Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 03/14/94 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by sorokin. In attendance were Voting members: ghudson abbe shabby yoav mkgray mwhitson warlord tlyu yandros sekullbe sorokin bert nocturne fastcart xiphmont autumn Associate members: wesommer mhbraun srz mhpower jweiss mjbauer rls rjbarbal jtidwell marc Non-voting members: Prospectives: bobmacke nygren rei beaners ernsts sdallas harrisj grisha dimon sjens Guests: Secretary's Gratuitous Pre-meeting Comment: Not a doozie, but it's still gonna be painful. Treasurer's Report: She's here. Not much to report. Anyone have anything exciting? yoav: we have a book... Schneier's Chairman's Report: The Chairman is buying a CD. We have two prosepctives nominated... nygren and rei. Q: Eri, how long have you been a prospective? A: since 1988, when I was a freshman. Q: What projects have each of you been involved with? A[nygren]: Linux support, a web server in my room... Linux-Athena documents in html format. Answer questions on linux-help. Other cool stuff. A[rei]: iBitmap. Office Manual stuff. Rewrote history. Logo for the SIPB Web server. Cleaned the fridge. Alumni Server stuff. Q: Can you name all the SIPB members in the room who have been around for more than five years? A[rei]: Well, Stan... A[nygren]: jweiss? no. mhpower? yeah. A[real]: wesommer, jtkohl, and rls Q: What's the symbol above the clock mean? A[nygren]: Multics was an OS that was around many years ago, SIPB was involved... Q: Explain those three sets of numbers (the chairman puzzles). sorokin: skip that one. Q: Name two office machines that provide services other than being clients. A[rei]: the xcluster thing... steve-dallas 5 1/4" floppy A[nygren]: hodge -tape backup, quiche is exporting by NFS the linux source tree... Q[mhbraun]: which sipb machines do websterd's run on? A[nygren]: I guess hodge... [no. close.] oliver? RA: podge, snork, charon Q: Do either of you know why we no longer care where webster runs? A[nygren]: Webster uses rpc for communication... A[real]: webster will go away soon. There's f_l thingie happening. We're buying something like a dictionary/ thesaurus which will be a lot cooler ["we" is Athena] Q: Someone threatens to put a firebomb in the office. what do you do? Q[real]: What happens if there's a fire. A[rei]: Get the frisbees! (save in case of fire box) Q: what's the significance of the "AMBAR 1" license plate? A[rei]: Is it ambar's? Q: What's hung from the office ceiling? A[rei]: kevin iga? A[nygren]: Simson's light thingie Q: What do you do for double spacing in ez? A[nygren]: step 1. show them olc answers. step 2. .li 2, format note. A[real]: .ls 2 Q: Someone calls asking for "Joe Sipadim". What do you do? A: A[real]: "Speaking" Q: only this [wrong number] phone is ringing. what do you do? A[real]: "Hello, wrong number. Yoav, it's for you" Q: how many news servers does SIPB run? (many people: "That's a trick question!") A[nygren]: the correct answer, basically. Q: What do the rings in one of those early questions mean? A: The topic's been beaten into the ground. Q: What's free in the box of Root Oops? A[rei]: an 'rm is forever' poster. Q: Who is the only prospective to have been hugged by marc in a floppy hat? A: NEXT... Q: Someone comes in and asks for a VMA account. What do you do? A[rei]: correct answer Q: Why do you want to become a sipb member? A[rei]: because it's a cool place on campus and I know almost everyone here. I've been here far too long, I might as well. I think I can help write things for the benefit of MIT Athena users and things like that there. Part of it is I'd like to keep in touch with MIT and this is a productive and helpful way to do that. I like people here. A[nygren]: I really enjoy helping people, and SIPB's a great way to help users. Sometimes I learn by answering questions too. Also, there are lots of people here who know a lot and are willing to talk about it. [rei: ditto] rei 15 0 0 nygren 14 0 1 "Please move along, we are a bulletin board" in the hall. Jeff Report: sorokin: It looks like we're not getting replacements for the RTs we didn't get because Jeff screwed up a year ago. It looks like SIPB in general is going to be screwed over. Servers? He's not going to be able to get us all of it, and he doesn't feel like IS should support us when we duplicate services that IS already does ("discuss" was mentioned) This leaves us without a SparcClassic, and an RS/6k 220. RS/6k 220's are butt-expensive. The fact that there are programs that run on oliver that don't run on RS/6k 220's was brought up, and ignored. We apparently have around $20000 for new machines. We don't know how much that really is. ghudson: We should keep at least one vax until IS officially desupports them. mhbraun: 1. We should talk to Cec. 2. Jeff's going to be getting a lot busier. ghudson: Let's replace something. yandros: The machine proposal we had a long time ago is trashed? Yes. yandros: So we have $20k left in our budget? What have we spent money on? sorokin: jacks and stuff. abbe: The only word I've heard of this $20k has been from Jeff, and kathy didn't know about a hard budget, Jeff hasn't gotten us the hard copies. yandros: the reason I ask is if $20k is our hardware budget then $20k would be what it costs to replace the machines. This may be a policy shift only... srz: MIT Budgets are broken out in terms of type of expense. Machines are capital expenditures, which are seperated out from yearly maintenance stuff. We had around '85 $10k capital, $35k maintenance. People who say we never had a budget are wrong. mkgray: Related, I'm working on annual report for '93. Anyone want to help me out so we can justify ourselves to IS, come help. sorokin: on that note also, everyone should