Introduction
In certain circumstances you may wish to restrict access to a portion of your web site. Professors may want only their students to see their lecture notes. Offices may wish to share internal information like work schedules.
If you are a Web Builder and your web site resides on the ITS web server under the /www, /wwwres, or /wwwfac directory we can password protect a directory for you. Please note: at this time, pages which reside in a tilde "~" directory cannot be password protected using this process.
Guidelines for Password Protecting a directory
What password protecting a web directory does for you
Password protecting a web directory restricts access to all files in a directory through the web server. Only those persons with the correct user name and password can view the files over the web. In other words, it is a group password. All users who need to gain access to a password protected web directory are given the same user name and password.
What password protecting a web directory can be used for
You can place information in a password protected directory which you would like available to a group of people but, which does not need to be seen by everyone world wide.
Examples of materials you may wish to password protect include: anonymous exam or quiz scores, internal office documentation, training information, class assignments, class or office notices, non-sensitive research notes.
Password protecting a web directory is NOT considered secure. Because the web server must be able to read your information, your files are going to be set to world readable. This would allow anyone who can log onto the ITS UNIX machine to see the contents of your files.
You cannot maintain any information which is considered sensitive in a password protected web directory.
Examples of materials that are considered sensitive include: student names with grades, social security numbers, medical information, and passwords to other accounts.If you wish to post exam or quiz solutions you should not place them in a password protected directory until you are ready to release your solutions.
Please note that this service is ONLY available for University at Albany sites hosted on the University at Albany's main web server.
UserIDs are CASE SENSITIVE. We strongly recommend ALL lowercase UserIDs.
Request password protection for a web directory
