Student Information Processing Board @ MIT

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Discuss was originally designed as a bulletin board system, but is now most commonly used at MIT for mailing list archiving. Pergamon is SIPB’s self-service Discuss server. For more information on using discuss, you can see SIPB’s documentation (DVI). IS&T’s diswww service also provides a fairly self-explanatory (if you know the hostname and meeting name) web interface to Discuss.

Creating a Discuss archive

The simplest way to create a private Discuss archive on Pergamon is to simply run

athrun adehnert make-discuss-archive listname desc acl

Arguments:

  • listname should be the name of the Moira list you would like to archive.
  • desc should be a short (a couple word) description of the list, which will be used as the Discuss meeting’s “long name” – for example, “scripts.mit.edu administration archive”.
  • acl should be the name of a Moira/AFS group (pass the -G flag to blanche) to sync. Pergamon does not currently support ongoing AFS sync, so you will need to manually resync the ACL (see below) when you update the list.

Relevant commands

The make-discuss-archive script is fairly simple, and just shells out to remctl and blanche, so you can run the underlying commands yourself if you prefer:

  • remctl pergamon discuss make-private-meeting "$list" "$desc" will create a meeting that only you have read access to
  • remctl pergamon discuss make-public-meeting "$list" "$desc" will create a meeting that anybody can read
  • remctl pergamon discuss set-read-acl "$list" "$acl" will sync read access to the $list meeting with the Moira/AFS group $acl. You can always set this command to run from a cronjob if you wish, or just run it manually when you update the ACL group. (In the glorious future, Pergamon may gain support for doing this automatically, but we haven’t written that yet. If you want to do so, let us know – pergamon AT mit.edu.)
  • Pergamon will add anything sent to $list-mtg@pergamon.mit.edu to the discuss archive. If you want to archive a Mailman or non-MIT list, you can just add that address to your list. The script runs blanche "$list" -a "$list-mtg@pergamon.mit.edu" to do that for you.

Common discuss servers

The main three Discuss servers around the SIPB community are:

  • pergamon, SIPB’s self-service discuss server. It’s the newest of the three, and the only one that does not require manual intervention to create a new meeting. It’s named after the historical Library of Pergamon (the second greatest library in its time, after the Library of Alexandria)
  • charon, SIPB’s earlier discuss server, used by most SIPB projects. You can contact charon-maintainers AT mit.edu to get a discuss meeting there, if you don’t want to use pergamon.
  • menelaus, IS&T’s discuss server. You can contact accounts AT mit.edu to get a discuss meeting there.