Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 09/10/2001 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by fyfer. In attendance were Voting members: fyfer arolfe nim kolya sly golem keithw tibbetts Associate members: jweiss yak ingolia belmonte | jhawk rjbarbal marc jered tytso srz Non-voting members: Prospectives: aatharuv kareid apm aletta hz04 emarcus |vkm asedeno mallon taalebi hubert Guests: Treasurer's Report: Chairman's Report: fyfer: We have an election for Arun. tibbetts: Assume the hazing position. fyfer: Please keep questions relevant. tibbetts: What have you done? aatharuv: I've installed locker software like gaim, icq, xmms. I'm trying to install KDE. I've been in the office a lot to answer questions and gone to help machines in the cluster. keithw: What's the last membership election you were at and do you think that's an appropriate amount of time? aatharuv: I think it was Omri's. keithw: What do you think about the length of time between that and now? aatharuv: That has been a long time. There have been several intervening elections. I think the last was for alex_c. SIPB should be convincing people to hang around the office more, especially prospectives. Most of the time I'm one of one or two prospectives here. golem: What's your favorite type of office chair? fyfer: Me, of course. aatharuv: That's a matter of personal choice. It depends on whether I'm trying to get work done. I like the chairs that can recline. fyfer: Who in this office don't you recognize and assign them a name. aatharuv: I don't recognize the prospective who walked in with a username with two zeros at the end. I call you "Bob." hz04: My name is Douglas. jhawk: How do you expect SIPB membership to change you. aatharuv: I'd like to actually be able to officially stay in the office. I'd also like to be able to get a key so I can open it up. It's sometimes closed when I come by. I've been trying to get buggy programs to work that I often cause X servers to die, so the root password would be useful. Bits are useful. sly: What do you think that SIPB should be doing that it doesn't or that we don't do well enough. aatharuv: We do a good job of ansewring user questions. What we really need to do is to convince more people to come to SIPB to hangout to learn things by osmosis. There are not enough people who are active voting members. tibbetts: What part of MIT computing sucks the most? marc: Network. aatharuv: It's hard for people to learn how to use Athena. It'd be cool if people didn't have to go to many different sources: SIPB, olc, asking upperclassmen. It'd be cool if there were more formal ways to find out information, especially information. jhawk: Remember that computing at MIT applies to more than just Athena. Recently, we've discussed what should be done about the lack of network drops in dorms. Do you think that's the sort of issue that SIPB should take on in our role as advocates for students? Do you think it's worth the effort? How? aatharuv: Dorm networks suck. SIPB should advocate for that. But, (1) do we have enough resources, not financial. But are we willing to talk to network. I'd be willing. sly: For issues where there are overcrowded rooms, there are inactive drops that can be activated. In other cases, sending mail will get a jack installed. The policy is that there will be one drop per person, they just need to ask for it. aatharuv: There are also the cases of crowded doubles and temporary crowds marc: I'd heard that it was two drops per student per room. tibbetts: Do you prefer gaff tape or duct tape? aatharuv: Duct tape is fine. keithw: Emacs? aatharuv: Emacs or nil- emacs would be a better option. There are times for both. I use vi sometimes. sly: A user asks a question when you are here with other members, but only you know the answer. Ask it of someone you think cannot answer it. aatharuv: How do you send email in chinese on athena? golem. golem: I have no clue. aatharuv: Emacs is the easiest way because it has support for Chinese. So you need to edit your .emacs to load tm, a set of packages for mime-encoded mail. Then, type comp, fill out the headers, then you tell tm to set the character encoding to ISO-2022-?? (one of several chinese encodings). Then set the language environment. Then type the message. Then save and then asnwer the character set question and then get dropped back to the comp prompt and type mime. golem: Two part question. First, name something that is hung from the ceiling that is not currently hanging from the ceiling. aatharuv: Previous SIPB members. Monkeys. golem: Second, do you own anything that you can add to the ceiling? aatharuv: I have a cellphone. nah. If I shave my head, we could hang the hair in a bag. nim: Name two items in the save in case of fire box and tell