Frequently Asked Questions about HKU CS Alumni Association

1. How to create my homepage?
2. Why can't I save my e-mails to mail folders?
3. How to enable spam mail filtering?

Who are eligible to join the HKU CS Alumni Association?

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How much does membership cost?

After joining the association, the member can enjoy the free service provided by the association and join activities organized by the association.

Currently, the free service include a mailbox and subscription to class mailing list.

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How much storage will be allocated to each user?

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Configuration Parameters

What is the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the alumni servers?

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What is the uses of those servers?

alumni.hkucs.org is the testbed UNIX server for members who have subscribed to the contribution option.

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What is the IP address of the alumni server?

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What is my e-mail address?

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How to create my homepage?

1. cd $HOME
2. chmod o+x $HOME
3. mkdir public_html
4. chmod 711 public_html
5. cd public_html
6. cp -p /usr/local/skel/public_html/index.html .

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How can I add an access counter to my homepage?

1. Create a file, say "v.count", in your public_html sub-directory and make it world writable.
   % echo 1 > /home/cs1980/tmchan/public_html/v.count
   % chmod o+rw /home/cs1980/tmchan/public_html/v.count
2. Add the following line in your html file:
   <IMG SRC="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=/home/cs1980/tmchan/public_html/v.count" ALIGN=top ALT="Hit Count">

How do I run my CGI scripts?

1. Your CGI scripts should be placed below the $HOME/public_html directory.
2. The file extension of your CGI scripts should be .cgi
3. Your should make your CGI scripts world-executable by:

   chmod o+x <your_cgi_script.cgi>

4. Your CGI script can be referenced by:

   http://www.hkucs.org/~yourname/your_cgi_script.cgi

What is the path to perl?

/usr/bin/perl

Why can't I save my e-mails to mail folders?

If you are not subscribing to the contribution option, you only have 10MB disk space for your mailbox, and 0MB disk space for your home directory. Since mail folders are stored under your home directory, you may subscribe to the contribution option to get 50MB disk space for your home directory. Besides, you mailbox will be upgraded to 50MB also. You may click here and login to verify your current disk usage.

How to enable spam mail filtering?

SpamAssassin has been installed on Alumni's mail server. You may download this mail_filter.zip file (which contains the .forward and .procmailrc files) and extract it to your home directory.

.forward file contains the following line which invokes procmail

"|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -f- || exit 75 #user"

.procmailrc file contains the lines below which defines in which folder the spam mails should be kept. By default, all spam mails will be stored in the "caughtspam" folder.

:0fw
| /usr/local/bin/spamc

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
mail/caughtspam

It's important that your procmailrc file not be writable by anyone but you, so run chmod 600 .procmailrc at the unix shell prompt.

To reduce false alarms on Chinese email, make a directory ~/.spamassassin and create a file ~/.spamassassin/user_prefs with the following content:

# Speakers of Asian languages, like Chinese, Japanese and Korean, will almost
# definitely want to uncomment the following lines. They will switch off some
# rules that detect 8-bit characters, which commonly trigger on mails using CJK
# character sets, or that assume a western-style charset is in use.
#
score HEADER_8BITS 0
score HTML_COMMENT_8BITS 0
score SUBJ_FULL_OF_8BITS 0
score UPPERCASE_25_50 0
score UPPERCASE_50_75 0
score UPPERCASE_75_100 0

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