Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/14/94 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by sorokin. In attendance were Voting members: sorokin shabby nygren harrisj abbe cat ghudson beaners jhawk yoav djib warlord yonah jmmikkel bert rcaileff Associate members: jweiss sekullbe yandros eichin mkgray marc mhpower jtkohl sgw mwhitson proven mjbauer rei nlgilman svalente cjsmith Non-voting members: Prospectives: quijote jered fubob daveg sipb5 hartmans emhavens cordelia kmccorm nathanw amsmith sotp mwp quark sipb7 seborn sdeo foley harrison midum cyruse elliot jforbess rshah midum Guests: Treasurer's Report: not much to report. abbe: If you get stuff from lab supplies that doesn't require a req, get a receipt. uhh... give me as much paperwork as you possibly can... uhh...she'll talk to lorraine and figure out what she means to say. Chairman's Report: Elections for hartmans and jered! jweiss: What have you done or would you like to do that ftgos? for both. hartmans: Things I've done, I've helped random people, annoyed random people, asked random people questions, I've mostly ported ytalk to solaris except for one minor bug. I was helpful yesterday when rosebud crashed, I "sort of have some experience with RS/6k's" and I was there from 12-10, which was not cool, but it was fun. I'd also be interested in news, random projects, and maybe AFS if they need new people. jered: I've answered random questions, I've brought in a 486, I was helping yesterday swapping the disk from waxwing. There's a neat story about yesterday coming up soon... I'm planning on working on iLinux Questions, not the Linux FAQ... The threaded Web server, currently being developed... yoav: sam, what kind of questions do you answer? hartmans: Linux, TeX/LaTeX, perl, random trivia, RS/6k stuff (though no one cares, I don't blame them), I'm interested in learning about other things. I know most of the options to xv. (yoav: Oh yeah?) I'm also good at postscript. jered: I can answer Linux questions, random trivia tidbits, I know how to double-space in ez, I'm learning about a dozen things, perl, tcl, postscript, all that kind of stuff. I know a little about frame. jhawk: it's 9am on a Sunday morning and you're the only one in the office, and you notice the sipb cell stopped working; what do you do? jered: ping the machine, that kind of diagnosis... then what do you do? mkgray: Who do you rouse from sleep? hartmans: Try a matt, or greg, or someone in system:administrators in the sipb cell... I'd wake someone up who had the ability to shut down the right things... yoav: People now run in screaming into the office, because the sipb cell is down, they can't read the files in teh sipb locker. hartmans: detach sipb, reattach sipb, and be happy. mwhitson: What areas do you think you don't know about and ... uhh... jered: I want to learn it all!!! bwahaha!!! ok, he didn't really say that, but he listed an awful lot. hartmans: things I don't know about and would like to stay that way. Tcl and BSD... I don't know why it sucks. things I'd like to learn about... DNS, cool net stuff, significantly more about news, non-SIPB type things, encryption, some other OS's... ghudson: Client workstations are trying to access files on file servers like ronald-ann, and they're hanging but not timing out... jered: when one server goes down, the other hasn't quorum or something... uhh... ghudson: no, you need to shut down the other server, and edit CellServDB,... hartmans: no, vos removehost. ghudson: yeah, vos removehost... uhh... sorokin: Name three things that have hung from the ceiling. jered: the hair (yoav (surprised): aag!) sorokin: whose is it? jered: I don't remember. hartmans: simson's light thingie. jered: The air conditioners... sorokin: wow. it's bert's hair, btw. other things have been Kevin Iga, Derek's Death thingie, the clothesline, the balloons, the chairmatt, the aaahrt. abbe: pick four sipb members around the office and say something they've worked with. hartmans: warlord, pgp&afs and stuff... proven, threads and stuff. jered: mkgray and various others, web. yoav, who has been busy dealing with installing the web server. (yoav: have not!) He's not a webmaster... he's avoiding that specifically. mkgray: What are of expertise do you have that isn't shared by many sipb members? jered: PC architecture... hartmans: (jered: text-to-speech...) I use the tty stuff rather a lot. mkgray: Name some random SIPB frivolous fact that you know. hartmans: vma is a cool system we're not giving accounts on anymore and we have a bitnet gateway now. They're offering backups from vma now. jered: the fuzzball hack... at a certain date, all the owls turned into fuzzballs. cat: Form a question with a short answer that you feel people in the room would have difficulty