scripts.mit.edu

MIT SIPB Script Services for Athena

New features on scripts.mit.edu

March 25, 2008 at 1:55 am by in

If you develop websites on scripts.mit.edu, we thought you might like to hear about some of the new little features we’ve quietly developed over the last year.

  • You can now access your website from yourname.scripts.mit.edu instead of http://scripts.mit.edu/~yourname. The new URLs are easier to type and more secure against cross-site scripting attacks. On https://yourname.scripts.mit.edu, current web browsers (supporting SNI) will receive a valid SSL certificate for *.scripts.mit.edu. This also works for group lockers.
  • Setting up certificate authentication on scripts is easier than ever. Just add three lines to your .htaccess file, and your visitors will be automatically redirected to port 444, which accepts optional client certificates. Visitors without certificates will be shown a friendly error page (which you can customize if you want). You can restrict access by user, AFS group, or other standard Apache authorization modules.
  • A new Apache module supports optional authentication. If you add
    AuthSSLCertAuthoritative off
AuthOptional on
    to your .htaccess file, then the Apache authorization process will be bypassed, so that your script can perform authorization itself, and treat authenticated users differently from anonymous users (which will have the REMOTE_USER variable unset).
  • You can now install Python modules into your locker using easy_install --user from the scripts servers, and they will be automatically accessible to Python scripts in your locker.
  • nelhage has made the Jifty web framework for Perl available in the jifty locker for scripts.mit.edu as well as Athena and Debathena.

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Questions? Contact scripts@mit.edu.

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