Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-04-07 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: mathmike, mitchb, ecprice, price, k_lai, tabbott nelhage, kaduk, jhawk, golem | jesstess, andersk, yoz Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: neboat, vatsa, dnawi Guests: mlodutb Officer Reports: price: Ben, do you want to say something? kaduk: I want to turn my computer on first, but yes. This past Friday, I got mail from IS&T saying that our account is over budget for the entire fiscal year as of the end of the third quarter. I replied with great confusion since I'd checked on March 3rd and reported that we had $14,800 left. I apologized for not keeping better records outside of SAP, but was not worried because we hadn't spent over $15k in the last month. I received mail from Mark Jones saying that budget changes happened because of the new payment structure for IP addresses and phones (they are now billed by proxy to DLCs), which wasn't approved until after the budgeting for the fiscal year was done. Of the $200,000 taken back by the Budget Office from OIS, $14,000 came from SIPB. price: We no longer pay $15,000 per year for IP addresses. Just last month they reduced our budget by roughly the corresponding amount. kaduk: And they didn't tell us about it. Perhaps this was negligence on my part. price: There are three months left in the fiscal year, and we're now over budget for all of it. What Mark Jones has told us is that their intent is not to stop us from spending money for the rest of the year. kaduk: He in fact seemed rather apologetic about it. price: He's asked us to tell him what we expect to want/need to spend for the rest of the FY, and he'll use those numbers in his justifications to the next administration level up. Sometime in the next week or so, we should have this estimate and send it to Mark Jones with explanations. jesstess: So, it's going to all just work out with no big surprises? kaduk: I spoke with one of our usual financial contacts, and she seemed to think that everything was fine, and was not going to block currently outstanding RFPs. price: Eileen Kenney told us that future purchases will require written justification. But just about everything we buy we could easily give a written justification for. jhawk: OIS cares about budgets at a higher level than single accounts, so if they're not over budget as a department, it's likely not a big deal if SIPB is over. price: As a consequence of these events, I've been looking at changes in our budget. In FY08, our budget is just under $20k. It was $34k from FY04 until now. It was $38k from FY95 through FY03. Back in FY94, it was $39k. The year it went from $38k to $34k was the year of the big reorganization where IS&T lost 20% of its staff. So back around 1994, we had $20-$23k of 1994 dollars to spend (after network fees). That is worth a lot more than our current budget, which seems not to have adjusted for inflation. mathmike: I wasn't buying computers back in 1994... can someone speak to how big a change it really represents? golem: The Main thing we were buying way back when wasn't computer parts, but computer time. jhawk: Not in the '90s. mlodutb: Computers really ought to be cheaper today overall. mathmike: Do we still have a separate machine room budget? price: No. jhawk: Previously, machine room expenditures came out of a separate pool of money, but that changed a couple years ago and we've been spending some of our regular budget on machine room hardware. price: So, we have less money than we used to. Possibly there are things we can do about that. SIPB Projects Report: price: This was a very productive weekend. Debathena [looks at Tim]. tabbott: On Saturday, we had a workshop for Debian packaging. Several people came and learned, and worked through significant examples. The next day, we had a hackathon and closed bugs 1 through 50 in Debathena Trac. There are only about 20 tickets remaining. price: And people we haven't seen too much around SIPB came for these events. vatsa and acrefoot, both prospectives, closed many of the tickets. price: Scripts did work on the autoinstallers, and we updated Wordpress, which is the first major update we've done in a long time. Prospective acrefoot did much of the work. price: sipb-xen - Anders? andersk: We upgraded to xen 3.2 and a newer version of the RAID driver. The random problems we've seen on the RAID haven't happened since then, but they hadn't happened for a while before, so they may be solved, but we should keep an eye out for them. jesstess: We go to Harvard and outnumber HCS annually. We'd like