Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2011-04-25 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by dwilson. In attendance were Voting members: dwilson lizdenys bbaren kaduk pweaver jhamrick adehnert achernya cesium ccpost geofft | mikemp dhanus Associate members: mats_a quentin broglek | wdaher jhawk Prospectives: rishig jdreed | lapentab lilibayo Guests: | Veronica Hanus Administrivia: dwilson: Welcome to the SIPB meeting. geofft: Hold on, we're not sure what we want yet. dwilson: Tonight, we have a membership election for jdreed after the normal proceedings. kaduk: Spend money! dwilson: How much and by when? kaduk: $6500 and by mid-May. adehnert: The sky has not fallen despite the library lending out books! Three books have been lent out and returned already. dhanus: I nominate rishig for membership. lizdenys: Second. rishig: I accept. kaduk: mary-kay-commandos has dropped off the network. quentin: Does the nics work? kaduk: Unclear. Will check with a PCI nic to see if that works. They were enabled in the BIOS. SIPB Project Updates: quentin: Scripts fell over this morning when someone got linked to on reddit. broglek: I saw this on reddit, and not scripts, obviously. geofft: We can't blame this on Amazon! quentin: Unfortunately, this was only about three times our normal traffic. dwilson: For the record, what was the content? geofft: TIL that there is a subculture of dandies in the Congo known as "Sapeurs" jhawk: Does scripts need more resources? Do users need to not do that? quentin: I don't think he had a choice in the matter. geofft: Scripts needs less afs. We needed to move it to static content that also was not in afs to make this work. It was a scripts afs client problem. quentin: Could it be because we're running 100 afs daemons? geofft: We were doing worse running 4. quentin: There exist numbers between 4 and 100. geofft: Making more VMs gives us more afs global structures. jhawk: How is this getting fixed? geofft: I want to throw more servers at it because more resources will make the problem less likely to happen. We've also been seeing other issues that need more resources in the last few weeks. achernya: Local disk is also hosed. mats_a: Can we tweak the software for scripts? geofft: Maybe. quentin: This won't solve the issue with local disk. quentin: XVM is out of IP addresses. Network replied today so we might get more soon. Other: geofft: I would like to allocate about $3000 in the near future for scripts, but not today. What else would people like to spend on? I move we allocate $300 for 6 KVM adapters to plug into the KVM. We haven't moved things to W91 as quickly as expected, so we keep unplugging servers from the KVM, which is what we were trying to avoid. lizdenys: Second. quentin: Is there room for them? geofft: Yes. dwilson: Is anyone saying the magic words? lizdenys: White ballot. jdreed: John Guy (jtguy) is retiring. If you have feedback on the IS&T website, email me by 5 pm tomorrow. For the new, new website. quentin: To replace the new website? jdreed: Yes, that's very 2010. If you have feedback positive or negative, send me email with concrete suggestions. wdaher: I'm Waseem Daher, you may know me from the things on the bulletin board or the screenplay. I'm donating Rudin to the SIPB library. I'd also like to borrow Max, our VT100, for a trade show in Boston on May 3-6. If you have concerns about this, let me know. quentin: It drops like 1 in a thousand characters. achernya: It was working fine in the midway. wdaher: I'll take pictures. Membership election for jdreed: jdreed: I'm Jon Reed, not the Chairman of the Corporation: if I was, SIPB would have more resources. I'm IS&T's Senior Liason to Students. I do stuff for Debathena. I guess I'm not technically cruft because I work here, but I was class of 2002. UID 7263, I think. Someone check that. geofft: How do you double space in Hermes? jdreed: Like LaTeX, \\ will actually force a line break. Or do it in the Rich Text editor then switch back. jhawk: What happened to the society for retro computing? jdreed: We graduated. ASA rules. We didn't actually do anything, but we went to the Midway once. kaduk: What is the most useful thing in the Athena dashboard? jdreed: Are you actually referring to dash? kaduk: I