scripts.mit.edu

scripts.mit.edu Fedora 15 Transition

On Monday, November 21, 2011, all of the scripts.mit.edu servers will be upgraded from Fedora 13 to Fedora 15, which was released on May 25. We strongly encourage you to test your website as soon as possible, and to contact us at scripts@mit.edu or come to our office in W20-557 if you experience any problems. The easiest way to test your site is to run the following commands at an Athena workstation and then visit your website in the browser that opens, but see this page for more details and important information:

athena% add scripts
athena% firefox-test

MS Office XML and OpenOffice.org file types added to white list

Our whitelist of file types served directly to the web has for a long time included .doc, .xls, and .ppt. With the advent of new XML-based Microsoft Office formats, and with the popularity of LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org, there have been requests for whitelisting these additional file types. As of yesterday, the new Office XML filetypes — .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc. — as well as ODF file types — .odt, .ods, .odp, etc. — will also be served directly to the web.

In addition to files you place in your locker, this also affects files uploaded to your website via the standard upload feature of apps such as MediaWiki and WordPress.

The full list of whitelisted extensions is posted in our FAQ.

scripts.mit.edu Fedora 13 Transition

On Sunday, September 26, 2010, all of the scripts.mit.edu servers will be upgraded from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13, which was released on May 25. We strongly encourage you to test your website as soon as possible, and to contact us at scripts@mit.edu or come to our office in W20-557 if you experience any problems. The easiest way to test your site is to run the following commands at an Athena workstation and then visit your website in the browser that opens, but see this page for more details and important information:

athena% add scripts
athena% firefox-test

Certificate Authentication in Safari

If you’ve tried to use our recommended configuration for authenticating users using MIT certificates, you’ve probably discovered that Safari users are not offered the opportunity to select a certificate. This is due to a bug in Safari’s SSL implementation where it will never present a certificate unless the server requires that it present one (we do not require that a certificate be presented, so that we can show a page saying “you need certificates”).

Starting today, we’ve added some additional code that will force Safari to show the certificate selection dialog. If you are using the recommended configuration for certificate authentication, this will take effect for your site automatically. (Specifically, what we now do is that force an SSL renegotation if we find the Safari browser.)

If you are using any other configuration than our recommended configuration, the behavior should not change.

(You can see the technical details of this change in our source browser.)

New Hostname Management Inteface

The scripts.mit.edu team is pleased to announce a new online interface for managing your scripts.mit.edu hostnames (lovingly called Pony). You can now easily request short URLs to use with your scripts.mit.edu sites and reconfigure your existing hostnames.

WordPress autoinstaller upgraded to version 2.8.5

We’ve upgraded the WordPress autoinstaller on scripts.mit.edu to install WordPress version 2.8.5. This is the most current stable version of WordPress, and includes several security hardening improvements backported from the upcoming WordPress 2.9 release.

Ruby on Rails autoinstaller

At long last, we’ve just deployed a brand new autoinstaller for Ruby on Rails, the popular Ruby based web application framework.

Ruby on Rails has been supported on scripts.mit.edu for quite some time, but the setup process was entirely manual, and involved many nonintuitive steps. You can now get a working Rails installation up and running for your own application in less than 60 seconds by typing

$ add scripts
$ scripts-rails

from any Athena machine, and following the instructions.

This brings the count of autoinstallable applications up to 12:

advancedbook
django
e107
gallery2
joomla
mediawiki
phpbb
phpical
rails
trac
turbogears
wordpress

You can read more about these applications on our quick-start page.

WordPress autoinstaller upgraded to version 2.8.4

We’ve upgraded the WordPress autoinstaller on scripts.mit.edu to install WordPress version 2.8.4. This is the most current stable version of WordPress, and includes yet another important security fix for an issue that was present through version 2.8.3, which was just recently released.

WordPress autoinstaller upgraded to version 2.8.3

We’ve upgraded the WordPress autoinstaller on scripts.mit.edu to install WordPress version 2.8.3. This is the most current stable version of WordPress, and includes a security fix that was missed in version 2.8.2, which was just recently released.

Django autoinstalls now see updates to your code instantly!

The Django autoinstaller has, up until now, told you that when you update your code files, you need to touch index.fcgi in order for the changes to be reflected on the web. Unfortunately, that feature has never worked on scripts.mit.edu. We’ve finally identified the reason for this issue, and implemented an improvement to the autoinstaller — it is no longer necessary to kill your python processes or touch your index.fcgi files. Updates to your .py files are now reflected immediately on the web without you having to do anything else.

We have applied this enhancement to all existing Django autoinstalls that accept our automatic updates.

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