Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-03-10 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:10 by price. In attendance were Voting members: mitchb, price, nelhage, jbarnold, mathmike, jwalden, tabbott, k_lai, broder, yoz, | wdaher, jesstess, ecprice Associate members: keithw Prospectives: ternus Guests: Officer Reports: price: There'll be an election at the end of the meeting for ternus. ternus: Hi, I'm ternus. I've been around on-and-off since Fall 2006. I've recently become more involved, taught the Crash Course in C last year, the Caffeinated version this year, built the door sensor, am working on the CUPS server, have been hanging out in the office answering questions. yoz: Name as many SIPB services as you can. ternus: scripts, linerva, staplers, LAMP, sipb-xen, quickprint, stuff, debathena, sipb-cups tabbott: List the IP addresses of as many name servers as you can. ternus: 18.171.0.72... tabbott: You can name more. What class of machines at MIT run NSes? ternus: Gateways? tabbott: All Athena machines, actually. ternus: Why aren't they ever in resolv.conf? tabbott: If you look at resolv.conf on an Athena machine, you'll see 127.0.0.1. jbarnold: In your expert opinion, is the office door open or closed? ternus: Optically it's open, but there's a high probability of it being closed in next hour. broder: Following the tradition from my questioning, name 11 SIPB members not in the office. ternus: geofft, quentin, jhawk, paigep, spang, golem, tibbetts, jweiss, cfox, zacheiss mitchb: One more. ternus: foley! yoz: What's your opinion of the Save in Case of Fire Drawer? ternus: It's too far from the door. It assumes that unless it's thrown out of the window and someone jumped out after it, the fire won't be between it and the door. tabbott: It's kind of heavy... you probably couldn't throw it out the window and clear the building nelhage: Is there really anything worth saving in it? ternus: Are you kidding? What about when RSA gets broken? mitchb: I bet that envelope just has old Cokecomm junk to tide us over. price: What SIPB service would you like to see implemented other than ones you're working on? ternus: Was thinking of a SIPB weather station, but the Radio Society is working on one of those. keithw: Yeah, since like 1999. ternus: Maybe Cluedumps, but more for the general public, kind of like classes we give over IAP, but during other times of year. I mentioned I wanted to teach a ham radio class at some point, for example, though that's not directly SIPB... I want to emphasize the service aspect of SIPB. tabbott: This may fill the void left by the loss of Athena Minicourses. ternus: Another example would be ways to use zephyr that don't suck. wdaher: [laughing] Sorry, jwalden's asleep. wdaher: What do you think SIPB needs to improve the most? ternus: It's been said before, but there's a high barrier to joining, it requires a lot of activation energy to become a SIPB person. It's taken me a while due to each time I start, getting hosed by other things. yoz: What would you suggest to make SIPB meetings more interesting? ternus: Free food? [collective oooooh] ternus: I think the implementation of laptop land corresponding with the increase in laptop popularity has helped. Some more comfortable chairs, maybe. mitchb: [smacks forehead] tabbott: Do you know anyone who likes the pink chairs? [some discussion about whether they are, or ever were, really pink] ternus: I haven't done a poll, but... mitchb: You could implement a sensor for it to report when it's being used, and use nelhage's existing code to render results. ternus: [makes reference to the mitchb-chair-buying cycle of life] nelhage: Devise a system to tell what members are in the office in laptop land because fingering at office heads doesn't really work anymore. ternus: Use a highly directional antenna mounted on the ceiling to detect MAC addresses. This doesn't have all the privacy issues of mounting a camera. price: Just a subset of the privacy issues. nelhage: You could hijack the access point. yoz: Ask someone a technical question they don't know the answer to but you do. ternus: broder, what specific filter is required to implement an SSB receiver? broder: High-pass? ternus: Hilbert. wdaher: I move that keithw ask the question. keithw: Why do you want to become a SIPB member? ternus: I like the service-oriented aspect of SIPB, like using technical skills to serve the general MIT community, and the same reason everyone else does - that awkward moment when the last member leaves the office and has to decide whether to kick you out, and all too often they do, and I'd like that not to happen to me any more. mitchb: What will you do when you have to make that decision? ternus: Depends who it is, [conversation about likelihood of theft, etc.] jbarnold: [disclaimer about Board policy] <16-0-0 ternus is membered> SIPB Projects Report: ternus: SIPB CUPS is progressing thanks to broder; we have keytabs and the cups.mit.edu hostname, and are working on making it suck less. broder: We're still waiting on the interesting keytab (ipp). price: What's next? ternus: Making printed jobs visible in CUPS-land. The ability to use local CUPS printers as well as those from the cups.mit.edu server. Recent developments suggest that this isn't as possible as we'd like. broder: Using printers from both local queues and a global queue looks like it requires either giving up Kerberos authentication or giving each machine a keytab. tabbott: There may be less evil ways, but I won't speak further of it. ternus: broder/tabbott have been talking with Ops about having CUPS be the back end instead of lprng. CUPS provides better load-balancing and some other desirable features. broder: cfox expressed the sentiment that lprng is on its way out. price: When is MacAthena going to be ready? broder: I'm making good progress on the build scripts; not ready to release just yet, but will when the build scripts are done. keithw: LAMP received its new server and RAID array. I'll be installing them this weekend. If you'd like to help, let me know. Office Report: broder: I move to allocate $60 for 2 water alarms for the machine room on behalf of jhawk. mathmike: Water alarms? broder: These are to alert us if the machine room begins to flood again; hopefully we'll be able to hear them. price: jhawk's proposal indicated that they're louder than 100dB. ternus: Door sensor update - the graph of the sensor data still looks like slightly under 21 hours is the longest the office is continuously open. broder: I move to allocate $40 for the CUPS Book. keithw: Was that seconded? jbarnold: Point of order - it's poor form to insist on a second for a motion that clearly would be seconded. [jbarnold runs to the bookshelf to get RRO] keithw: Point of personal privilege - I'm happy to continue this conversation if the Chair is willing to commit to following strict RRO for the remainder of the term. tabbott: nelhage made some graphs of office openness, though they're incorrectly normalized. ternus: He did? price: nelhage should talk to ternus. jesstess: We were checked off at the ASA meeting, still in progress. Other: nelhage: CPW is sooner than you think. [collective: oooooh] jbarnold: The office now has a gnu [next to Kerberos/fluffy]. nelhage: We believe it was not free. keithw: It cost $20! nelhage: I believe that if we asked rms for detailed specs to produce our own... [redacted] nelhage: About CPW - I'll be coordinating a booth and some other event, perhaps another fsck and inode block party. Other Other: '() The meeting was adjourned at 20:10. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.