About Protected Personal Web space

On July 28, 2023, the Protected Personal web server will be retired as a service. This change aligns with the retirement of the PASS service upon which it depends to store web content.

ACTION: Please migrate your data to another platform before July 28. You can review the recommended options to replace PASS-based web hosting features on Choosing Your PASS Alternative.

As of June 23, 2021, protected.personal.psu.edu has migrated from Cosign to OpenID Connect for authentication. This is part of a much larger process to move from WebAccess to the new Penn State Sign In process. Right now, logging in will look much the same. If you look closely, you may see different urls pass by in the process, but it will still prompt for login, password, and 2fa as usual.

The first time you log in, you may see a Microsoft screen asking you to grant permission to s8-webhosting-allow-limited to do the following:

View your basic profile
Maintain access to data you have given it access to

S8-webhosting-allow-limited is simply the name of the application in Microsoft Azure that handles authentication for this and some other web sites we manage. Once you grant these permissions, you will gain access to this and the other web sites, and you should not be asked again.

More information on the new Penn State Sign In can be found in this ServiceNow Knowledge Base article.

In addition to the new authentication process, we have made some changes in the Access Control Manager:

Restricting access using FPS (Limited) accounts no longer hangs for a minute before finally erroring out.
The downside to this is that FPS userids you choose are not looked up to make sure they exist, so please be careful. We will circle back to this and provide that functionality at a later date.
This top-level page no longer requires authentication. It is still required for the Access Control Manager and to access someone's protected web site.
The Logout button now works.

Get Protected - Overview!

First, use the PASS Explorer, also available via the left-side navigation, to add content to your protected space. Other methods for adding content to PASS are found on personal.psu.edu.
Then, protect/restrict your content by launching the Access Control Manager Wizard via the left-side navigation.

About Protected Personal Web space

Protected Personal Web space provides a means by which users can restrict access to specific files stored in their respective Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS) folders. Those who have www (Personal Web space) folders in PASS are automatically provided with an additional folder labeled www_protected within their respective PASS folders.

A step-by-step Web-based Access Control Manager (ACM) Wizard allows users to easily specify who should have access to specific files within his/her www_protected folder. Access may be restricted to Penn State Access Account userids, Friends of Penn State Accounts, and/or Access Account groups or roles.

Information Technology Services (ITS) continues to offer the Penn State community the option to apply for Personal Web space via an online quiz at https://www.work.psu.edu/webspace/. Once granted, a www folder is created in one's Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS). The www folder is publicly accessible by the entire Web, unless some extra steps are taken to restrict access.