SIPB Software Services

The most essential inessential computing at MIT

All of the following SIPB services are free and available to all members of the MIT community.

• scripts.mit.edu No IS&T-provided service allows Athena users to make web-accessible CGI scripts. Using the SIPB web script service, you can put scripts on the web using nothing more than an Athena account. Perl, PHP, Python, and many other languages are supported. SIPB supports two other script services. The SIPB mail script service allows you to write scripts to process e-mail sent to an address @scripts.mit.edu. The SIPB shortjobs service allows you to set up scripts to run at certain times during the day. See http://scripts.mit.edu for more information about any of the SIPB script services.

• The SIPB AFS Locker The SIPB AFS locker contains software that is not included on Athena by IS&T but that we find useful enough to make available on our own. To use programs that are stored in the SIPB AFS locker, you must first run “add sipb” from an Athena command prompt. The SIPB AFS locker contains several AIM clients (such as gaim), the Ogg-Vorbis music system, several programming languages, the vim editor, the Mutt e-mail program, and more. We also maintain many more lockers of more experimental software. Ask us about them.

• IMAP Mail Backup Script Are you worried that you might accidentally delete some or all of the e-mail in your MIT mail account? You can run this script to copy all of the messages stored in your MIT IMAP mail account to a folder in your Athena home directory. For more information, run the following two commands at an Athena command prompt:

add outland
imapback --help

• stuff.mit.edu stuff.mit.edu offers a few interesting web services such as a zwrite gateway, a finger gateway, an acronym database gateway, and a cview (Athena cluster information) interface.

What is SIPB? The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB, pronounced sip-bee) is MIT’s volunteer student group dedicated to computing. SIPB has, in one form or another, been working on improving computing at MIT since 1969. Today, SIPB contributes to MIT computing by sponsoring interesting projects that provide additional services or expertise to the MIT community. We have an office just outside the Athena cluster in the MIT Student Center, and you are welcome to come to the office to ask us for help or to hang around and use our computers.

Have a suggestion for a new service or for new software? Willing to work to make it happen? Contact us with your ideas. We may be able to provide you with help or other resources to make your project possible.