Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/7/94 The meeting was called to order at Mon Nov 07 19:30:05 1994 by sorokin. In attendance were Voting members: ghudson beaners sorokin bert cat tlyu gsstark yoav mhpower abbe jmmikkel | jhawk nygren yonah dcctdw rjbarbal Associate members: jcb eichin jtkohl proven jweiss yandros mkgray | sekullbe srz sgw wesommer Non-voting members: Prospectives: marian@fandom_house.org jered aragorn katzchen mwp quijote klmitch mib@gnu.ai.mit.edu elliot rshah hartmans amsmith cordelia shade | jbb rpeck@cory.eecs.berkeley.edu rajiv foley Guests: Chairman's Stupid Joke, in Substitution for Secretary's Gratuitous Pre-meeting Comment: Knock knock! Who's there? Interrupting cow. Interr -- Moo! Treasurer's Report: nothing useful. Chairman's Report: proven: nominates hartmans for membership. Accepted. many-0-0. Elections will be held at nexit week's meeting. jhawk: requests that new prospectives be announced in meetings. Discussion of how to make people aware of new prospectives. Tail members-and-prospectives if you want to know. yandros mentions that the file is no longer used by SIPB xlogin. This is all silly. If you want to know who's in the office, be in the office. More discussion. jhawk gets frustrated and pours DrPepper in his own hair. Introductions held. jtkohl: nominate jered. Accepted. 9-0-3. Elections next week. Office Report: yandros: There is a machine in the monitor with a dead monitor-- [pointing at jhawk's sun3] jhawk: It's not dead yandros: it's off. As I understand, it was supposed to be out of here two weeks ago jhawk: not true, there was no such date. Noted, I'll see what I can do. abbe: will get up-to-date faculty/staff and student directories for the office. bert: half the office fell off the net because a BNC connecter wasn't locked in. Thinwire ethernet added to SUCKS report. yandros: the two VRC 16's in the office have problems lately. Has anyone notified hotline about this. jhawk: sorokin volunteered jweiss two weeks ago, but this didn't make it into the minutes. jweiss: will talk to people at E40 to see what we should do. sgw: motion to allocate money to buy power strips. This was already approved. shade will fill out the req and get them from Lab Supplies. From minutes.94.09.12: bert: last week a power strip in the machine room in the athena part blew and they asked us if we had any free power strips. We didn't have any. And we were having problems with the midway, and we need power strips! Motion to get two power strips... dkk says $5.50+tax. jweiss moves for up to $10 for two power strips, seconded, white ballot fails. mhpower asks if we want to get more expensive ones that work better. sgw says there are better ones at the MCC... yandros: the ones we have now came from lab supplies for $15... marc: up to $50? dkk: The surge suppression at that price is not meaningful... yandros: $50 and we let dkk decide what to do. white-balloted. yandros: a person wanted to move milo into the machine room. Talk to that person if you object. (Ask yandros if you don't know who it is.) jhawk: A/C didn't come back up immediately--F-IXIT dealt. MIT Computing Report: mkgray: MIT is looking into getting Encyclopedia Britannica for the web. mkgray: MIT Graphic Arts is looking into putting student ID pictures in a format that can be digitized. ghudson: zephyr servers are now sparc20's--they've been dropping subscriptions--didn't know why. yandros: MIT is a pit. jweiss: most of the dialups are upgraded. All of the "athena" pool is done, as well as half of the express pool. Athena-X will be done tomorrow. jweiss: there was a bug in AFS that caused spewage of data until the client machine was fixed. There's now a new Linux AFS distribution server. Computer Services: yoav: anxiety-closet has been down a lot recently--logging both disk and memory errors. charon is getting hosed by being used as a second web server. We need to discuss alternatives. ghudson: news transport is now running on a sparc 20. We're now getting more news than we used to. "We've lowered the expire times from 10 days to 6 days and still almost ran out of news." oops, he means disk. mkgray: sgw's machine has disk problems and is therefore unusable. Moves to switch bill-the-cat with the machine that is currently anxiety-closet, since many of the bugs appear to be Ultrix-related. When this is done, charon will stop being used as a secondary web server. (The switch has already been cleared with jis.) We will need to play musical heads, since the monitors aren't the same. amendments: 1) this won't be done if anxiety stops crashing 2) dt won't be switched to SunOS discussion of motion: jweiss: there was a change