Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-04-09 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk arolfe aseering golem jbarnold jhawk k_lai nelhage presbrey quentin rayhe tabbott tilia wdaher | kchen lockhart Associate members: asedeno mitchb Prospectives: danjared ecprice jwalden mathmike seanyliu spang Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: tilia, how much money do we have? tilia: About $10000. tabbott: Move to nominate danjared for SIPB membership. He’s the current maintainer of our IPv6 and steve-dallas virtualization services. He’s around a lot in the office. <12-0-0, motion passes> MIT Computing Report: andersk: There was a web.mit.edu outage. jhawk: DOS attack on W92? W91? SIPB Projects Report: wdaher: My German RFID reader thing arrived. I’m still compiling things but it seems to be working—it lights up and stuff. danjared: I’m playing around with vServer on steve-dallas, a virtualization technology for Linux. nelhage: We worked on Debian-Athena, but despite our best efforts we failed to beat Etch to a release. quentin: The Defcon sign will be done before CPW. presbrey: The SIPB Tor exit node has been running for a really long time. The EFF has asked us if they can give us another server to run a directory authority. tabbott: Do you know what the bandwidth requirements are? presbrey: The server would host other tor-related projects: a tor subversion repository, an anonymous remailer. In total they say 12 Mbps. If we put it in the machine room, we’d probably want it on the office network. tabbott: Isn’t the entire office network 10Mbps? presbrey: Wait until the office upgrade, I guess. jhawk: If we are going to make a commitment we should have an explicit motion on this. Are non-SIPB people going to have root on this? mitchb: What else do we have with arrangements like that? jhawk: At some point we temporarily hosted the NetBSD CVS server. tabbott: I think we’re more interested in hosting the Tor directory server than the other things which require other people having administrative access to the machine. jhawk: For the record, I remain not entirely comfortable with Tor because of its potential infringing uses. presbrey: I think it furthers our goals. presbrey: Should I propose a motion that we want to support them with the directory server and nothing else? arolfe: We currently have 100Mbps…full-duplex or half-duplex? In any case we’re not saturating that. jhawk: What’s the timeframe? presbrey: They’re looking to move it by the end of May. tabbott: Quick straw poll on whether this is a good general idea? <15-1-0> presbrey: I’ll explain our network status and ask for a breakdown of usage. jhawk: Just want to observe that this might result in other open-source projects asking us to host things. tabbott: I don’t think so. danjared: A lot of MIT alums are involved with Tor already. presbrey: I’m going to open up the SQL project repository for commentary and review. If you want to check it out, send me email. Office Report: rayhe: First, I’d like to move to allocate $115 for a humidifier for the office. It’s an 11 gallon humidifier weiging 21 pounds. jhawk: 16 inches. quentin: What’s the reason for this? tabbott: Because we keep shocking ourselves everywhere in the office. jhawk: I am skeptical that humidifier will successfully fight the ventilation system enough to be useful. I think that dealing with refilling it will be annoying. tabbott: How long does it need to be refilled? rayhe: It’s 11 gallons. nelhage: That tells me nothing! jhawk: I have an 11 gallon humidifier. Probably about once a day. Also they can grow algae and crap like that if they’re not cleaned properly. On the other hand, it’s only $115. mathmike: Is there a plan for where to put it. tabbott: If it’s 16ʺ on a side, we can probably put it somewhere totally useless. mitchb: Getting 11 gallons of water to there is going to be a nuisance. jhawk: You can carry the tank to the bathroom. mitchb: 11 gallons? That’s fucking heavy. You’ll then have the office carpet growing algae and stuff when you screw up the first time. tabbott: This seems like a lot of water. jhawk: Maybe it’s 2 [gallons]. I’m puzzled, frankly. rayhe: Move to allocate $2000 for a new Debian-Athena machine plus a 24ʺ Dell LCD. The specs were emailed out earlier. quentin: Where are we going to put it? tabbott: lola-granola is the slowest machine in the office at 800MHz. We’d get rid of lola-granola and rearrange the machines. <15-0-1, motion passes> rayhe: Separate from that is whether we want a 30ʺ monitor for this Debian-Athena machine and use the 24ʺ monitor for another office head. The idea is that we want to have cool things for Debian, and replace some of the aging LCDs in the front of the office. jbarnold: I think it is good to have the office equipment good enough to encourage people to staff the office. Second, we’re going to try to set up graphical Debian-Athena on this machine, and it would be good to have a nice LCD to encourage those developers. spang is working on this. quentin: We’re going to be limited because it requires specialized graphics cards. rayhe: It already supports it. jbarnold: Because of the resolution, Athena is not well optimized for this display; you want to use modern X font rendering. The idea is to show off what you can do with Debian-Athena. aseering: What kind of graphics card do you need? jbarnold: Dual-link DVI. rayhe: The computer we just bought has a Geforce 7900 PCI-E. rayhe: The other thing we could do is, for less than the cost of the 30ʺ LCD, is get two 24ʺ LCDs. Or we could do some combination. The 30ʺ LCD is $1500, and the 24ʺ LCDs are about $700. rayhe: Move to allocate up to $1650 for a 30ʺ LCD. <10-2-5, motion