answering. Computer-related! err, SIPB-related. jered: ISA, EISA, VESA, PCI? ghudson: ISA is an old 8-bit, err, 16-bit bus standard that's used by just about every machine, not very fast. EISA is an old extension that's 32-bit, fast, but didn't catch on. VESA is a faster bus, it did catch on, it kinda sucks. PCI is another standard on Pentiums... shabby: ISA can be clocked faster, Monty found out... PCI is 64-bit, I think. VESA is clocked at something fast, as is PCI. hartmans: What is "the question"? warlord: What do you get when you multiply six by nine? harrisj: Why do computer scientists confuse Halloween and Christmas? They don't know. nathanw: Because DEC 25 = OCT 31. nathanw: The monitor behind me is losing; what kind is it? jered: It's a Digital! yoav: name three machines in the office, and three in the machine room, and what the servers serve. jered: Lola, Oliver, DT, rattles on. hartmans: anxiety-closet generally doesn't serve web. beacon serves news-transport, and picayune serves rtfm. rosebud serves afs and crashes sometimes. sorokin: I know you people can count... jhawk: Each of you name at least two things that you think are wrong with SIPB, preferably the things that are wrongest. sorokin: that's actually one each. jered: nothing, SIPB is perfect. Just a sec, I have a real answer. hartmans: sometimes people get too carried away with work or arguments and it tends to get a high flame level... It gets confusing to prospectives or new users. jered: The office gets really crowded. jhawk: How can you help fix that problem? hartmans: I'll try to help explain to people who are confused by that kind of thing. jered: no one really knows about PC's, I know about PC's and I can tell people about PC's... yoav: Hypothetically, you're given root on a server or root on an office machine, or placement in a group in the SIPB cell. Which of the bits we'd give you, what would you choose? jered: Since I'm not actually in a maintence group for a service, I'd take the office machine root. hartmans: I'd probably pick AFS since that's what I'm interested in. But I've seen that SIPB is good at getting reasonable bits for what they need to get done. warlord: What was the last time you answered a user question, and what was it? jered: today - how do I put text below this chart in Frame? hartmans: not at SIPB, actually, yesterday before coming in to help with the fileserver, I helped someone debug their umsdos filesystem which had gotten hosed. jhawk: name the ip address of... hartmans: 18.70.0.210, rosebud... jered: 18.70.0.215... hartmans: no, it's 239. no wait, it's 219 for ronald-ann. jered: 28 for tess turbo... cordelia: someone wants to print a word for windows document. jered: Ask him to save it as a postscript file... blah blah, gives the right answer. rei: User comes in, a random user comes in and says "I need to make a file, how can I create a file?" answer me as you would answer the user. jered: What kind of file? rei: A text file. jered: The easiest way is to use a simple text editor such as emacs, or vi. We have ref cards by the door, we have version 3 or 2. (hartmans: We're running emacs 19 with version 3 cards?) hartmans: What kind of file would you like to make, if it's text, there are two programs, emacs, or emacs19. Explains how to do emacs 19 stuff. marc: We're out of Getting Started on Athena, what do you do to get more? jered: Get funds allocated at a meeting. sorokin: nope. hartmans: oh! send mail to sendpubs or whatever? sorokin: yes. harrisj: Can I borrow a book, I'll give you an ID? jered: no! hartmans: yes, if you keep it in the office. svalente: I move that jweiss ask the question. seconded, jweiss asks the question. jered: Because I like to help people. It's a lot of fun here, it's indescribable. If it's explained, it'll be replaced with something else unexplainable. Also, I can't get in if the door's locked. hartmans: The canonical answer is to help people. But you can help people without being a member... But it'll make helping a little easier, but it's also because I enjoy being with the people in SIPB and I'd like to influence the direction of SIPB and contribute to flamewars. enter closed session. yay. hartmans: 19-0-0 jered: 12-2-5 They're both members, it would seem. Yay. Office Report: warlord: We seem to have lost a useful head in the office. I'm angry that bill left the office, it was one of the fastest machines we had. sorokin: We voted on this at the last meeting. ghudson: discusses stuff mentioned a week ago. marc: Since we're down one head, I'd like people refrain from doing things like playing netrek on the good machines. jhawk: The office is running low on IP addresses, we only have a couple other machine names. jweiss: dandelion-patch and portnoy. jhawk will talk to jweiss after the meeting. jered: dandelion-patch is