Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-03-17 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: price, jhawk, mitchb, mathmike, kaduk, ecprice, nelhage, quentin, wdaher, broder, tabbott, jesstess, jwalden, ternus, golem Associate members: Prospectives: dnawi Guests: kyoki, angieyen Officer Reports: price: We registered for CPW. nelhage: Yes, we'll have a table at the midway as usual, and another inode and fsck block party at Fri from 7 to 9 in the office. There'll be food, talking to prefrosh, showing them what we do, a machine room tour, etc. price: Come entertain the prefrosh, tell them how much you love SIPB and MIT. tabbott: And what fsck and inodes are. SIPB Projects Report: ternus: cups.mit.edu has been updated to include all cluster printers, and now uses io.mit.edu for the printer "sipb" [a.k.a. meadow] instead of husqvarna.mit.edu, since meadow's queue was moved. broder: I've tracked down configuration options to use CUPS with both local printers and ones served by a global server. zsr is now configured to do that. mitchb: We tried to experiment with giving cups.mit.edu a ZONE realm principal, but we couldn't get it to work right. broder: I've been talking with jweiss about getting cups.mit.edu added to meadow's IP ACL. I'm also interested in changing meadow's hesiod entry to point to cups.mit.edu at some point. ternus: If this happens, at some point, cups should get real hardware. quentin: scripts passed 2000 users sometime in the past couple of weeks. price: There's a prospective interested in working on autoinstallers. Maybe we can move forward on this again. quentin: Yeah, about 10'. mitchb: I did a bunch of debugging of everyone's favorite mail client, nmh, on Debathena. price: I met a couple other nmh users just the other day. mitchb: Really? Tell me where I can meet more nmh users! tabbott: We're going to have a Debathena workshop sometime soon on how to do Debian packaging and Debathena development... maybe around the week after Spring Break... respond to my e-mail about times that are convenient for you if you're interested. price: We're thinking about having an event over Spring Break maybe. Straw poll - how many people will be here over much of break? [A bunch... 8ish] price: How many would come to a hackathon around the first weekend of break? [A few... 3ish] price: And the last weekend? [Surprisingly, more] price: In andersk's absence, I'll bring this up. scripts has certificates issued by the MIT Certificate Authority, which is good for MIT-only sites, but some of scripts's users are trying to make webpages targeted at least partly at non-MIT folks, and it looks bad when those people try to use these sites and get an ugly warning box because their browser doesn't trust the MIT CA. It turns out that you can get certificates for fairly cheap: $132 per year for a wildcard cert that would cover *.scripts.mit.edu, and and $12/year for single hostname certs (which would cover scripts.mit.edu). You get these rates if you buy five years at a time. quentin: Can we add scripts-cert.mit.edu to that? price: Sure. So, the cost would be $780 total, so I'll move to allocate $900. broder: Second. jhawk: I assume all of the scripts team is happy with it? Are there MITnet policy issues? quentin: There's prior precedent for that; webmail has an externally signed certificate. jhawk: Will this change the default cert that's presented? quentin: Yes. I disagree with it, but I defer to andersk as Scripts Architect. broder: White ballot. quentin: I object. tabbott: This is a great idea. quentin: The cheap certs have some caveats associated with them. They're not as well supported by some browsers as other certs. jhawk: I think it's problematic for the Board to make decisions about what server maintainers should do, and if scripts has reached concensus about what they want and it's a reasonable amount of money for them to spend, then we should rubber stamp it. We shouldn't be getting into the details of their implementation. mitchb: What's the name of the sketchy company with the cheap certs? price: RapidSSL. mitchb: Oh, great. quentin: What? mitchb: Nothing. It's just every bit as special as I hoped. [12-1-0 - $900 to scripts for certificates] jhawk: I've deployed one of the two water alarms. It's in a suboptimal location, and is barely audible in the office. It's a little less barely audible in the cluster. I'll try to modify the other one to be better and try not to break it. ternus: What does it sound like? jhawk: Kind of a high-pitched, whiny beepy thing. I'm having trouble remembering. [someone whistles it perfectly] wdaher: Wow. Office Report: price: We have new Coke as of a few minutes ago! price: There's been some cleaning over the past week. There is less personal stuff in the office now. Up for grabs is this book, "The Independent Review, Vol. 11 #4." tabbott: We also have "From Resistance to Revolution." price: There are also four umbrellas, two of which work, so we'll keep those. This one doesn't work [demonstrates]. This one is cutely marked SIPB in Sharpie and maybe whiteout, and also doesn't work [demo]. This one works. So, that'll leave us with three working ones, but if you want the broken one, it's up for grabs, or else we're tossing it. Also, there's a mysterious rabbit-on-a-rope over there [points to back of office] that I'm told used to be hung from the ceiling. kaduk: In arolfe's absence, I'll take responsibility for putting it back up. jhawk: New ethernet drops were wired last week, but they may not work yet. quentin: The cutover should be next week (Spring Break). mitchb: They'll make the new ones live without us requesting activation of each one? jhawk: Hope so. jwalden: I move to allocate $50 to buy "Programming Erlang". [seconded and white balloted - $50 to jwalden for "Programming Erlang."] Other: broder: Friday evening all VMs on ops's xen-2w became unreachable. This includes the license server for student MATLAB and Mathematica, a dialup nameserver, the test print server husqvarna, one of the ops cell fileservers, and all zone cell servers. It was very "special" because it happened while I was actively working on the zone cell challenge. mitchb: Late Thursday evening, reynelda crashed for reasons we're still not clear on. Fortunately the first person to notice was me, and it seemed not to cause enough inconvenience that many users complained during the outage. Something we've learned from this is that we should better document our configuration and maybe some recovery procedures; quentin and I spent a good while desperately trying and failing to get console access to the machine until we decided that the cell had been down long enough that we were going to just hard powercycle the machine to bring it back. quentin: And none of the reachable cell maintainers knew the root password, until eventually jweiss logged in and called to tell me what it was. jhawk: That's not true; I knew it and was half paying attention. quentin: Well, you didn't respond when I asked for it. jhawk: I must have missed that. mathmike: "Conquer MIT" by SaveTFP says that there are two ways to run Pine. One is 'pine' and the other is 'add sipb; pine-imap15'. jhawk: Will someone talk to the editors to correct this? mathmike: I can. Other Other: nelhage: I have a box of maple bacon lollipops that are being resold at cost, which is $1.50 apiece. broder: They're heavy on the maple, and light on the bacon. The meeting was adjourned at 19:52. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.