Below is a guide to commonly asked support questions. As a courtesy, please look here before emailing us.

• Email - How do I access my email?
• FTP - How do I upload my files?
• Control Panel - How do I access my control panel?
• Telnet -  How do I access my shell account?
• Counters -  How do I put a counter on my page?
• Logs -  Where is my log file?
• CGI -  How do I use CGI?
• htpasswd -  How do I password protect directories?
• Real Audio -  How do I use real audio files?
• Sendmail - Where is your mail program located?
• PHP3 - How do I use PHP3?
• SSI - How do I use Server Side Includes?

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Email

Email can be retrieved using any of the readily available mail clients including a Netscape browser. One of the best Windows and Mac based clients, Pegasus Mail, is available for use free of charge! Another popular freeware mail client is Eudora light.

Use your domain name, yourdomain.com as both your POP3 and SMTP host. It is not necessary to put "pop" "mail" "smtp"  "www"  or any other prefix. Use the same account password and login that you use for ftp to access the main box.

Web Based Email

You can also access your POP3 account via your web browser. Enter http://www.yourdomain/~webmail/
You will be prompted for your login and password.

FTP

Our servers can be accessed using standard ftp protocol. A very good Win95/98/NT ftp client is   WS_FTP ., this client happens to be free for home use. Mac users can try a shareware copy of Anarchie.

You should use your domain.com as the host to connect to if your domain is active. If not, we will supply you with a temporary number to use while waiting. Materials should be uploaded into the users public_html directory for viewing from the web. Users can request that an anonymous ftp be setup and can place material in their public_ftp/pub/ directory if they wish it to be made available via anonymous ftp from their domain. 

Control Panel

To access your control panel, enter the following in your browser
http://www.yourdomain/~webshell/ (substitute your actual domain)
You will be prompted for your login and password. Your webshell can be used to upload, download, compress and edit files through your web browser. It is possible to manage your account with no software other then your web browser! There is complete documentation on its use once you login.

Telnet

If you wish to use telnet you can email us and we will activate it. We require that all telnet accounts be "host masked" so they can only be acessed from your location. You can go to:

http://www.NetMegs.com/cgi-bin/envtest.cgi

and send us the REMOTE_HOST and REMOTE_ADDR of the location you will be telneting from.

Telnet access is primarily needed for advanced web developement and the use of the unix shell for compilers. A very good shareware client is made by neosoft or you can check here at Yahoo for others.  Make sure you have terminal emulation set to VT100. 

NOTE: No IRC. We do not allow the use of irc clients even if they are not bots or being run with scripts. Your IRC client can be attacked and we feel it is an uneeded risk to subject our servers and customers to. Any irc clients will be terminated and result in the loss of telnet access for your account.

NOTE: No daemons. Using cron is permitted as long as it is reasonable. 

Counters

We have preinstalled a CGI access counter to enable you to track the traffic to your pages. Complete directions on the use of this software are available at this site. A quick example of a counter code is as follows:

This code would produce a counter like this: 
 
 

NOTE: You must use a unique name for your counter's .dat file. Use yourdomain.dat or some other unique name for this file.

NOTE: If your account is configured with suexec you must use the name of the server you are on in the counters path. For example, if you are on no2 you would use "http://no2.netmegs.com/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?ft=2|frgb=000000|dd=E|df=test.dat".

Logs

Your server log is located at /var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com.log. Be aware this is not a url but the path on the servers drive to your log. You can browse to this location using your ftp software just as you would browse your own hardrive on your PC at home. Logs are rotated weekly Sunday morning. They are then stored in /var/log/httpd/OLD and compressed using gzip. We do not charge our clients for this space.

CGI

CGI can be run within any directory of public_html. It can be compiled or perl. You must name all CGI files with a .cgi or .pl extension. If you wish to create a directory to hold all your cgi you can name it anything you like except cgi-bin. The directory name cgi-bin is an alias for the main cgi bin where the counter and preinstalled CGI is run from. CGI files must be chmod 755 in order to execute. You can chmod a file via telnet or using an FTP program that allows you to do so. When writing your own scripts please do not test them on our servers. Use a Linux PC at home or another unix machine that is performing less critical operations. Scripts can easily get caught in infinite loops if written poorly. Please do not run any CPU intensive scripts. It is not fair to other users to hog all the server CPU resources, particulary if you are a busy site. If a script is too intensive we will inform you and try to make suggestions on alternatives. If your script does not work, please do not email us to "just take a look at it", unless you have exhaustively tried to trouble shoot it yourself. If we do have to look at it , we may have to bill you for our time. There are many many reasons why your script may not run on our server even though it worked on your last server. It can be something as simple as a path you have set up incorrectly .

