Connecting to Webdev (Development Server)
The University of Adelaide website and sub-sites are designed to be maintained by authorised staff and students of the University. All changes to University of Adelaide webpages are made through a development server, webdev, that sits within the University's firewall. Therefore, for web maintainers who are not on campus, a valid University LDAP username and password is required to access the network.
How to Access the University's Network
Get Authorised
If you need access to edit your School or Faculty's website, please follow the steps below:
- Speak to your Head of Department or an existing website maintainer and ask them to send an email to the Online Media team requesting access for you. The Online Media team will then contact you when access has been granted.
- If you have not edited the University's websites before, you will need to complete a short training session on using TMS. This can be arranged by requesting TMS training.
Log In
You can then either log in:
- from a University of Adelaide campus; or
- via Virtual Private Network (VPN) from home or elsewhere outside of the University's campuses.
- Set up and install Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Certificate Error Message
When a website has secure content, you are typically asked to log in before seeing the content. At this point, the first part of the address displayed in your browser switches from http:// to https://. When this happens your browser and the server exchange security certificates and establish an encrypted connection.
The University's websites use a certificate that covers the domain name *.adelaide.edu.au - meaning that one word can be used before the .adelaide.edu.au (e.g. www). Strictly according to the standard covering SSL certificates, this doesn't cover URLs with more than one word before the adelaide.edu.au e.g. *.*.adelaide.edu.au.
As such, if you are accessing secure websites with *.*.adelaide.edu.au, you may see a certificate security warning or error appear on screen (see below).
If this appears, don't worry! There isn't anything wrong with the content and your access is not restricted. All you need to do is click once on the 'Continue to this website (not recommended)' link and the page will appear.
To reduce the number of times a security certificate error message can potentially appear, several steps have been taken:
- All virtual hosts (e.g. sciences, business etc.) have dual configs to work with and without www e.g. https://sciences.adelaide.edu.au/.
- Links to log into a secure site automatically have www. removed
- All links in HTML documents matching https://www.*.adelaide.edu.au have the www. removed
- Creation of new subdomains is discouraged for public sites
If you have a website on a subdomain, a good workaround is to always refer to your website as <my-site-name>.adelaide.edu.au and never add the www prefix.
