LSU College of Engineering Web Services Guidelines

The following guidelines are for the College of Engineering with regards to providing Web services to faculty and staff of the College:

1) In general, each department in the College is responsible for providing and maintaining its own Web server. The only current exception to this rule is Construction Management. Their web services are provided directly by the College. If any department does not feel that it can adequately provide these services, arrangements can be made to have these services provided by the College of Engineering (COE) computing staff. Departments that maintain their own Web servers are also responsible for backing up those servers unless specific arrangements are made with COE staff.

2) It is recommended that these services be provided using the Apache web services software in a Unix-based environment. Any pages that specifically require IIS should be placed on a College of Engineering IIS server. Arrangements for such services can be made directly with COE computing staff. Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) or other similar packages are not approved for use within the College due to inherent security risks.

3) Each individual department is responsible for providing Web services to their faculty and staff members. Particular details of this are left to the discretion of the department. The College will provide this service to individual faculty members only if the College is also providing services for the departmental pages.

4) The College will provide Web services as needed for any centers, labs, or institutes that are officially approved by the Board of Regents. It is up to the discretion of the College to determine where these pages are housed based on particular needs.

5) The College requests that individual faculty and staff do not run Web servers on individual PC’s or workstations. Doing this creates a security risk which can be exploited by hackers to gain access to the COE and LSU networks. Any systems running such servers which are creating problems on the network will be immediately removed from the network.

6) Web page development should not be done using Microsoft products such as FrontPage as these products generally require proprietary extensions which are not readily available on most Web servers such as Apache.

7) If there are any questions regarding these policies or if assistance is required for any Web services needs, please contact Chris Schwehm, Associate Director of Engineering Services for Computing Services at 578-5262 or email him at chris@rsip.lsu.edu.