Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2011-11-21 The meeting was called to order by dwilson at 19:30:00. In attendance were Voting members: ezyang geofft davidben kaduk dwilson bbaren achernya cesium afarrell Associate members: mitchb quentin tlyu | jhawk Prospectives: vzh lapentab amb madars maria89 alex_c steb | dlaw Guests: Administrivia ============= dwilson: vzh has been doing a very good organizing cluedumps, and I would like to nominate her for membership. [vzh: I accept!] [Nomination passes 10/0] kaduk: The prize money from the CodeSprint context that we got emailed about last month has finally made its way into our account. This is $1147.33 or something. The prize was split two ways. davidben: There was recently a new book called the "Tangled Web". I'd like to allocate $34.92 to buy the book for SIPB (that includes shipping). It is by Michal Zalewski. (I've already bought it, but don't let that factor into your decision.) [ezyang: Second and white ballot.] [White ballot passes.] Project Updates =============== achernya: There are two Scripts updates. 1) The Scripts cutover will start happening after the meeting. This is when we'll do the final config changes to remove F13 from the pool, and add the F15 servers. If all goes well, no one will notice anything (except for some broken sites.) A nice message will be displayed in those states. 2) Apparently, rebooting too many machines in Xen will cause pygrub to use two much memory, and we will OOM kill xend. I had to reboot the host. [geofft: This is poor.] [witty banter follows] geofft: I'd like to allocate $500 for additional RAM for Scripts hosts, so we can run more VMs [achernya: and we don't OOM kill xend.] It will let us run more servers. [bbaren: How much?] 48G. [bbaren: That's quite a good deal!] [achernya: This is the price, plus or minus a few dollars. And it's ECC too.] [quentin and kaduk second.] [Allocation passes 8-0] [achernya: I like how I think only Scripts Team voted.] mitchb: A few years ago, back in the era where Scripts would hang very hard and we would have to reset every two hours, I made an announcement, which said that our server had reached three weeks of uptime. I decided to look up a bit of statistics. Three full months since the last time XVM has had a host crash, OOM kill, or any other issue that has killed a user VM. [applause] [bbaren: Well, I can fix that!] [achernya: Yesterday, XVM, after having migrated to RT, a user asked for help. Mitch responded, and the user was absolutely dumbfounded that he had reached XVM, and he got a prompt response.] vzh: This week there is no cluedump, but next week we will hear from geofft at 8PM in 3-133. Other ===== jhawk: MIT computing report: in Wednesday last week, there was a campuswide VOIP outage. IS&T updated 3down noting outage in 56 and 16. This seems alarming because they didn't acknowledge the scale of the problem. There were also problems with po14 today. bbaren: PyPy 1.7 has been released. [quentin: They're not trying to track Python releases]. Among other things this has the first implementation of what will be NumPyPy. It supports many things, but notably lacks multidimensional arrays. [uh] But in places, it is up to two times faster than NumPy, which is funny because it is written in Python. [kaduk: Does this mean my Fortran skills are no longer a valuable resource?] [bbaren: ... I'm going to refrain on commenting on it.] [geofft: This phrase "no longer."] geofft; adehnert and I taught a dozen students about SQL injection vulnerabilities and CSRF last Sunday. Hopefully the world is going to be a good thing. dwilson: Drop date is this Wednesday. Other Other ========== dwilson: Thanksgiving is this week. maria89: The Student Center will be locked. [ezyang: Sleepover!] [jhawk: [redacted]] [quentin: It would probably be better to sneak in after it started.] [mitchb: It might be difficult to exit the building.] geofft: If you ever have the brilliant idea to read alpine's source code, run away before it's too late! meeting adjourned at 19:41. Minutes taken and submitted by ezyang.