Class sites:
Stellar is the main portal for most of your classes.
Accounts:
Athena is the name for MIT's network. Get an account : you will need your MIT ID number to do this.
Websis:
Websis: Websis is the main student information system. You will need a certificate to gain access to the various services in Websis. Websis is where you will register for non-Sloan classes. It contains information on cross-registering at other Boston/Cambridge area Universities. It is where you will get your “report card” – select “Student” then “Academic Record” then “Grade Report”. It is also where to change your personal information.
Required Software:
MIT generally supports the latest stable operating systems, browsers, and applications. The SDM office will tell you that must have “admin privileges” for your machine: this depends on the application you are installing.
Dialup access (Tether)
Tether offers dialup Internet access to MIT. You can acquire a Tether account during the IT setup session during IAP. Contact the LGO-SDM IT folks and they will point you to who to contact for an account. Tether is useful for dialing in if you don’t already have a dialup Internet service provider or broadband at home. MIT’s administration believes that everyone should come to campus to do work, so dialups aregrudgingly supported at best. They work, but they can be terribly slow on the server side as if Kbps line speeds were not slow enough on their own. There is also a specialized vocabulary to learn, most terms defined elsewhere in this document. If you are dialing up, you are considered to be off-campus. You will want a wifi card if you don't have one already, as wifi is the preferred network connection method and supported pretty much everywhere on campus.
SDM mailing lists:
SDM maintains mailing lists of students by class year, the year is the January when you start. So those of us who started in January 2000 are on the SDM00 lists, etc. All lists end in “@mit.edu”. The mailing lists are maintained by the staff and updated before the beginning of every term. Using “yy” in place of the year, the following are the lists. They are private lists maintained on Athena using listmaint.
- SDMyy: All SDM students who started Jan yy, plus SDM staff.
- SDM-OC: Current on-campus students plus staff.
- SDM-DL : Current distance students plus staff.
Backup important data often:
The question is not “If you will have a computer problem” it is “When will you have a computer problem”. Murphy is alive and well. Every SDMer has a computer horror story – the problem either happened directly to them or to someone on their team causing a hardship to them directly. Laptops are lighter and possibly more rugged now than in the past – MIT-SDM is tough on students – SDMers are tough on computer equipment. Distance students get the chance to be “problem children” for at least two IT departments (LGO-SDM and corporate). You can back up your critical stuff using MIT tools.
Passwords:
Make MIT-related passwords significantly different from those protecting corporate data; MIT is hacker central and Athena accounts get hacked more often than you might think. Scan anything you download for viruses before opening it; infected homework solutions and the like have been posted unknowingly in the past. Update the signature files for your virus scanner every month or more, so that it can find the latest strains. Do not configure your browser to automatically open or launch downloaded files; save, run a virus scan, then launch. It costs a few seconds and potentially saves you hours/days.