This page has documentation on W3C's Unix guest accounts. If you do not have a Unix account on W3C's systems and you need one, please apply for an account via your staff contact. Note that most people do not need Unix accounts; Jigedit is the recommended way to edit our web site.
Note: this page describes the environment on
the machine coda.w3.org. If your account is on our
older system, www16, a.k.a.
guest.w3.org, please contact us so we can arrange to
move your account to coda.
Last modified $Date: 2018/01/25 15:52:23 $ by $Author: plehegar $
To log in to your account on coda, you need to use
ssh (secure shell). Telnet is no
longer available for security reasons.
Though it is possible to use ssh with a password, we highly recommend using RSA keys for authentication instead. Once you have generated an RSA key pair, send us the public part and we'll install it in your account.
More detailed ssh installation/configuration notes are also available.
Most of our file space is version controlled using CVS. If you are aware of CVS and your W3C contact has indicated that the area that you are going to be editing is under CVS then you can check out a local copy of CVS in your home directory and work from there.
If you do your work on a Unix system, it would be easiest for you
to access our CVS repository directly from your system using
remote CVS over ssh with RSA authentication.
(and you probably don't need an account on coda at
all.) If you would like to be set up for this kind of access, just ask.
If you do your work on a Windows or Mac system and plan to use
CVS on your Unix account on our server, you may need to set up
an extra ssh identity on
coda so it has access to our CVS repository which is
located on another machine (cvs.w3.org.)
To do this, run "ssh-keygen", and enter a passphrase
when it prompts for one (it can be the same one as the one you
use for your ssh identity on your windows system.)
After ssh-keygen has finished, type:
cat .ssh/identity.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
to add this new key to your authorized keys.
Then, type "ssh-add" to authenticate yourself in
your current session. You will need to run "ssh-add"
each time you login in the future (but not ssh-keygen, that only
needs to be done once.)
This will give your current session access to our CVS server on
cvs.w3.org.
For more information on using CVS, see our CVS documentation, or ask your staff contact or sysreq for help.
Possibilities include:
If you have any problems with your account, please send mail to sysreq@w3.org, and optionally Cc: your staff contact.
When reporting problems, please be specific about the problem you encountered and what you were doing at the time. Cutting and pasting raw text from your terminal session is especially useful to help us pinpoint the problem.
Another way to get help is to drop by our IRC server, irc.w3.org,
port 6665, channel #sysreq, where you
can ask questions and get responses in realtime if one of us
are online.