Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:30:24 -0400 (EDT) From: Timothy G Abbott To: sipb-office@MIT.EDU cc: sipb-ec@MIT.EDU Hello all, As we reach (and now have passed) the end of the the term, I feel that it is important that we have some reflection on what SIPB has been doing to serve the MIT community. Thus, I have prepared the following report on the SIPB's activites this term. Membership: SIPB has made excellent progress this year in handling the membership process more effectively. My practice of regularly reporting to the membership on the activities of each of our active prospectives (begun early last fall) seems to have served us well. Further, the improved communication with SIPB prospectives about their status resulting from this seems to have made the SIPB membership process smoother. Only a few years ago we had to worry that we would not have 9 active voting members to fill the SIPB EC. Before graduation, we had 22 active voting members. I've noticed an increase in the expected population of the SIPB office this term over much of my past time at MIT. I attribute the recent popularity of the SIPB office to the office reorganization last Fall that created Laptop Land, and a second recent increase to the purchase fo the new monitors. SIPB meeting attendance is also up over last year (though not over the recent peak in 2005). Below are the median attendance data for the 13 meetings following February 15 over the last decade. While we are below the recent peak in 2005, we are doing quite well in comparison to my freshman year, and have recently been having shortages of seating at meetings once again. 1998 Median: 27 1999 Median: 33 2000 Median: 29 2001 Median: 25 2002 Median: 22 2003 Median: 16 2004 Median: 16 2005 Median: 25 2006 Median: 20 2007 Median: 22 Projects: SIPB's projects have been the most important part of shaping the Board and its image on campus in recent times. Many of these have received substantial attention this term: - SIPB has begun a grand virtualization project funded by ISDA. The vision for this project is for MIT students to be able to commission a virtual machine running linux using their MIT certificates, substantially decreasing development time for projects where one wants a scratch machine. The project is currently waiting on hardware purchases. - The Debathena project has been working on two major initiatives. We've been working on a repackaging of all of our work to be extremely clean and easy to maintain (as opposed to the last repackaging, which was intended to make the binary packages extremely clean). The Debathena project has also begun work on a desktop environment. Though we've been delayed by the hardware failure on mega-man, we presently have a reasonable system that is quite usable. Linerva is currently hovering at around 125 concurrent users, and has become a quite popular service around campus. While linux security vulnerabilities have occasionally caused us to need to reboot linerva, Jeff Arnold has developed a new system for deploying security updates to the Linux kernel without rebooting the machine, to further improve the reliability of this system. - LAMP is still working and reasonably popular, though usage is on the decline. 636 people used LAMP in the last year, playing 16,943 unique songs an average of 4.1 times each. By comparison, 907 people used LAMP in the previous year, playing 20,615 unique songs an average of 6.4 times each. We may want to consider advertising LAMP again. - Sportcast filmed and broadcasted three sports games in HDTV (one football and two ice hockey), including its first outdoor game. All three games were in the fall. - Nothing that SIPB has done recently compares in popularity to scripts.mit.edu (well, okay, maybe our new outside stapler service). With nearly 1500 users publishing websites using scripts, it has become an important part of the MIT computing environment. scripts.mit.edu is nearing 100 DNS CNAMEs, twice as many as we had when the scripts 3-year report was sent a few months ago. scripts.mit.edu has also been making some excellent improvements to ensure high reliability, with the deployment of Linux Virtual Server (LVS) load balancing. LVS will allow us to do security updates and handle hardware failures on the scripts servers without a service disruption. This very week, one of the scripts LVS servers had a hardware failure without a service outage. Scripts is in fact doing so well that IS&T is building a similar service. - Cluedumps. SIPB ran a series of cluedumps every week last fall that were fairly popular. We should consider doing so again -- I think that it was a great way for people interested in computing to learn the sorts of things that we expect members to know in a more organized fashion. - IAP. We had 24 or so classes this IAP. Since this was twice as many as the number of cluedumps (and each class normally met for more than an hour or two), our IAP classes are a substantially larger teaching project than our Cluedump series, as is appropriate for IAP vs. term projects. - quickprint.mit.edu, a new service to make printing easier. Joe will be sending an announcement about it sometime soon. - course.mit.edu has a more accurate system for finding course websites based on some user guidance. We should advertise it. - The snork Ubuntu mirror has been set up. - The ipv6 project has done various upgrades. - The Athena Defcon sign was built! We need to make a circuit board for it so that we can mount it outside the office. - We now have a stapler outside office. It's very popular, more so than our in-office stapling service. We also have a new paper cutter. - Binkley was restored, and much hunt was played. - Backups for charon and penguin-lust were moved to TSM, and martyr-of-the-falklands was retired. We probably should do some additional work on our backup infrastructure. - various locker software packages were upgraded. - We ran a party this CPW, and around 10 prefrosh showed up and hung out. I think we should do a better-advertised version of this event during orientation to give more freshmen a chance to learn what SIPB is about. - Asksipb columns were published for a few weeks this term (including over CPW weekend). It would be good to get back on a regular publishing schedule. Office Improvements: The SIPB office has had a number of improvements made this term. We purchased several large monitors, which seem to be quite popular. We have a new projector, which has a lot of potential for good use, though we've not developed a final mounting plan for it. The SIPB glass whiteboard was mounted this term; I think having a wall-size whiteboard has made meetings to plan things in the office much more productive. We also purchased some new chairs and ditched some broken ones. I think a lot of people are quite pleased with the often clean open space of laptop land. In fact, the office has been substantially cleaner this term; nobody has called the SIPB office a pit during a SIPB meeting this term (grep for "pit" in the past minutes, and you will see the improvement over time!). The last few years have been particularly productive for SIPB -- we've been creating a number of exciting new services to the MIT community. In fact, at a recent SIPB meeting, Deberg remarked that "SIPB's seemed to have had this renaissance of new interesting projects recently." I hope that we can continue this SIPB renaissance far into the future. -Tim Abbott SIPB Chairman