server move

[Jim Green]

Thank you for the very helpful responses to my question on how to
notify users about our move of the web server.  I appreciate the
suggestion to drop my plan to notify them with a web page and to
just let the aliasing of the old host name to the new do its job.
I'm not completely sure why I didn't think of it but it seems to
be partly a misunderstanding of TCP/IP networking on my part (aliases work
better than I thought) and partly because I've seen others do it so I just
assumed it was the thing to do (wrong!).

A couple of folks asked, "why change the host name at all?"  The answer
is that we are changing from www.libraries.wayne.edu to www.lib.wayne.edu
because our Internet Committee recently established a standard domain name
of lib.wayne.edu for all WSU Libraries' servers.  We are supposed to have
aliases to libraries.wayne.edu and library.wayne.edu for all of them, too.
I am open to feedback on this if anyone out there thinks this is not a
good idea, now would be a good time for me to find that out.

Special thanks to Roy Tennant for cluing me in on the environment variable
I was asking about even though I won't be needing it for this now -- I do
see where there might be applications for it in the future.  It's
HTTP_HOST.  This book I looked in (CGI Programming in C and Perl, by Thomas
Boutell) has an appendix listing environment variables that indeed does not
list this one.  Also thanks for the tip on refresh not working with Opera.
Darn.  I don't like to use things that aren't widely supported....

******************************************************
*    James F. Green                                  *
*    Systems Librarian                               *
*    Wayne State University/DALNET Systems Office    *
*    jfgreen at cms.cc.wayne.edu                        *
*    tel: (313) 577-6439  fax:  (313) 577-3615       *
******************************************************