MIT Student Information Processing Board
The MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) has been a
stronghold of top hacker talent since 1969, and we count among our
members generations of operating system contributors, storied
computing experts, and successful software entrepreneurs.
The Board's mission is to further computing at MIT, both by
offering services to the MIT community and by acting as an ideal
location for people to hack on cool projects. We teach programming
classes, run servers, publish the "Ask SIPB" column in the Tech, and
write and maintain software for MIT's Athena computing environment.
Our office (W20-575) is packed with Linux, Macintosh, Windows, and
Solaris workstations, two photographic film scanners, a DVD burner,
HDTV gear, an oscilloscope, a fully-stocked soda and candy fridge, a
library of technical books on almost any topic, and some astonishingly
accomplished hackers.
Our members are responsible for a wide array of projects. LAMP is a
legal music delivery system that allows anyone on campus listen to
songs from 2,000 CDs on demand. SIPB members wrote many of the
shortest (and quite legally controversial) DVD descrambler programs,
now printed and sold on controversial ties, controversial shirts, and
controversial napkins. The "Sportcast" project is developing the
world's only open-source HDTV live editing and effects software, which
will be used to broadcast MIT sports games in HDTV. SIPB is also
involved in technical advocacy around MIT. SIPB members were also
responsible for implementing a phone transfer gateway that persuaded
IS&T to cancel an unpopular policy of charging $17/month for receiving
incoming calls on dormitory phones. A more extensive sampling of
other recent projects and activities is given below.
Interested in joining our ranks? If you want to learn more about
computers from some of the people who know them best, need help
getting financial sponsorship or other resources for a computing
project, would like to teach a class during IAP, or just want to rock
out and write a little code in our large and comfortable office, SIPB
membership may be for you. (No technical skills are required. If you
don't have any, you'll learn fast, and we always have plenty of
non-technical work to do.)
Full membership in SIPB is open to all MIT undergraduate and graduate
students; associate membership is open to anyone who shares our goals.
Most people complete some kind of technical community service project
as part of joining. Stop by at any time, or come by one of our weekly
meetings on Monday evenings at 7:30pm in W20-575 to learn more.
SIPB Computer Tours
SIPB offers annual Computer Tours every
Fall, an opportunity to see cool server rooms and computing projects
around campus. The tours conclude with snacks and what is often
several hours of tales about MIT's computing infrastructure from our
very own master storyteller.
scripts.mit.edu
No IS&T-provided service allows Athena
users to make web-accessible CGI scripts. The SIPB web script
service, scripts.mit.edu, allows you
to put scripts on the web using nothing more than an Athena account.
SIPB-Debian
Linux Athena is not the optimal operating system
for personal machines, especially laptops, which most students arrive
on campus with. Students who choose to install some distribution of
Linux, often Debian, on their laptops thus sacrifice the easy
availability of Athena services. The SIPB-Debian project aims to
provide client software for Athena services as Debian packages, so
that Debian users can easily install the Athena services on their
machines.
linerva.mit.edu
At present, the official IS&T dialups, athena.dialup.mit.edu , run
Solaris-Athena, which many users who have linux experience find
annoying. Further, they do not allow sessions to continue more than a
few hours, preventing users from running zephyr logging programs on
them. We have a prototype SIPB-Debian dialup running on linerva.mit.edu. We hope to
have it ready for production usage by the end of the summer; until
then, feel free to log in, but be aware that
The SIPB AFS Cell
SIPB maintains the sipb AFS cell, along
with the sipb and outland Athena lockers, which make available on any
Athena workstation hundreds of software packages that IS&T does not
support.
Fun Computer Stuff
We also have some fun abuses of
technology, such as sipbmp3, our print server that spools music to the
office speakers. We're also working on building a large Athena Defcon
display to show the state of Athena services outside our office at the
entrance of the W20 cluster (the largest cluster on campus).
Useful Documentation
SIPB maintains some documentation about Athena and programs that you
may find useful over the summer, and may explain some of the
terminology we've used in the rest of this page.
A useful source on how to use Athena is the Athena
Pocket Reference Guide, which gives a brief summary of how to use
the most useful Athena services.
An
Inessential Guide to Athena offers a more verbose view of how to
use Athena.
The sipb zephyr class is an excellent place to ask technical questions
or ask for help with a technical problem. Listening on class SIPB can
also be quite instructive. You can learn about Zephyr, an instance
messaging system built at MIT that has a unique atmosphere of
"chatrooms" (zephyr classes), from our Inessential
Guide to Zephyr. If you want to get a deeper view into Athena,
you may want to consider reading How Athena Works.
Your Project Here
SIPB has a long history of providing MIT students with resources and
help with their computing projects. In fact, it's original purpose
was to review applications for computing (information processing) time
and install timesharing terminals in dormitories, hence our name.
Drop by our office and talk to a member about how we can help you with
your project idea.
![[Pictures of SIPB people doing cool things.]](slideshow.png)