FAQ 

• Where is Perl located on your server?

The complete path to Perl on our servers is /usr/bin/perl . This means that the first line of your perl script should be:

#!/usr/bin/perl

• What version of Perl do you have?

We are currently running version 5.005

• What compilers do you have?

We currently have gcc version 2.7.2.3 and egcs 1.0.3

• What does "Premature end of script headers" mean?

This error can be caused by a multitude of problems in the script or its installation. For a technical explanation, here is one by the developers of the server software themselves, Apache.

• What userid do my scripts run as?

Our webserver runs as userid "nobody". Should you wish your scripts to run under your own userid, we can activate suexec for your account. Be aware that suexec performs security checks on directory permission and scripts will not execute if they are not set properly. Familiarize yourself with this document and pay particular attention to read 14 and 16.

Note: Unless you have some reason for the script not to run as the normal userid of the webserver, this is NOT neccessary.

TIPS

Did you upload the file as ascii text? If your ftp program has problems uploading it as ascii for some reason, try this. Make sure you have ascii selected. Rename file with a .txt extension and upload it. Once it is on the server rename it to .cgi .

Do you have all your paths in the script set correctly?

Do you at least have minumum permissions of 755?

Note: if you are using cgi wrap you can have less permissive settings.

If the script does not run from the web, try to execute it from a telnet command prompt and read the errors. From a telnet prompt type ./nameofscript.cgi using the correct name of the script. If it is a perl script you can type perl -w ./nameofscript.cgi and it will show you errors. 

If you are unfamiliar with telnet you can execute it via the web in diagnostic mode. Rename the file nph-scriptname.cgi and now try to run it from your browser. It should now show you errors.

RESOURCES 

Here are a few links that may prove usefull:

Galaxy's CGI--Common-Gateway-Interface-and-Applications.html
http://www.cgi-resources.com/

htpasswd

Outlined below is the manual way to protect directories using Apache's htpasswd. This process is automated in your Control Panel

1.Create the directory your want to password protect in
your public_html directory (example: members )

2.Create a file .htaccess in that directory that looks
similar to: 

AuthUserFile /homeX/domain/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Private Directory" 
AuthType Basic
<Limit GET>
require user myfriend
</Limit>
 

NOTE: Make sure you put the actual path to your home directory
in AuthUserFile.
NOTE: Make sure you use quotations "" in AuthName. 

3.Create the password file /homeX/domain/.htpasswd using
the program:
/usr/bin/htpasswd
To do this, log into your account via Telnet and type:
htpasswd -c .htpasswd myfriend
when prompted, enter the password for that user.

Now try to access a file in the protected directory by
entering the set username and password when prompted for it.

In the example above, "Private Directory" is the name that will come up
in the dialogue box as the site to access and myfriend would be
the login. The password would be whatever you select using the
htpasswd program.

Real Audio 

Accounts are capable of Real Audio and Real Video via http streaming. To play a Real Audio file, just do the following:

Create a text file with the URL of the  Real Audio file you would like to play and name it with a .ram extension. For instance we created a test text file called 288.ram which contains just one line:

http://www.netmegs.com/support/288.ra 

 You can put this text file in the same web directory as the Real Audio file.Now put a link to this text .ram file (NOT the .ra file) on your site. Like so: 288.ram. That is all there is to it! The same can be done with a Real Video file, just reference the .rm file in a text file with a .ram extension and viola! Real Video!. All your websurfer requires is a Real Audio Player which is available free from the Real Audio site. 

Sendmail

Sendmail is located at:
/usr/sbin/sendmail

Please note, we do not allow mass email of any nature. This includes CGI mailing lists, web boards that email all subscribers or anything else of this nature.

PHP3

In order to use PHP3 files, they must be named with a .php3 extension.  A begginers guide to using PHP3 can be found here.

SSI

In order to use SSI files, they must be named with a .shtml extension. A guide to SSI on Apache can be found here.