us why they're there. tibbetts: I suggest conscientous objection to this question. aatharuv: There's a frisbee. I don't know what else. fyfer: Useless documentation. jweiss: I move that Ted ask the question. tytso: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? aatharuv: I like hanging around here and asking questions. I want a key to the office. I'd like bits. I like doing stuff for SIPB. nim: If would be cool if membership stuff were at the end of the meeting so we didn't hose prospectives as much. Office Report: sly: There are several machines that are not set to auto-update. This seems poor for machines that don't have any special services because they don't get updated. jhawk: Historically, SIPB machines have been autoupdate=false. They often have local changes. Lately, this hasn't been done. For those machines with no customizations such that autoupdate=false is unnecessary, it seems fine to autoupdate. But don't want all machines running the current major release. I think that's a reason to worry about autoupdate=true. Otherwise, we can lose having 8.4 machines handy. The argument that no one updates them seems specious. If no one is updating them, then it's because they've been autoupdate for so long. We should remind people to do so. jweiss: It is true that once upon a time SIPB machines were autoupdate=false. But I think that changed with the exception of a couple of machines, like the scanner machine. I agree that people tend not to update machines. keithw: Can we take this offline? jhawk: The pool cue rack stuck itself to the wall. sly: It also has a pool cue. jhawk: We were out of staplers when one was used for postering. I move to by 5 747s. They're like $8 each. sly: If we buy these, they don't go out all at once. [jhawk allocation: $60 for staplers] Office Cleaning Report: jweiss: Plastic is not paper. MIT Computing Report: keithw: According to Chris Murphy, all classrooms now have wireless ethernet. marc: jis estimated that in February, the OC3 will be full. tibbetts: Keith, what is the status of the roaming thing? keithw: No progress since last time. Microsoft and HP are investigating. Computer Services: tibbetts: There's a linux installer. I haven't been working on it enough. If you'd like to work on it, please tell me. It's a very visible project. sly: If you do a fresh installer from the current installer and try to update directly to 9.0, it won't work because of the rpms file. You need to update to 8.4.26 and then to 9.0 kolya: bloom-beacon was rate limited to 10 Mbs by jis. jhawk: What was previously in place? kolya: We had grouplists and article sizes that we sent to certain peers. It still exceeded 10 Mbs. It doesn't effect our service. Other servers don't get as much news. tibbetts: VMWare. You know you want to play with it. First, there is the vmware dialup. Another is allowing people to run Windows in the clusters. golem: Can you give a description of what still doesn't work? tibbetts: It's unclear if we're going to use Samba or windows AFS to get a homedirectory. And we haven't solved the problem of getting software onto the machines. I don't know if the dialup thing has any problems. vkm: How easy is it to set up a certificate based voting system? jhawk: The apache-ssl locker has documentation. SIPB Backup Report: Publications Report: keithw: We're out of iAthena. fyfer: Move to $50 for 50 copies of iAthena. [fyfer allocation: $50 for iAthena] sly: If you go make copies, we have an account at CopyTech. Our account number is in the Treasurer's drawer. So is our number for Quantum. Get a receipt and put it in the right drawer and send the treasurer mail. Orientation Report: emarcus: Tours happened and went well. About 40 people showed up. 25 or 30 stayed for Stories. IAP Report: fyfer: Sherri says: It's that time of year. If you'd like to teach, let me know. Send me an email, even if you're not sure. Also, I need a volunteer to moderate the panel discussion on the last Thursday of IAP. The topic is network security. jhawk: Ask alien to print a detailed status of what the classes are. yak: There is a chance of Lex and Yacc by Lex and Yak happening. CokeComm Report: Other: keithw: Negotiations broke down in my lawsuit against BMG and the lawyer made me feel horrible. It looks like we're going to court on Thursday at 9am in room 15a. golem: I move that keithw isn't horrible. keithw: Arun, Yak, and I went to the cluster Saturday to help celebrate the giga-second. There was general cheering from us but other people didn't participate much. Other Other: jweiss: Blooddrive this week through Thursday in Sala. tibbetts: 5e has wireless thanks to 4e. We hate them much less now. tytso: I am now gainfully unemployed. The meeting was adjourned at 20:31. Minutes taken and submitted by arolfe.