Action Required for major webservice change July 15 2024

Dear CSAIL members,

As first announced last September[^1] TIG is transitioning our legacy shared webservers to a new clustered infrastructure providing better security and availibility. Newly requested sites with custom domain names have been using this new cluster for nearly a year.

As of July 15th 2024 our shared webservers will only serve static content (e.g., HTML, CSS, client-side JS)

Affected servers are:

people.csail.mit.edu groups.csail.mit.edu project.csail.mit.edu courses.csail.mit.edu

Sites with active content will need to be migrated to our new web hosting infrastructure before this date. Please test your sites and contact us at help@csail.mit.edu as soon as possible to ensure a smooth transition. For most site this means picking a new name (ie .csail.mit.edu to replace groups.csail.mit.edu/) and then reviewing the code to ensure it works on the updated server. Note that TIG can not help with debugging or updating your code. Available languages include Python, Perl, Ruby and PHP.

Since September TIG has been running testing versions of the affected servers. You should check any sites you host on the affected servers by going to the equivalent -test host:

people-test.csail.mit.edu groups-test.csail.mit.edu projects-test.csail.mit.edu courses-test.csail.mit.edu

For example to test https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tig/ go to https://groups-test.csail.mit.edu/tig/

If your site requires active content or if you encounter any other issues with your site on the demo URL, please let us know by reaching out to us at help@csail.mit.edu.

Thank you for your understanding during this transition.

Jonathan Proulx (he/him) Sr. Technical Architect The Infrastructure Group MIT CSAIL

[^1] https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/private/active-users/2023-September/000002.html

Previous Notice: https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/private/active-users/2023-September/000002.html Erin Gwen Roberts erin at csail.mit.edu
Thu Sep 7 10:51:53 EDT 2023

Dear CSAIL members,

Our shared webservers will be transitioning to a new hosting
infrastructure later this year. If you have a site hosted on
people.csail.mit.edu, groups.csail.mit.edu, courses.csail.mit.edu, or
projects.csail.mit.edu, your site may be affected.

One significant change is that only static content (e.g., HTML, CSS,
client-side JS) will be enabled on these servers. We will host your
active content upon request, however, enabling this will necessitate
registering a custom URL.

To help minimize disruption, we have set up demo URLs that show the
new configuration and will help you to identify if your site will be
impacted by these changes.

people-test.csail.mit.edu groups-test.csail.mit.edu projects-test.csail.mit.edu courses-test.csail.mit.edu

To see if your site will be affected by this change, please browse to
your site’s URL, but replace the webserver name with the version
ending in -test above. For example, if your site is hosted at
groups.csail.mit.edu/waterdrinker, visit
groups-test.csail.mit.edu/waterdrinker to see if your site appears as
it should.

If your site requires active content or if you encounter any other
issues with your site on the demo URL, please let us know by reaching
out to us at help at csail.mit.edu We will assist in making arrangements
to host your site with the features you need.

Thank you for your understanding during this transition.

Erin Roberts System Administrator MIT CSAIL