Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-06-02 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: andersk jhawk jwalden kaduk kchen mathmike price | ecprice mitchb quentin Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: y_z Guests: Officer Reports: '() SIPB Projects Report: asedeno: BarnOwl had its 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 releases. price: It’s now actually free software. asedeno: There’s a Debian package being tested. It’s in the locker. price: scripts had a more peaceful week than the week before. quentin: We didn’t knowingly drop any requests. quentin: XVM ran out of IP addresses again, which means we have more than 128 now. mitchb: I thought the name of the project was still a secret. quentin: We have hundreds of machines. That’s what the marketingspeak would be. quentin: scripts presented successfully at the IT partners conference (njess and I). Almost every question was answered with “this is in the FAQ.” I believe Michael Gettes was in the audience. Office Report: price: We have new phones. Look around and you’ll see shiny new IP phones. [discussion about individual numbers for the four phones] mitchb: I guess I’m just not popular enough to understand why you’d want to have five calls at once. price: We can keep talking about this after the meeting. price: On Laptopworld, there is our new office head from Dell. mitchb: I was never good at geometry. price: [points out Laptopland, Laptopworld, Eurolaptop, Tokyo-Laptop, …] price: It has a 22″ monitor. We should set it up. price: On the topic of office heads and other large machines on our desks, we probably want to decrement the number of heads. Currently, the machine that is opus is our slowest, so is first in line to be punted in favor of new machines. cutter-john continues to make a lot of noise; I think that puts it next in line if not ahead of opus. price: Related to these office heads are the scanners. We currently have two ordinary scanners and two film scanners in the office. I’ve never seen people using both scanners at once and I don’t see a good reason we should have two. I’ve never seen even one person using the film scanner, although I believe the claim that it happens sometimes. I intend to get rid of one scanner and one or both film scanners. geofft and I tested the scanners; we did not find any strong reason to prefer one over the other. quentin: It’s never been clear to me that either film scanner is actually fully assembled and functional. The last time I tried to scan film I wasn’t able to do so. I think it is useful for SIPB to have one working film scanner as a service to members and users. I’ve had film that I’d like to scan. jhawk: Both film scanners are fully assembled and have been functional. They all have separate holders which you need to use to use them with film. It’s concievable these are lost or in weird places. Arguments about whether it’s right to buy a film scanner are different from arguments to keep them. I think they do have different capabilities. Since foley was strongly involved in their acquisition, he should be consulted before getting rid of any. jhawk: Both of our paper scanners are craptastic. We should seriously consider just getting another one regardless of whether we throw them out. That one [next to bobbi-harlow]’s document feeder always falls out. The other one has a smaller feature set. You mentioned Debian; I think it would be a serious mistake if we did not have a Mac-accessible scanner. kaduk: I have had numerous experiences with the scanner on bobbi-harlow crashing. jhawk: New scanners are relatively cheap ($100–$300), unlike new film scanners. quentin: I’m not convinced that average scanners are better today then they were five years ago. price: Further discussion can go after the meeting. quentin: Did sipbmp3 v2 happen? geofft is remotely developing sipbmp3 Mark II, or whatever you want to call it, sending raw PCM audio over the network to the Airport Express. He is remotely carpetbombing the office with music in this development effort. price: One, it allows a wider variety of formats; two, it means we don’t need two entire PCs to keep it running. mitchb: What do we need other than xcb? quentin: snork is the volume control. It’s currently broken. price: ccpost made a thing to organize our power cables in Laptopland. kaduk: I’d like to make a tray to hold the power bricks under the table, but I haven’t decided whether to make it out of wood or metal. Other: mitchb: The cluster was closed for more than a week, and due to probably a bunch of miscommunications, it was locked up before it was supposed to be, and closed an additional weekend after it was supposed to be. jhawk: I want to apologize for not asking the right questions Friday when I was told it would be closed until Monday. jwalden: Some food for thought. If you want to have your own certificate and you want it to be signed, you could run your own CA, or you can take your certificate and self-sign it. Which of these two groups of people ran into more trouble when Debian screwed up with their OpenSSL incident? The ones with self-signed certificates, because they can’t revoke them. quentin: Beginning some time Friday morning, we started losing packets to many destinations. This was first noticed with youtube.com, which perhaps indicates the relative popularity of various destinations on the internet. We had 20% packet loss to YouTube. traceroute identified that this was happening between 207.210.142.1 and 207.210.142.2. These are in NoX space (the Northern Exchange, the peering point that MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of other New England universities use to connect to Internet2). Finally on Saturday afternoon, austein and I decided it was worth paging network. austein did so as an RCC supervisor. Both mark and jis immediately responded. Some combination of them shut down MIT’s connection to NoX, and all that traffic was rerouted over the commodity Internet. jhawk: How come nobody sent mail? Why were the IP addresses relevant? quentin: Only because they were IP addresses inside NoX. There were several tickets to the Network queue. mitchb: If someone notices a problem during business hours, page Network! They’re in business! Don’t wait until the weekend! Other Other: jhawk: Fire pull stations in the building were lowered by about two feet, for ADA compliance. mitchb: It seemed really urgent. Something prompted this. jhawk: Most of the building has been transitioned to VoIP, and I think notifications to most groups were rather lacking. jwalden: Speaking of the ADA, there was a recent court decision ordering the US Treasury to redesign bills so they can be distinguished by touch. quentin: Is there a deadline on this? jwalden: None that I’m aware of. jhawk: As an expert, I can tell you that the design cycle for new bills is about three or four years. kaduk: In connection with the VoIP debates, there’s a new building under construction right now, NW35, a graduate dormitory. They’re having VoIP be the standard phone infrastructure with residential rooms. However, they can’t get away with not pulling actual copper phone lines, because of emergency phones. quentin: Have they yet decided to offer MIT VoIP? Last I heard they were not offering MIT VoIP to residents of the MIT building. kaduk: On voip.mit.edu, I now have a personal account that I do not remember signing myself up for. jhawk: On a similar note, the analog phone infrastructure is being transitions to make use of the data phone infrastructure. It probably means our analog line is going to move. jwalden: The Detroit Redwings are playing in the Stanley Cup finals tonight. It’s going to be awesome. jhawk: Hockey! Hockey! You got that, Anders? The meeting was adjourned at 19:59. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.