Personal Home Pages at Indiana University

2008 Migration from Steel to Mercury

The Mypage service moved June 23, 2008 to Mercury, no longer operating in conjunction with the general purpose Unix environment that was provided by the Steel Cluster. Your pages continue to be served from http://mypage.iu.edu/~username

Accounts that were migrated:

• Only Steel accounts that have been serving Mypage web pages via the www directory were migrated to Mercury.
• General use Unix accounts are available on Quarry, IU’s newest supercomputer.

Some changes in the new environment:

• Mercury is not a general purpose computing environment. Software options will be limited.
• Each account will have a 1 GB disk space quota.
• Your new host for publishing pages is mercury.uits.indiana.edu. 
• Your new home directory will be /fs/username.
• Your pages will be served only from the /fs/username/www directory of your account on Mercury, no matter the location on Steel.
• Outbound email will not be available with the new Mypage environment.
• Printing will not be available from Mercury.
• The directory indexing feature for web serving will not be available by default, but you may still use the feature for your account (.htaccess file required).
• You may now serve personal pages over a secure server. If your Mercury account was recently migrated from Steel, you may run spinweb at the command line on Mercury to create a wwws directory for serving pages securely. New accounts will automatically have a wwws directory.
• A VPN connection for off-campus or wireless access to Mercury may be required at some point.
• You may now use IU Network IDs in your .htaccess files, but only in the wwws directory tree.

Some things stay the same:

• All of your files from your account on Steel were copied to Mercury.
• You have the same shell as with your Steel account and your login initialization files have been migrated. The default shell for new accounts is bash.
• Ezreset is still available to reset your login initialization files (very similar to the Steel environment settings)
• Spinweb is still available, but a switch has been added so that you can easily "shut down" your web site.

Exceptions:

• If your web pages include absolute URLs (e.g. /N/fs2/username/Steel/www or /N/u/username/Steel/www), they will not work in the new environment. Learn how to change absolute URLs at: https://kb.iu.edu/data/avlz.html.
• If you had a node other than Steel or perhaps an unusual directory structure, you may notice changes in the hierarchy of your home directory on Mercury. Specifically, the content of the directory pointed to by WWW was migrated to /fs/username/www and other content may be found in a “from_steel” directory on Mercury. All of your account content was migrated.