGI programs?
    This server uses the CGIWrap program to allow you to run CGI programs from your Alumni account.  To make your script recognizable by the web server, you must have the execute bit set (ie, mode of the script/binary should be 755) and it must have one of the following extensions: exe, php, cgi, sh, pl or py. NOTE: CGI programs will run under your user ID.  Your CGI programs will have full access to all your personal files.  Therefore, it is in your best interest to make sure your CGI script or program is as secure as possible.
  • Can I have server-side includes in my documents?
    Yes, the alumni machine is configured to support server-parsed HTML.
  • How do I enable my personal home page?
    cd ~
    mkdir .html
    chmod 755 .html
    touch .html/index.html
    chmod 644 .html/index.html

    Then modify ~/.html/index.html to flavor using an editor (pico/vi). The url to your personal home page is http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~USERNAME/
  • How can I see log files for my personal home page?
    If you create a folder in your home directory called .html-log, the system will start logging requests to your personal home page there.  Be sure that the folder is writable by you.  For example, you can use these commands to stat logging access to your home page:

    mkdir ~/.html-log
    chmod 755 ~/.html-log