passes> jbarnold: We should figure out how we’re going to secure it to something reasonably. tabbott: Probably the extra $150 will suffice. tabbott: We had an office cleaning on Saturday where we cleaned up a lot of stuff. The zsr side is nice, and there’s space for backpacks next to the couch. We should deal with the broken chair corpse over there. Does anyone want to deal with that? tabbott: We also have a chair corpse that jbarnold is sitting on. jbarnold: Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. tabbott: That’s the worst chair in SIPB. jbarnold: Did you just call me the worst chair? tabbott: Also in this pile is coleco-sidewinder, an old Sun machine that we should probably get rid of. danjared: Can I use it for testing IPv6? tabbott: Sure, you can put it into the office rack. tabbott: jhawk, rayhe, xdsg were supposed to decide which CRT to get rid of. rayhe: I left it up to jhawk and xdsg. tabbott: There’s a heap of cables that we should put into a reuse pile. tabbott: There’s the broken LCDs that has been broken for 2½ years. jhawk: It’s just the power supply that’s broken. mathmike: Are we getting rid of LCDs? jbarnold: No, we can use them in the machine room. When we turn on the four CRTs in the machine room, the UPS starts beeping, and then 20 seconds later turns everything off. tabbott: What’s involved in fixing the power supply? jhawk: We just buy one. jbarnGiven how no one has repaired it in the last 2.5 years and how no one is volunteering now, I think we should just get rid of it. tabbott: Okay, we’ll get rid of it. jbarnold: I really think we should get one chair in the immediate future and ideally in this meeting. This chair should be gotten rid of because it is thoroughly broken. jhawk: We never have enough chairs at a full meeting, so the argument that it’s a crappy chair and you’re sitting in it is not a good one. jbarnold: There’s room for chairs here, it’s not a space problem. tabbott: We can buy a chair like our normal ones for about $700. quentin: Someone suggested getting an Aeron chair. tabbott: We can’t seem to find them without armrests. golem: I’m quite confident that Aerons come with the armrest and no-armrest options. tabbott: It would be nice if somebody had a specific proposal with a price. tabbott: We still don’t have any volunteers for doing the warranty harrassment with the Herman-Miller chair over there. jhawk: Can someone explain the space on top of the cabinets? jbarnold: We’re still reorganizing the back of the office and are going to likely end up doing something with that space in the next week or two. It would be nice if it weren’t filled with other stuff in that time, but if people have ideas about what that space would be useful, go ahead. nelhage: We should get a Power Squid for laptop land. It’s like a power strip except it has foot-long extension cords instead of plugs. Move to allocate $30 for this. rayhe: The two projectors that were Zephyred out were Dell 2400MP and Dell 1800MP. Prices are $999 and $749. One is brighter than the other. The brighter one also has more expensive replacement bulbs ($299 instead of $199). We can get ceiling mount for $150. quentin: One of the advantages of getting a projector is that it’s portable; we shouldn’t ceiling mount it. rayhe: We could also fashion some sort of homemade mount on the wall or something. I’m willing to do it. We probably want about $100 for miscellaneous mounting hardware. jbarnold: I think we should allocate up to $800 to get one of these Criterion chairs. It’s nice to have chairs from the same vendors so we can make one warranty call to repair several chairs. rayhe: Why do we buy expensive chairs? tabbott: They’re comfortable. jbarnold: I’m open to other chairs if other people will get them. mitchb: I’ll buy an Aeron. quentin: How many people like armrests? We should take a straw poll. jbarnold: That’s not how it works. We need to divide the office up into districts, … tabbott: Silence! mathmike: Move to allocate $1000 for mitchb to buy an Aeron. […confusion…] andersk: Move to allocate $1300 for a motherfucking chair so that we can close this goddamn meeting! <12-1-3, motion passes> rayhe: Move to allocate up to $1700 for the 2400MP projector, extra bulb, screen, mounting hardware from Home Depot. mitchb: Is this projector going to have armrests? <8-1-8, motion passes> Education Report: tabbott: We have the SIPB Inode and fsck Block Party on Friday, April 13 at 8-10 PM. Move to allocate $150 for our CPW events on Friday and Saturday. tabbott: Does anyone want to help get food by Friday at 8? [spang, danjared volunteer] tabbott: You should all show up for the Inode and fsck Block Party. We’ll have free food, “Name that Vulnerability”, and the OLPC vs. Binkley usability competition. tabbott: geofft will be running an Ask SIPB column for CPW on Friday. jbarnold: We should get a reasonable quality whiteboard marker holder to go next to the whiteboard. tabbott: The markers fit fine along the rail but the erasers don’t. mitchb: That could be as simple as a magnet. jbarnold: Yes it could be. Would you like to deal with it? I don’t have mechanical clue. mitchb: I mean, I can glue a magnet there. jbarnold: I don’t have mechanical glue, mechanical clue, …. I have the mechanical blues. Other: tabbott: I received a reply from Linda Noel of the Student Activities Office regarding the incident at the hackathon. We will probably meet with her but won’t be under a scary investigation. Other Other: jhawk: 9% of GFCI outlets have failures, according to a recently published survey. It’s sort of scary. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:39. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.