Error Messages

Why am I getting email messages about errors in pages I don't own?
If you are getting email messages you don't think you should be getting, this could be because you either created the pages and then "gave" them to someone else, or someone created them while they were using a network connection created with your username. When you create a page on the MHC Web server, the "owner" of the page is automatically set to the account that is accessing the server. When the server needs to send email notification of an error, it sends the message to this person.

The best way to tell if you own a page is to go there with one of the college's Unix computers, and use the ls -l command. (That's a "dash el," not a "dash one".) For example, let's say you are getting messages about files in http://www.mtholyoke.edu/org/knitting :

mhc.mtholyoke.edu % cd /web/org/knitting
mhc.mtholyoke.edu % ls -l
-rw-rw-r--   1 fperkins  w-knit      1957 Aug 14  1997 index.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 fperkins  w-knit     19398 Aug 19  1997 pearl.html

In this case, both files there are owned by fperkins. If this is you, you will get any error messages concerning these pages.

So what if you want to give ownership of these files to someone else? Well, there is a special command that was created for this purpose. It is called iownit ("I own it"). It gets run by the new owner of the files. Because this is not a regular system command, its full path must be used; it is invoked by typing /web/bin/iownit

Let's say mlyon wants to be the new owner of the files. Assuming she has write permission in the /org/knitting directory, she can enter these commands, after logging-into MHC under her own username:

mhc.mtholyoke.edu % cd /web/org/knitting
mhc.mtholyoke.edu % /web/bin/iownit index.html pearl.html

In this case, she could also have used the command /web/bin/iownit *html, since all of the filenames end in .html. To see the results:

mhc.mtholyoke.edu % ls -l
-rw-rw-r--   1 mlyon    w-knit      1957 Apr 11  1998 index.html
-rw-rw-r--   1 mlyon    w-knit     19398 Apr 11  1998 pearl.html

You will also notice that the modification dates of the files have changed. If there are still syntax errors in the files, mlyon will get an error messsage by email the next time the errors are detected.