currently the 486. that'll change. yoav: There's only one keycard, it's half-broken, it disappeared for a day, and can we please get one? jweiss: matt knows, jis is out of town... people try to debate this. sorokin: status report next meeting. svalente: the sun3 is still in the office. jtkohl: there were three netbsd install disks. jhawk: we overwrote them for aix boot disks. jweiss: I thought we had some. hartmans: They were crufty. marc: Move to allocate $20 for 20 hd disks. Friendly amendment to make it 40, placed back there in the office supply drawer. (Later clarification on the list: This is an allocation to up the money to $40 for as many disks as can be afforded by that, up to 40) ghudson: We borrowed another VRC-16 from the machine room. jweiss: I looked into the problems with VRC-16's. If we have problems with them we should bring them in the machine room put it on the table with ops-tmp-w20 and tell hotline it has a problem, and it's SIPB's. yonah: speaking of disks, it'd be nice if they were labeled in the future. sgw: someone mentioned people were sitting and playing games on the Mac for 8-10 hours, don't do that if other people want to use the Mac. MIT Computing Report: ghudson: testing zephyr problems for 7.8, in the zephyr locker, put them at the top of your path now that the bugs are fixed. jweiss: All the dialups are running 7.7 now, vax.dialup is dead. marc: no publicly accessible scribe machines on campus. sorokin: if someone asks to use scribe tell them they're out of luck. mhpower: how 'bout charging them a dollar? Computer Services: ghudson: We've juggled machines around. old-beacon is now opus and it's doing nothing. anxiety-closet is now a sparc classic serving the web. a sparc 20 does news-transport, is now beacon. jhawk: project.mbone will be useful soon. ghudson: rosebud lost its internal drive yesterday, AFS hung with the RxCallback thingie... We took care of this really well by that evening. mhpower: We're getting a lot more news than before, possibly a temporary increase in posting, possibly sites sending us backlogged news... Or we're getting a larger fraction of available news. We'll need more disk space for news, we'll want to think about getting a few more gigs of disk space for news at the next meeting. ghudson: We have 1G of the new disk space allocated to news currently. jweiss: Once the cutover happens we'll probably have another 1G disk we can shuffle around... SIPB Backup Report: mhpower: it wasn't done last week, it's running now, about 75% done. Publications Report: jhawk: We are out of iDotfiles. sorokin: there is no iDotfiles. mwhitson: cordelia's writing iCourtesy. jhawk: someone's been using the trays as a maildrop. It shouldn't happen that way. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: mwhitson: people should look at the IAP guide online at the url http://www.mit.edu:8001/afs/sipb/project/www/iap/iap-top.html. CokeComm Report: jhawk: dkk's going to bj's sometime this week. he'll buy us soda? jforbess: i went last time, it's a lot of fun. you should do it. Other: '() Other Other: jhawk: You can type beep jhawk, and unlike at last meeting, it'll work. abbe: bert and Eric both helped me a lot with .004 and I hereby thank them. mjbauer: if you want chocolate, send me mail by Friday ghudson: doom with sound is better than sex but I'm tired of it now. sorokin: at 11am this morning, the queue for checkoff in the lab was 40 long, so I bribed Eric to check me off. turned out someone else was checked off next to my name, only with a different lab kit. If anyone knows whose lab kit is #262, tell them to go get checked off. harrisj: Slander hasn't gone out yet, so I'm making a last-minute change for greg's quote above. bert: I went into 004 at 1:30 and didn't bribe Eric, so I came to the meeting late. marc: Doom on an 8-bit sound card and headphones can't be better than a 16-bit sound card on a 5-foot screen with Bose speakers. jered: I move that marc bring that machine to the SIPB office, so... sorokin: You can't make a motion in other other! I'm sorry, I just made that up. white-balloted, marc wasn't paying attention for a moment. warlord: I'm working on a menu-based interface to pgp for a class. Its target audience is the extremely new user. Please test it out and make sure it works, it's available at /mit/warlord/afscell/classes/4.207/pgpsh.pl jhawk: VBTB in Senior House Friday, Holman basement. jered: Rumors that half of Japan is using Twirlfish now are false. sorokin: but rumors that xiphmont is working on TwirlFish for his official research are TRUE! good god. jhawk: Marc's Wavelan antennae completely failed to make it from here to Senior House. yandros: did we abolish my report? Yes. There'll be frisbee later. The meeting was adjourned at 21:25. Minutes taken and submitted by shabby.