Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2011-05-09


The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by dwilson.

In attendance were 
        Voting members: dwilson lizdenys cesium bbaren rishig adehnert
                rye achernya jiawen

        Associate members: sgw mitchb tlyu quentin biyeun jdreed
                jhawk

        Prospectives: landa amb haoqili 

        Guests:

Administrivia:
        dwilson: Welcome to the SIPB meeting. 

        lizdenys: phurst asked me to allocate for Learn You a Haskell
                for a Great Good, and it sounds like a good idea. So I
                move we allocate 50 dollars for Learn You a Haskell
                for Great Good.
        bbaren: Second.
        lizdenys: White ballot.
        <motion passes.>

SIPB Project Updates:
        achernya: I move we allocate $5200 for two servers for
                scripts. I sent mail about this earlier today and
                prices went down since then and it should cost 5133.56
                right now.
        dwilson: What is the use/need?
        achernya: We've been having capacity problems of some sort,
                but we don't know the exact cause. The loads of many
                of the machines have been spiking to 30 or higher. We
                can't do much other than throw hardware to fix
                this. Only one guests has more than 4 GB of RAM
                right now.
        jhawk: How much would this leave us with?
        dwilson: Between $500 and $1000.
        mitchb: Ben has been advising us to proceed.
        jhawk: So scripts has been fighting some sort of mystery
                battle. Two won't help with the mystery but will with
                the load.
        mitchb: There is definitely a load issue. We don't have a lot
                of disk space. We need at least three or four to do
                the cut over. We're always crunched.
        jhawk: Will this remove that crunch?
        mitchb: Yes.
        jhawk: What does scripts see for future purchases? Need to
                spend this much money next year?
        mitchb: I think we've hit the plateau of number of users. Most
                individuals and student groups are currently using it,
                but webapps are becoming more and more intensive. I
                would be surprised if this doesn't fix it for at least
                a few years to come.
        dwilson: Given that this will take most of our available
                money, are the other projects planning on making
                hardware purchases this fiscal year?
        mitchb: It could wait until next FY. There is a small
                allocation I want to make for afs for remote
                management cards on the order of 200-300 dollars.
        lizdenys: Second.
        tlyu: If you are planning to increase capacity, are you sure
                there is not a lot of latent demand?
        mitchb: At this rate we won't finish Fedora 13 servers before
                the Fedora 15 build.
        achernya: We're pretty on track for deployment.
        jhawk: When do you expect delivery if passed?
        achernya: Order will go tomorrow.
        jhawk: If they don't come in a month, you'll have problems
                with getting them in this FY. Bound on times?
        achernya: I would be surprised if we don't get the chassis in
                a week and the other parts should come in a day.
        jhawk: Great, so eight days.
        <motion passes 14-0.>

Other:
        adehnert: If you have stuff in the machine room, please label
                it with the project it belongs to or otherwise.

Other Other:
        jhawk: We have media for CS 5.5 if anyone cares.

        jhawk: Why do we have two paper cutters?
        lizdenys: From an IS&T reuse pile. Ben thought it might be
                better.
        jhawk: Two is a lot for that space.
        lizdenys: Yeah, one was going to be disposed of or loaned
                out. Again, Ben thought this one might be better.
        jhawk: But ours has lasers!

The meeting was adjourned at 19:41.


        Minutes taken and submitted by lizdenys.