Rosserver Support Online Manual Chapter 13

Online Support Manual

Please use this manual to resolve any problems or questions you may have regarding your account before contacting our Tech Support Staff.

Chapter One - Support Home
Chapter Two - General Account Information
Chapter Three - The Control Panel
Chapter Four - FTP & Fetch Instructions
Chapter Five - Telnet Access
Chapter Six - POP 3 Email Settings
Chapter Seven - Mail Manager & Mail Lists
Chapter Eight - Microsoft FrontPage
Chapter Nine - Anonymous FTP
Chapter Ten - Site Statistics
Chapter Eleven - Password Protected Directories
Chapter Twelve - CGI-Bin, Formmail, SSI
Chapter Thirteen - Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
Chapter Fourteen - Changing Your Password
Chapter Fifteen - PHP
Chapter Sixteen - Policy, Guidelines, & Disclaimer
Chapter Seventeen - Real Audio, Real Video

Chapter Thirteen - Secure Socket Layer

Normally, any text (such as your credit card number) sent from your browser to the web server is sent as plain text. This means that a hacker could potentially intercept (however unlikely) the information sent from your browser and read it. Therefore, by using the secure server, the information is encrypted before it is sent from your browser. It would be practically impossible for anyone to decrypt it without knowing the key.

The following example uses yourdomain as the name of your domain and any page as the name of the order form or the page you wish to be secure.

Use the following url to call your pages via the secure server:

https://host.$servername.com/your_domainname/anypage.html (no .com or .net)

The above page would be accessed from the normal web server as:

http://your_full_domainname/anypage.html (with the .com or .net)

Go to www.yourdomain.com/menu and click on Formmail and follow the instructions for installing your formmail.

If you are calling the formmail through the secure server, your action line and other code will look like the following:

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="https://host.$servername.com/cgi-sys/formmail.pl">
<input type=hidden name="recipient" value="emailaccount@yourdomain.com">
<input type=hidden name="subject" value="Order">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_url" value="https://host.$servername.com/$yourdomain/yourpage">
<input type=hidden name="return_link_title" value="Back to Your Page">

The last two lines allow a link back to your main page - thus they get a report of what they ordered and a link.

It's important that you call your order page through a secure URL (HTTPS) in order for it to work properly

Example:

https://host.$servername.com/yourdomain/yourorderform.html
(note: $yourdomain does not include the extension)
(note: $servername can be found in your server control panel under the "account management" button)

SSL is active from the moment your account is created but you will need to request access to the CGI-bin through SSL, this will take 24 hours to accomplish. So if you need your secure server name or need your secure cgi-bin enabled please go to the Tech Support button in your Server Control Panel, and we will provide you with this information. Your secure server name was e-mailed to you in that "Welcome Letter" that had your IP address and password in it.

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