[2078] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: Protected Page...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dana Hudes)
Mon May 13 14:44:41 1996
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 12:29:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Dana Hudes <dhudes@panix.com>
To: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.ULT.3.93.960513075047.29486A-100000@hummingbird.whiteshell.com>
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
Directories do chew up disk space. It is not just the kbytes but
i-nodes (on unix) or FAT entries (on DOS). For small server this is fine
if you only have a few documents to server up. But for a big server with
undreds of documents you are making life more difficult. In addition,
many graphics are common to all or many pages so you keep them in a
/icons directory or something .
Also consider that many file systems sw will cache directories (at least
the TOC). I encourage grouping file together in a directory if they are
related to each other logically. Merely being by the same author is not
sufficient of course, and one certainly can and should use directory
tress that match the logical structure of the information you are serving.
Also remember when nesting your directories that there are definite
limits on the length of a path name on many machines (and do you really
want a 32-deep path name?).
On Mon, 13 May 1996, Jacob Rose wrote:
> Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 07:56:27 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Jacob Rose <jacob@hummingbird.whiteshell.com>
> To: Dana Hudes <dhudes@panix.com>
> Cc: www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
> Subject: Re: Protected Page...
>
> > directories chew up disk space and putting one doc per directory
> > defeats whole purpose of directories. instead httpd should be modified to
> > allow restirct on per doc basis
>
> Not at all; HTML documents are composed (typically) of several files,
> including the text, graphics, CGI scripts, Java classes, what-have-you.
> Jumbling these components from multiple documents creates an unmanageable
> mess; use directories! That's what they're there for (besides, they
> generally take up less than 1k each, I don't know why you say they chew up
> disk space). None of this is to say that I disagree with the statement
> that you should be able to password-protect individual files; added
> functionality always finds uses, but HTML is really designed to function
> on a directory-as-document basis.
>
> > > > I wonder how I can protect only one particular Web page or material
> > > > instead of the whole directory.
> > >
> > > You should really use one directory for each Web page; that way, your
> > > directory structure looks roughly like your page structure, and you can
> > > control access to a page with .htaccess since there's only one page in
> > > its directory.
>
> w h e r e
> w i l l
> W E
> b e
> ,-.i n
> ` / ----
> ,' ()()1 ?
> ~~~ ----
>
>