am. jdreed: I sat at Portnoy so you couldn't log in. Is this a trick question? The fact that the pointer is a little hand is neat. bbaren: What is dash? jdreed: Log into Athena 9.4 but don't run nautilus at the same time. quentin: Dash, the interpretative dance, please demonstrate. jdreed: I don't understand this paradigm. It involves every major that existed in 1996 at MIT and every class. Dash will not be ported to Debathena. kaduk: What is the first thing you remember noticing hanging from the SIPB ceiling? jdreed: The license plates. kaduk: How long ago did you notice them? jdreed: I noticed them before ever coming in here. I next noticed the Mario question block. geofft: A student asks you about the state of the Windows cluster. jdreed: It's in a state of flux. It will be Windows 7, better, and pretend to actually be an IS&T service. quentin: Is it OEIT's or is IS&T is taking over? jdreed: Yes. OEIT has the skill set, but IS&T has staff with free cycles. adehnert: IS&T has staff with free cycles? jdreed: Hotline just hired more people. They're in W91. bbaren: What is your favorite/least favorite Debathena bug and why? jdreed: The atpocolypse, even though it was never a ticket. I had to run all over campus because we did updates with at invoked in cron. When you kill at when it's running a job, it dies. When you kill at and at is in the process of updating, bad things happened. openafs with dkms would be nice. geofft: *head down* jdreed: You recommended a user do that! kaduk: Name a consumable that SIPB should stock. jdreed: The UA would probably like staples for the staplers in the clusters. A rentable consumable should be flash drives. When the back part of W20 becomes laptop workstations, laptop locks. adehnert: What are your views on stabbing people? jdreed: There are occasions when it is necessary. jhawk: In the eye? jdreed: Not necessarily. I'm against stabbing people in the clusters, but stabbing over zephyr is fine. geofft: Does that violate the rules of use? quentin: When is the next rules of use coming out? jdreed: 2003. Time is cyclical. geofft: How will MIT computing change if we start NATing? jdreed: We are not going to NAT campus now. Thank you for not having any followup questions. bbaren: As kind of a follow up to that... what's the status of IPv6 campuswide? jdreed: I don't know. lizdenys: What is your favorite package name we didn't use? jdreed: debathena-punches-you-in-the-face or geofft-translates- english-to-english-config. geofft: But we actually used that! jdreed: Under a different name... cesium: What's your favorite Pokemon? bbaren: Don't say "Kirby". jdreed: I don't know any, so I'll go with the only I've heard of Pikachu. bbaren: Thank you for not saying "Kirby". dwilson: If Debathena the musical happens, how do you feel about the Hallelujah chorus with "Debathena" instead of "Hallelujah"? lizdenys: *sung* DEBATHENA! DEBATHENA! jdreed: I'm for it. kaduk: A user comes with stolen ream of paper while coming to use the stapler. What do you do? jdreed: I'd give them a stern talking to about how costs work at MIT. If they have a dolly, call the CPs. It's happened. kaduk: How do costs work at MIT? jdreed: I'd just explain it. jhawk: Are dorm printers being funded with the same resources as clusters? jdreed: Yes, but please go through the correct channels to refill paper. jhawk: But I need to print now! jdreed: You came near another printer. jhawk: My friends sent me! kaduk: Under what circumstances would you feel comfortable removing the oscilloscope from the office? jdreed: I'm done with 6-1. bbaren: Where is it? lizdenys: I move that kaduk ask a question. kaduk: Jon, why did you want to be an IS&T employee? jdreed: They pay me. dwilson: I move that Waseem ask a question. wdaher: It's an honor and a privilege. Jon, why do you want to be a SIPB member? jdreed: I figured that was the actual question. I've worked with a lot of you in various capacities. I'd like to understand better how SIPB works so I can do my job better. Getting to know everyone. Access to the stapler. dwilson: You don't have to be a SIPB member for that. Other Other: quentin: I am now an ITA software employee. I will be a Google employee on Thursday. The meeting was adjourned at 20:06. Minutes taken and submitted by lizdenys.