switch to *.scripts.mit.edu and disable scripts.mit.edu/~username

[andersk]

(Imported from ​help.mit.edu #424130.)

geofft:

We've had *.scripts working since mid-October. We should start to publicize these URLs more aggressively, and announce an end-of-life date for the scripts/~ URLs sometime early spring term.

[price]

Once we no longer support /~lockername URIs (except with a redirect to lockername.scripts/~lockername or something, to avoid breaking links), we'll have more freedom in building a nice web-based vhost-management system for users, which will take a steady load out of the RT queue and likely also increase the volume of users taking advantage of vhosts.

[price]

Blocking on #47 and #48. Then we can make a good start on this task proper just by removing scripts/~ URIs from the scripts/web introduction.

[price]

Once we no longer support /~lockername URIs (except with a redirect to lockername.scripts/~lockername or something, to avoid breaking links), we'll have more freedom in building a nice web-based vhost-management system for users, which will take a steady load out of the RT queue and likely also increase the volume of users taking advantage of vhosts.

IOW, in doing #3.

[adehnert]

I believe that we now use locker.scripts.mit.edu exclusively in autoinstalls now. We should discuss a deprecation process for scripts.mit.edu/~locker.

[adehnert]

Anders claims that the only thing left is checking if any Wordpresses think they're at scripts.mit.edu/~username, and if so fixing them.

[andersk]

We can’t finish this transition for lockers that aren’t valid hostnames until we do #262. We could do it for the lockers that are, assuming there are no affected Wordpress installs.

[adehnert]

Replying to andersk:

We can’t finish this transition for lockers that aren’t valid hostnames until we do #262. We could do it for the lockers that are, assuming there are no affected Wordpress installs.

#262 is really three underlying issues:

• #106: I think I'm comfortable saying "your SSL usage gives a warning when you have a dot in your name, unless you grab mit6858.mit.edu and use that" (redirection of legacy URLs using HTTPS will produce a warning, but that's also okay, I think)
• #171: it sounds like we only really care for initial or terminal underscores. New users are unlikely to realize the scripts/~username approach exists, and we only have one current user.
• #176: entirely irrelevant to this issue

In summary, I think I'm personally okay with deciding I don't care about these issues.

[adehnert]

We decided we were happy disabling scripts/~user, as follows:

• we will log accesses (#391) and contact users who are using this feature, to tell them to stop
• we will add a redirect from scripts/~user/ -> user.scripts/~user/
• we will fix old wordpresses, using parallel-find and mysql DB munging (presumably only making changes for installs where scripts-security-upd has bits)

[adehnert]

We should probably scan our documentation for uses of tilde URLs -- in particular, see #416.