made to httpd and the web server did not crash today. mhpower: do we lose a cluster platform in the office if we do this? (discussion) many-1-3+sgw. Approved. jweiss: legal agreements wrt switching btw with anxiety-closet--we cannot sign them. mkgray will make sure the right things happen, ie contact MIT legal people and make sure chair or vice sees the agreements before we do anything. it's cool. yandros: there are 3 VRC 16's in there now--if we're moving a head out, we have to move another head in, since we decided earlier that 3 was our minimum number of heads. jered: ghudson's monitor for his 486 box? No further info. mhpower: news expiration times--if you notice anything weird happening, send mail. mhpower: if we get sgw's machine working for web service, motion to name it sgwwww with a cname of i-abstain. a lot-1-5 sgw: That is not to be confused with kkkken. ghudson: we have a 2.1G disk at E40 ready for us. Plan is to wait for the 4.3G disk to arrive and then do an AFS cutover. mkgray: make sure all keyboards in the machine room stay labeled so people don't reboot the wrong machine. it sucks when www falls down and people reboot RTFM. jweiss: will make new labels for machine room machines soon. jered: this morning, half of the USENET groups seemed to disappear but were still in the active file. jhawk: there was a problem on the USENET with duplicated articles. ghudson: for over a week, there have been NetBSD system packs in the SIPB cell. SIPB Backup Report: jweiss: did it last week. sgw: do we have plans for our dead Exabyte tape drive? He wants it. sorokin: jcb moves that the dead Exabyte drive be decomissioned and given to sgw. white ballot. Accepted. Publications Report: jhawk: we have more iLinux-Athena. There is no good feedback channel about usefulness of the Inessential documents. sorokin: I think that we can all accept whatever mechanism you come up with, do you have a suggestion [hopeful gleem in eye]? jhawk: No. jered: volunteers to make a short one-page Linux document. svalente: Agrees with jhawk. A month ago, I sent out email to linux-dev stating that there's a serious need for a Linux-Athena faq, and asking for volunteers. The email was, as far as I can tell, basically ignored. mkgray will ask for 100 more athena quick refs. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: jhawk: people should look at /afs/sipb/project/www/iap/iap-top.html and give mwhitson feedback on descriptions of IAP courses. CokeComm Report: The jerk is a jerk. We have no coke. jhawk: Coke is sticky when it's in your hair. rhonda volunteers to help be a jerk Other: Doom has 5 news groups and they all passed! (USENET Added to Sucks Report) jhawk: Two SIPB ID cards were found and issued by the chairman-- sorokin: Three jhawk: Nonetheless, two were still issued [regardless of whether three were] They've been sitting in a drawer in the office since at least 1977, and the chair thinks they're immoderately silly, but if you want one she will sign it. jered: Jered's doom server: (gives info) Objections to the doom server having SIPB affiliated with it. Oh, it doesn't. Note that MIT already has a doom server--doom.mit.edu. rajiv: is going to look into MAC-Linux, MAC-BSD, etc. (This has been tried about 6 months ago with little success, but it has supposedly improved.) svalente: rumors that the so-called "toy gun bandit" has robbed three banks in Japan with a souped-up plastic dart gun are completely unfounded. jtkohl: we have a full house of Johns over Gregs. Other Other: jhawk: now has a pager. It's in his .plan file. mib: 2 people running for Senate. One is a womanizer, has driven women off a bridge and drinks too much. The other is not. But since you're voting for Senator, not roommate, this is irrelevant. shade: moo LSC doesn't have quorum. [Several people leave.] abbe: the couch is a better place to sleep than your bed--she took a 2-hour nap that lasted 6. cordelia: vigil for former POW's. ask him or see posters around the 'tute for info. jhawk: NetBSD, version 1.0 is informally released, or something like that. We think there's a stable version now, but we may be wrong. foley: toy guns are becoming banned in the US. jtkohl: Election Day tomorrow. jhawk: Friday is a holiday. Everyone-look-at-Chad report: Everyone said it was too cold for Ultimate. Objections. If you want to play Ultimate, talk to Chad. svalente: moves to eliminate Everyone-look-at-Chad Report (aka Post Meeting Ultimate Report. Seconded. sorokin will no longer recognize it as a valid report. jhawk: motion to reinstate the Post-Meeting Ultimate report. sorkokin: veto The meeting was adjourned at Mon Nov 07 20:28:19 1994. Minutes taken and submitted by jcb.