Advanced Features

Setting up Your Own "404:File Not Found" Error Page

A file already exists in the www directory of your server. It's called missing.html. You can edit it to your liking, or create your own. As long as it's called missing.html and it's in your root www directory, the server will display it whenever someone tries to access a page on your domain that does not exist.

Password Protected Web Directory

Use monstercontrols to password protect directories.

Simply go to http://youractualdomain.com/cgi-bin/monstercontrols to add usernames and passwords to ANY directory you want. That user and all users you've added will be defined in a .htpasswd file in your secure directory by default, and will have access to that directory of your site, which is accessible from a web browser by typing the URL as: http://www.yourdomain.com/directoryname/

To remove a user from your password file (i.e., to remove the access of that person to your protected directories), use monstercontrols, or simply edit the .htpasswd file located in the secure directory. In this file, you'll see usernames followed by a colon (:) and a password string. The string is the password you entered in your control panel encoded in a way to protect the access rights. To remove the privileges of a user, erase the line containing his/her username. Be sure to keep the file in plain ASCII, and not to change ANYTHING else.

Crontab

What is Crontab?
Crontab is a program that allows users to execute a script or task at a given time.
There are 3 ways to create a crontab for a User on your domain: Monstercontrols, crontab from the command line and crontab from a file.

1) Use Monstercontrols, Webmaster Tools, add/edit cron jobs to create a crontab: http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/monstercontrols
(replace "yourdomain.com" with your real domain name).

Note: You will need to use Monstercontrols to create a cron before being able to run crontab from the command line as described below or contact Support to be added to the cron.allow file.

2) SSH to your domain and use the command: crontab -e
Options for crontab from the command line are:
Edit the current crontab or create a new one: crontab -e
List the contents of the crontab file: crontab -l
Remove the crontab file: crontab -r

If you're not familiar with the "vi" text editor which is used by crontab you can change your editor to "pico" or "joe" by using the commands below.

Change editor from vi to joe:

EDITOR=joe
export EDITOR

3) Or if you're not comfortable using a text editor on the server, create the crontab using Notepad on your PC (Simpletext for Macintosh users) and upload the file to your /home directory in ASCII format. (Note: do not use a Word Processing application such as MS Word as that may add unwanted formatting characters to the file.)
It does not matter what you call your crontab file. You should name it something that will identify it (eg: mycron or croncgi) and upload it in your /home directory on the server. /home/username is where you are when you first FTP to your domain.

Upload the file in ASCII format (crontabs are text files and must be uploaded in ASCII).

After uploading the text file, SSH to your domain and execute the crontab file by typing the command below (replacing "nameofcrontabfile" with your file name).

crontab nameofcrontabfile

- Additional info and examples.

The syntax of the crontab is very rigid. Each entry in a crontab consists of six fields, with each field separated by a space. More than one crontab can be added to the file with each crontab on a separate line (see example below).

0 13 1,15 * * /home/username/www/update-calendar.php
30 9 * * * /home/username/www/delete-logs.cgi

The first five fields specify exactly when the command is to be run; the sixth field is the command itself.

minute hour day month weekday command

The first five fields are:
Minute - Minutes after the hour (0-59).
Hour - 24-hour format (0-23). (based on a 24-hour clock, ranging from 0, for midnight, to 23, for 11 p.m)
Day - Day of the month (1-31)
Month - Month of the year (1-12)
Weekday - Day of the week. (0-6; the 0 refers to Sunday, 1 refers to Monday, etc.)

- Asterisks (*) specify when commands are to be run in every instance of the value of the field. For instance, an asterisk in the Month field would mean that the command should be run every month. In addition, multiple events can be scheduled within a field by separating all instances with commas - with no space between.
- Note that the day can be specified by two of the fields (day_of_the_month and day_of_the_week). If both are specified, both will be used. If one of the two fields is an asterisk, only the other is used.
- If the first five fields of a crontab line were: 0 0 15,30 * 1
...the command would be run at midnight on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month and on every Monday. 
- To specify only specific days of the week to run a command, put an asterisk (*) in the day_of_the_month field. To specify only days of the month, put an asterisk (*) in the day_of_the_week field.
- If you do not direct the standard output and standard error for the command, any output for standard output or standard error is emailed to your default email address.
- Any line in a crontab file that begins with a number sign (#) is a comment and is ignored.

Examples:
To execute the script delete-logs.cgi every morning at 9:30 AM the line in the crontab file would look like this:
30 9 * * * /home/username/www/delete-logs.cgi

To execute update-calendar.php at 1 PM on the 1st and 15th of the month, the line in the crontab file would look like this:
0 13 1,15 * * /home/username/www/update-calendar.php

To execute update-calendat.php at 6 PM (hour 18) on the 10th day of June (month 6) and December (month 12) the crontab would look like this:
0 18 10 6,12 * /home/username/www/update-calendar.php

Another example... let's setup a crontab to make a backup of script.cgi on Tuesday at 2:25 PM.

MIN = 25
HOUR = 14 (note that military time is used)
DAYOFMONTH = * (doesn't apply)
MONTHOFYEAR = * (again we don't care)
DAYOFWEEK = 2 (Sun=0, Mon=1, Tue=2)

So our crontab entry would be...

25 14 * * 2 /bin/cp /home/username/www/script.cgi /home/username/www/backup-script.cgi

For more information about crontab type: man crontab