Technology of Privacy

Fall 2016

Problem Set Two

“DUE”: Monday, September 19, 2016,1:20 PM

Ungraded Assignment

Throughout the semester, you will be required to complete short, technology-focused assignments. In homage to undergraduate science and math education, these assignments are called “problem sets.”These assignments won’t be assigned or due every week.

These will do some or all of the following: give you hands-on exposure to technologies discussed in class, thus reinforcing the lesson; give the professor feedback about how well the class is understanding the material; andpreview technical material to be discussed in a future class (or to use the parlance of the day, “flipping” the classroom).

You must hand in your assignment electronically, sometimes via email, Box, or Canvas, and sometimes on the class’s shared server. These assignments will not be graded, but missing or incomplete assignments will count against the participation component of a student’s final grade.

For these ungraded assignments, you should feel free to work with classmates or discuss them on the class discussion board.

For our next class, we will spend time looking at how activity on the web is tracked other than through the use of cookies. In particular, we will spend a lot of time scrutinizing web log files.

Creating and Accessing web pages

Once again, you will be working on the class’s shared linux server, tp.ohmly.com. This server has a web server installed on it, meaning it can be used to host and serve web pages. Every user can create their own webpage or pages in their own Linux directory structure. To make this work, the files comprising the web page must reside in a directory called “public_html,” which must live in the top level of your directories (i.e. /home/<username>/public_html). If you create an html file in that directory (e.g. “index.html”) you can load it in a web browser using the following syntax:

file>

So if I used my “ohm” account to create a file called “foo.html” in a directory called: /home/ohm/public_html/test/” then I could access it with the URL:

If you have never created an html web page before, this is a wonderful time to learn an important skill, and you should find hundreds of tutorials online.

Viewing web logfiles

In addition, I have given you access to the apache log files for this server. Apache log files are described in some of the reading for next week. On this server, they are stored in the directory:

/var/log/apache2/

Of most interest is the “access.log” file.

Your task

Your task this week is straightforward:

  1. Create a web page
  2. Access that web page
  3. View the types of log entries created by that access.
  4. Go back to step 1

Your assignment is: “observe something interesting.”Bring your “something interesting” to class with you.

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