document and log stuff! xstapler! mhpower: We should be prepared for the possibility that no one has the money for us, though. Possibly get clue dumps on Vax and RT hardware from older people... wesommer: We could get other cheaper types of workstations, too. abbe: How do we have our office space? Does someone pay for it? srz: It was gotten through jdb in '88, it's allocated as IS space, that's why we have it. srz: We should start using our budget real soon now. April 15 is sort of the cutoff. jweiss: server machines? sorokin: We aren't getting as many... I don't know what that means. I know he doesn't want to give us hardware for discuss meetings, it's a repeated services. Maybe we should start to think about letting go of services that don't serve the MIT community, like rtfm... wesommer: We could probably turn over the services to other people... mwhitson: There is someone interested in mirroring rtfm services. It may be a possibility to get it off our hands. sorokin: push the rest of that to a maintainers meeting... mkgray: Present the annual report to IS people soon? We need to do PR. sorokin: meeting to IS Managers to make a little presentation... We have an open invitation for it... srz: I suggest you just set a date, so there's a deadline... Office Report: gee. it's a pit. podge has a kernel. It does sound, packet filtering, and loop-de-loops. snork's mouse is starting to lose. xiphmont: steve's been panicking every so often with keyboard problems. ghudson: CD Crap. pocket cases do not scale. label your cases... wallet cases are NOT a good idea. The case for the CD in the player should be at the player. MIT Computing Report: mhbraun: Moira was down, it's probably still down. This caused a kerberos outage. Moira was spewing lots of bogon requests at kerberos... mhbraun: kick-me was down, greg fixed it but he didn't know it. yandros: NeXT... umm... the floptical drive we sent to California isn't back yet. Could someone find out where it is? tlyu has a copy of the original letter somewhere. mhpower: The names bloom-county and bloom-pycaune are decs at PBE. yandros: I found out if you get a resnet machine you can add cnames at will... jweiss: no power hit last week! Computer Services: mwhitson: netbsd locker? Offline. Mail's been sent. mhbraun: ni is back up letting people mount it... We could probably get a Vax to run our own nfs2afs translator... yandros: Is IS planning on supporting the translator that exists only for the cray after the cray goes away? mhbraun: probably no mkgray: clue dump after meeting yandros: people should look at the clue-dump schedule in the web. http://www.mit.edu:8001/sipb/clue-dumps.html warlord: MCC Demo happened today. They were really excited about it, questions like what is needed to run Linux, how to install it, how to deinstall it, if you install lilo, how do you deinstall lilo? Other stuff. mhbraun: mlbarrow sez: There's going to be a see-it try-it get-it demo thing for Resnet stuff maybe in two weeks. [correction in mail from mlbarrow: I said that, but what I really wanted to know if someone(s) from SIPB could come to the See It, Try It, Get It on 1 April 1994 (it's April Fool's Day, but we're really doing it....) and demo/answer questions about Linux. If you're interested in doing this, please let me know. ] ghudson: Linux 1.0, the release kernel, was released yesterday. SIPB AFS Cell Backup Report: mhpower: I could start it later if hodge becomes free. tape drive... Monty sent out numbers, did anyone look at them? ghudson: the question is exabyte or dat? warlord: I'd say exabyte... mhbraun: If something happens to our exabyte, we can use athena's in a pinch. tlyu: 8mm media is more widely available than 4mm DAT. yandros: Do we want a service contract? ghudson: A warranty sounds sufficient. wesommer: get cleaning cassettes and use them. srz: If we can buy two DAT drives for the price of one Exabyte...... (the prices are this much of a difference) tlyu: If we get a DAT drive we'll be hard pressed to find a place that will read our backups. DAT'd be quicker. Straw poll. Exabyte vs. DAT? 6-6-many. mhbraun: How about we get a DAT drive and try it out for the 30-day money-back period? sorokin: I'd like someone to swear on their mother's grave that they WILL return the DAT drive on time if we do this. xiphmont is volunteered. yandros: DAT drive would be a service whether or not we use it for backup. sorokin: I move for $1500 for a DAT drive and some tapes providing we can ship it back in 30 days if we don't like it for any reason. Vote: many-0-mhpower. Publications Report: We actually have some linux Athena. also iBitmap. Bleed on iLatex, rjbarbal is doing work on it over spring break We only have 5 iLatex's... Move for 50 ilatex's. seconded. white-ballot. dimon will get it. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: jerk's a jerk. He also hasn't gotten the minute-taker his cd Other: sorokin put up a little poster on the SIPB board out there... BGLAD schedule events. There were different objections to it. rjbarbal is planning on completely redoing the board. ghudson: This has always been a 'common sense' thing in the past... mhpower: instead of the initialing it people should clearly write a username on it. rjbarbal: Has anything been suggested about rewriting the bylaws? Nope. mkgray was going to deal, he didn't. ghudson at least is still interested in changing them around. There are classes happening around here. yandros: renaming sipb@mit.edu to sipb-members@mit.edu? sipb-members exists... umm... Offline. jtkohl: Digital released DEC OSF/1 version 2 now. Other Other: warlord: CTS really sucks. Chronic CTS is even worse. autumn: don't sit on the space bar... The meeting was adjourned at 21:12:50. Minutes taken and submitted by shabby.