Athena List Settings Legend

The Username

Your Athena Username, also sometimes referred to as your Kerberos Name, your MIT Network ID, or just as your Username, is required for many network services at MIT. If you have an Athena or Eudora account, it is used to check your mail and log into the system.

If you have an e-mail address of the form name@mit.edu, then name is probably your Athena username. If you use Eudora to check your mail, your Eudora username is also your Athena username.

If you do not know whether you have an Athena username, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The Name

Your full name is used by Athena User Accounts to try to contact you in the event that your username was entered incorrectly, as well as in addressing correspondence. It is not used for anything else.

The List Name

Your Athena list needs a name. This name can contain letters, numbers, the underscore character, and dashes. It may contain a period if it refers to an MIT course number and is officially associated with that course. The list name should be entirely lower case. No upper case characters are allowed.

If your list is a mailing list, the address for your list will be listname@mit.edu on the MIT mail servers. If you are considering a long name, keep in mind that anyone sending mail to the list will have to type the list name to send mail to the list. A short but descriptive list name is probably best.

Finally, sometimes users will send mail to an address by the best-guess method. To avoid random or incidental mailings to your list, avoid names which may easily be confused with other groups or purposes. For example, a name such as study-help-ee@mit.edu is probably a better choice than help@mit.edu

If you are not sure what list name to choose for your application, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The List Members

The members are the e-mail addresses that will receive the mail sent to this list. If your list of members and list of administrators are the same, you probably want a self-owned list.

To specify a user, or a string ("address@wherever.com"), or a list, just enter it. If you want a more unusual entry, such as a kerberos principal or a machine, you may specify that explicitly:
KERBEROS:user@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
MACHINE:machinename

If you are not sure how to set up your list, or who to specify as members, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The Administrators

Every Athena mailing list must be owned by one or more administrators. Administrators have the power to update the membership of a list, or change its characteristics such as visibility and the list name.

Every administrator must have a Kerberos username. To modify a list, a tool such as listmaint or blanche is used. It is best to use these tools by logging into Athena. For more information, see the stock answer on listmaint.

If more than one administrator is requested for any given list, a second list, usually of the form listname-request, is created. This list holds the administrators for the list listname. This list is then made the owner of the list listname.

It is now possible to have a different set of people who can make changes to the list membership (that is, add and remove people from the list), who are not the owners of the list (and thus cannot delete the list, rename the list, or change other list properties). If you want this sort of membership-changes-only list, contact User Accounts.

If you are not sure how to set up your list, or who to specify as administrators, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The Public Setting

An Athena list can be made either public or private. By default, a list will be private. If a list is made public, any Athena user can add herself to the list by using the list administration tools. If a list is private, a list administrator must add new members to the list.

Public lists are a good choice for MIT wide discussion lists to which any member of the MIT community can subscribe, as well as lists that are used for essentially public information or discussion which see high turnover rates in their membership.

If you are not sure whether to make your list public or private, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The Visibility of a List

An Athena list can be either hidden or visible. By default, a list is visible, which means that other Athena users can look up basic information about this list, such as its membership, description or its administrators.

If a list is made hidden, that information is available only to the list administrators (and select other, privileged users), via list maintenance software. Even list members cannot view the membership or the information for a hidden list, unless they are also administrators.

If you do not know whether to make your list hidden or visible for your application, please contact Athena User Accounts at x3-1325 or send mail to accounts@mit.edu.

The Mailing List

An Athena list is by default a mailing list. That means that the members of the list will be mailable through the address listname@mit.edu, which will distribute the mail the all the members of the list. Such a list may include e-mail addresses for users outside of MIT.

You may choose to not make your list a mailing list. This is useful if you want to use the list as an access group for an Athena file system, but do not want it to be an e-mail address.

AFS Group

In addition to (or instead of) being a mailing list, and Athena list can also be a group. A group can be used as an access control list on the AFS file system, for example. If you wish to be able to set access permissions on an Athena directory or locker for the members of your list, you should choose to make it a group.

Note that only Athena users (or WinAthena users) on your list will be able to take advantage of this feature. If you have any other members on your list, such as e-mail addresses outside of MIT, they will not be able to access Athena file systems.

NFS Group

While AFS groups (the default type) are what you need for giving permissions on most Athena lockers, if the locker in question is an NFS file system (such as a directory mounted from a private workstation), then access is granted via an NFS group.

Note: Only Athena users (or WinAthena users) on your list will be able to take advantage of this feature. If you have any other members on your list, such as e-mail addresses outside of MIT, they will not be able to access Athena file systems.

The Description

A short description may be specified for an Athena list. This description is displayed for lists which are not marked hidden if list information is generated by another Athena user.

Self-Owned Lists

A list may have itself designated as its own maintainer; this means that anyone on the list can add and remove members. If all of the people you are specifying for adminstrators are also going to be the only members of your list, then you probably want a self-owned list. If your list is meant to be managed by one or more people, but the list itself is larger, then you probably do not want a self-owned list.