gif: I am under the table, and this is not hazing. Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 09/6/1999 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by gisele. In attendance were Voting members: gisele jered hartmans cfox fyfer jmorzins amu zacheiss sly foley golem nygren kolya | jfmurphy Associate members: rjbarbal belmonte tb kcr proven jdaniel srz jhawk mhpower Non-voting members: Prospectives: gemery lgdean dmaze mwp arolfe nim chibong ingolia mrbonk ppham gfrankli jeppig jcshieh keithw mjones jwa mbilotti gif xwxin | goodell Guests: Treasurer's Report: foley: I'm here for once. I started work on the ROLES stuff. Chairman's Report: gisele: We have 3 elections tonight, gemery, lgdean, dmaze. zacheiss: Describe what you've done to FTGOS. dmaze: I wrote iGnus and answered users questions. lgdean: Last year I organized the SIPB Computer Tours, and I am helping again this year. I help users in the office. gemery: I taught the IAP Perl class last IAP and will again this year. I've done code hacking for webmaster, and answered webmaster questions. sly: Name 3 SIPB services and the machines they run on. dmaze: discuss on bloom-picayune, charon, and one other. AFS runs on ronald-ann, reynelda, and rosebud. News runs on senator-bedfellow. lgdean: Newsgroup FAQs is rtfm. There's the cluster thingy (xcluster). I think that's lying-naked-in-the-perriwinkle. gemery: charon is also the dialup server. webzephyr runs on anxiety-closet. granola runs the scanner. hartmans: What is the neatest thing that you've seen over the last year and why was it neat? (related to SIPB work) gemery: The occasional email of praise that webmaster gets on the transweb stuff, and that it now sometimes works on animated gifs. lgdean: Pun wars in the office. dmaze: I'll say tess-turbo, because it was a damn fast machine when it was here. jhawk: Pick someone in the room and ask them a question that you think that they can't answer but that you can. dmaze: nygren, frosh comes into the office and says that froshpref is down. You look, and it is down. Who do you talk to? jhawk: Tell them that it's way too late. nygren: I'd ask someone else, because I don't know offhand. dmaze: froshpref was being run by network. gemery: tb, user comes into the office, has a file that they brought over from their windows machine and it has all these ^Ms. What should they do? tb: Tell them to load it in emacs, M-% C-q C-m ! jhawk: The fastest answer is to pipe it through tr. jmorzins: Or add consult and pipe it through 'clean', which does just that. lgdean: belmonte, someone using mh has gotten their mail all out of order and wants to get it back in order. What do they do? belmonte: I have a stupid way to do it; go into the mail directory and use 'mv' to renumber all the messages. lgdean: Use 'mhsort'. hartmans: gemery, dmaze, what is some advice you'd give people for when a service you're responsible for crashes and they're not sure what to do? dmaze: Well, for froshpref, there was basically a switch to turn it off and display an error message. I would do that and then try to debug it in the way that you try to debug things. gemery: For transweb, I would log into the webserver and back out the most recent changes in RCS, then take the broken version over to anxiety-closet and debug it there. tb: A user runs out of the cluster, hair on fire, and screams "OH MY GOD A MACHINE EXPLODED!" gemery, what is the first thing you do? gemery: Try to extinguish the user. tb: dmaze, what is the second thing you do? dmaze: I would ask the user which machine and go verify that it had in fact exploded. tb: gemery, what is the second thing you do? gemery: Check if there is a fire that requires more attention. dmaze: Pull the fire alarm. lgdean: Grab the save in case of fire box. zacheiss: A user has a question, and only you know the answer. What is the question? dmaze: Some minute detail about froshpref. gemery: Anything about prereqs for the IAP Perl class. lgdean: It depends on who else is in the office. vi type stuff, perhaps. There's also this thing called 'edscheme'. foley: How do you doublespace in 'foo', where 'foo' is two random editors. gemery: In frame, you click the button. dmaze: In emacs, M-% C-q C-j C-q C-j C-q C-j ! ldgean: In vi, s/... dmaze: In ed, ... gemery: From the command line, I would use perl. tb: Move that amu ask the question in a simple and direct manner. amu: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? dmaze: I think that being able to open up the office, sit there, and help users would be really cool. lgdean: Before I would have said that I used to get here at 9am, and the office was always closed. gemery: I'm interested in doing webserver maintenance, but I can't really do that as a prospective. [Meeting is closed] [dmaze is a member 17-1-2] [gemery is a member 18-0-2] [lgdean is a meeper 19-1-0] [Meeting is opened] gisele: There will be EC and officer elections next week. jered will send mail about that tonight. Office Report: jhawk: Yesterday, a user asked if he could borrow a power cord, and in return we got a neat drawing of a mechwarrior standing on the great dome. sly: I found the office rock and the office slinky. jweiss [through zacheiss]: The promised office purge will happen soon. Put personal items in your drawer, or they may disappear. Office Cleaning Report: zacheiss: Make kretch re-enable the cleaning bot. MIT Computing Report: mrbonk: Matt Wall left the mechanical engineering department. Computer Services: hartmans: This weekend, zacheiss and I continued the process of installing the server to be known as squid. We have the alpha for running squid, and will also be running a toy Oracle server. The machine is up. I'd like to get more people involved on the Oracle side of things. I'll send mail. zacheiss: Server maintainers who haven't submitted budgets for this fiscal year suck. We still haven't gotten budgets from rtfm, news, or www. SIPB Backup Report: zacheiss: I did UFS. AFS hasn't happened because aforementioned purchases haven't happened yet. Publications Report: jhawk: We could use more Linux 1-sheets. Did people get more iLatex, or is this just leftovers? cfox: I didn't get more iLatex. I got more iZephyr. gisele: We've approved money for more iLatex, does anyone want to deal? [gif volunteers] dmaze: There's a new draft of iGnus on the board. zacheiss: iLatex is still terribly out of date and would make a great prospective project, hint, hint. Orientation Report: lgdean: Tours are happening three days from now. I think we have sufficient guides. It ends with the talk by jis in 4-231. aurora is going to do postering stuff, I imagine she could use a minion. [fyfer volunteers] IAP Report: jhawk: It's now IAP Planning Planning month. hartmans: Someone should teach an IAP SQL class. jhawk: People who taught classes last year who didn't offer to teach classes this year should think about if they can make them happen. CokeComm Report: gif: I would like to be CokeComm if pipa doesn't object. I have a car and a BJs membership. Other: jmorzins: A release candidate of Windows 2000 failed to be released today, it may not even be out by the end of the year. nygren: I will no longer be a student as of tomorrow, I'm taking some time off. We will need an EC elections meeting. jered: I will no longer be a student as of tomorrow, I graduated. hartmans: I have decided that bachelors degree was enough, instead I'm a systems architect at FundsXpress. People should visit Texas more often. gisele: elliot will also no longer be a student. jhawk: The faculty picture book comes out for the first time in 7 years this year. sly: jhawk has joined the category of "Things that have hung from the ceiling." Other Other: gif: Simple harmonic jhawk. cfox: New prospectives who haven't had the spiel should see me after the meeting. fyfer: Don't forget to register tomorrow! The meeting was adjourned at 20:26. Minutes taken and submitted by jered.