I am basically posting this here as a reference for myself, but I’m sure the information will be helpful to other people out there, as well.

Occasionally, when working on my Web server, I need to create a new user on the server and grant one or more other users permission to view and edit files within the new user’s home directory. This task, in itself, does not seem all that difficult on the surface. However, because most Unix servers are set up (and rightfully so, for security purposes) not to allow most users to navigate outside of their own home directories, it becomes a problem.

Let’s say, for example, that you have two users on your Web server that you want to allow permissions to view and edit each other’s home directories, but you don’t want them to have access to any other files and folders on the Web server.

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Last week at work, we unveiled one of the new Web sites I’ve been working on for a while.  In doing so, we removed the old Web site completely from the server and replaced it with the new site.

Of course, when we did so, a lot of our old links became obsolete, so I had to find an effective solution to keep our regular visitors from going bananas when they tried to access some of their favorite pages.  That’s when I began to look into some options for redirecting without having to create placeholder pages just for those redirects.  After quite a few fruitless searches, I was able to piece together a fairly good solution, and also discovered an easy way to achieve URL rewriting on an IIS server (similar to the way you would with htaccess on an apache server).

First, you need to set up your “404″ so that it points to a VBScript page.  That’s the most important part.  Once you’ve got that done, navigate to a page that you know does not exist on your server, just so you can test the behavior of your 404 page.

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