to invite them here so we can continue to outnumber them here. We're thinking of the third weekend in April. price: It's not during CPW; it's the next weekend. jesstess: So we'll have a barbecue event shamelessly ripped off from the type of events EC has. I'd like to make an allocation for $300 to cover it. kaduk: I second. price: Do you hae a particular date? jesstess: Saturday, April 19th, unless that's bad for a significant number of people, in which case Sunday. tabbott: All accounting is strange given that we have negative money. mitchb: We can have a bring-your-own-food BBQ! price: We'll make written justification for this. jesstess: For people who watched "Sneakers," a proposal was made to the EC for a $75 allocation, but the allocation wasn't actually made, and so I'd like to move to retroactively allocate $75, which is almost exactly what I spent on it. mitchb: I second. tabbott: So that we have complete transparency about what happened with the EC, the motion was made and seconded, and three EC members voted "yes." Nobody voted "no," but since a quorum of the EC didn't partitipate in the vote, no allocation was made. price: Objections to a white ballot? mathmike: I object. <9-0-5 passes - $75 to jesstess> Office Report: jhawk: The thermostat on the A/C next to the window is working backwards; hot is cold, and cold is hot. price: There's a label on it noting this. nelhage: We moved the office over to the new jacks, except for a couple of items that will happen with help after the meeting. This also made some new drops available in the office. And, there are 4 new ports on the office network in the machine room, so we could move things like sipb-tor and such into the machine room and still have them stay on the office network. jhawk: Did anyone go to the W20 VoIP meeting today? [no] nelhage: While rewiring the office rack, we noticed that there are some crufty machines in it that I think we don't need. I'd like to get rid of planet-zorp (the alpha). We also have bart-savagewood (Sun), deathtongue (old Windows machine on the KVM), a disk array or something [tabbott: old steve-dallas], new steve-dallas, quiche, and nethack with a dead disk (which is planning to move to sipb-xen). tabbott: Which can we get rid of with no effect on SIPB's services? nelhage: planet-zorp, maybe both steve-dallases? asedeno: One steve-dallas is on, and possibly running VMs. nelhage: Okay, so planet-zorp and old steve-dallas. jhawk: Should we do this at the meeting? nelhage: I'll put together a punt list and send mail proposing it. jhawk: Several people have noticed severe problems with our printer, and apparently Ops has moved it back to a production server again. It has also stopped making that squeaky noise. Other: jesstess: Google Games happened this weekend. Super Cow Power (which included ecprice and mathmike) got second place, and Windsington got third. dnawi: Cokecomm is restocked. Thanks to kaduk for restocking a bit while I was gone. As a general announcement, if we're out of some soda we need, you can go downstairs and buy a 12-pack, and leave the receipt in the payment box, and I'll credit your account. I'm working on dealing with $30 in expired V8 stock, and about $100 in expired Red Bull stock. I just ran dots; some of you should have received e-mail. Hopefully it'll happen more often now. Also, behold the half-half-price drawer of Starburst and such! nelhage: Friday at 7pm in the office, we will have the fsck and inode block party with dinner and prefrosh, and stupid SIPB-themed games to play, we'll explain what we do, and generally hang out. Last year we convinced jbarnold to come up with the game "Name that Vulnerability." On Saturday from 1pm-3pm is the Midway. I'll be at the office at noon to gather stuff. jesstess: Is there specific stuff we're giving out? nelhage: We could give out the radios. tabbott: Do you want to save some stuff for when they're at MIT? nelhage: Okay, so then soda and stuff as usual. jhawk: Do we care about our stock of Ubuntu CDs? price: To give out to the frosh? tabbott: The next release is coming out in like two weeks. Other Other: jhawk: The SIPB-noc was again invaluable yesterday in handling the 77 Mass. Ave. crossing power outage from 2pm-7:45pm. It was NStar's fault. Some have asked me why the light is hung to the side of the street instead of over the street. The answer is that these are temporary, and the new ones will be installed similarly to the old ones in April or May on masts that have recently had their foundations poured. The meeting was adjourned at 20:00. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.