Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 12/5/94 The meeting was called to order at Mon Dec 5 19:29:58 EST 1994 by ghudson. In attendance were Voting members: jered shabby jhawk hartmans tlyu yonah ghudson cat | yandros yoav rjbarbal Associate members: proven jtkohl jcb mhpower jweiss mwhitson mkgray | sgw Non-voting members: Prospectives: sipb7 mark klmitch mwp rshah elliot hobbit rajiv nathanw quijote fedley cordelia daveg | grisha larryjd dwyatt tpena seborn warrend Guests: Treasurer's Report: The treasurer is not here. jered: limekiller (formerly dandelion-patch--see Office Report below.) has 8M of RAM and swaps its brains out frequently. We should get an additional 8M to make it useable. Cost is $170 for 4M SIMMS, $359 for 8M, $592 for 16M. The 72-pin SIMMS will work in lola-granola and also in the Power Mac, so there won't be an issue of being able to use the RAM when jered removes his machine. Discussion. Motion to allocate up to $650 for 16M of additional RAM. limekiller would get an additional 8M bringing it up to 16M, and lola-granola would get an additional 8M, bringing it up to 24M. Obviously, the SIPB's RAM will be removed when jered removes his machine from the office. 9-2-6. Motion passes. Chairman's Report: The chairman is hosed. She's not here. Office Report: hartmans: wants to run vmstat and iostat (monitoring programs) on the RSAIX machines (oliver and pickled-herring) to collect data that will be useful for fine-tuning the machines so they don't have to swap quite as often. Discussion. Some people request that it be able to be turned off, and that information about how to do so appear in the motd. This will happen. It will require root access, but then again there's always at least one member in the office, right? jhawk: xcluster on yaz now displays the Athena DEFCON level over lying-naked-in-the-periwinkle's xcluster display. jhawk: the sipb-office mailing list now exists. It contains sipb-staff plus sipb-prospectives. jhawk: the lights in the office now run on 277V power. yonah: can we change root's shell from /bin/csh to /bin/sh? tlyu: suggests that we remove /srvd/patch from root's path instead. Short discussion. Will continue on sipb-staff. Shell change is likely to happen. rjbarbal: we have fewer chairs than heads, and the chairs we have are breaking or broken. Can we buy furniture? Do we have the money. yandros suggests we try to grease some chairs from various places. (Discussion of which clusters' chairs aren't labelled "property of athena" was stricken from the minutes.) jhawk: bought three punchers for the 3-hole punch from University Stationery for $1.29 each. jhawk: there are two cash boxes in the 'fridge. One of them may belong to cokecomm, but the jerk doesn't realize this. jered: here are the suggested names for dandelion-patch: limekiller, cutter-john, snugglebunnies, berke, doomcctdw, minbari, cordelia-is-a-twinkie, pgp, sack-of-doom, sit-down-jered. ghudson requests that we strike names that don't fit into our naming scheme. Discussion. Agreed. limekiller: 9 cutter-john: 0 snugglebunnies: 5 berke: 0 The new machine will be limekiller.mit.edu. Discussion of cnames. dies. We want at least one short cname, e.g. lk or lime. (secretary note: at this point someone mentioned the cname lime-in-the-coconut, but this was shot down instantly) jhawk: there's a key in the office--if it belongs to someone, claim it. MIT Computing Report: ghudson: Random outages. We don't care about them. jweiss: AFS outage today. Athena Ops has done some things to try to prevent these in the future. (It's not clear why the outages were happening.) The changes are to the invocation of the file servers. SIPB members should *not* send out filsrv messages about the Athena cell. ghudson: cfields has come out with a new version of the add script for the next release. "add cfields; man add" to learn how to test it. Computer Services: mhpower: anxiety-closet hasn't been accepting connections on port 8008 (the discuss gateway) tlyu: ronald-ann is no longer serving files. The data is on rosebud2. mwhitson: return of "Return of the Jedi": lisanti wants to merge some of the pages where web.mit.edu and www.mit.edu duplicate information. She wants us to merge the activities page by abandoning web support for the activities page and letting us just do whatever we want. (related info: the takeover of homepages list won't happen immediately--and web.mit.edu may abandon the reaper that looks through people's homedirs.) ghudson: because of the problems with beacon falling off the net, we won't be cutting over any servers to SS20's immediately. mhpower: ops has been having a similar problem. yandros: we may be able to get system 7.5 for the mac for free. SIPB Backup Report: jweiss did it last week. Someone should do it this week. Publications Report: We just changed iAthena to correct minor bugs and need copies. Motion to approve the necessary funds for 100 copies. White ballot. Approved. cordelia will deal. cordelia wants to do a major rewrite of iAthena over IAP. email him with suggestions. jered is working on iLinux. R/O Report: IAP Report: the IAP Guide is out. jtkohl: the NetBSD people should get together and plan. They also need a room. CokeComm Report: jcb: We're out of coke and low on some other stuff. Other: jered: ordering 5GB tapes that work in the Exabyte drives (brand name--3M). Talk to him if you want to add to his order. rjbarbal: the Office of Career Services now has a web server. cordelia: The new issue of Technology Review new issue has just gone online. There's a Scott Adams interview in it. The URL is: http://www.mit.edu:8001/activities/techreview/tr.html mkgray: Sometime in the next 12 hours, netgen.com will be pingable mhpower: new Athena ops staff member named Tim mhpower: jis's home-ppp machine is road-warrior klmitch: jhawk got three copies of the student directory for the office. Other Other: jered: if you get an email message about a virus, don't forward it. rjbarbal: LSC members should go to GenComm NOW. jcb: I'm now playing with the New England Philharmonic. cordelia: new year's party in Southern California The meeting was adjourned at Mon Dec 5 20:09:52 EST 1994. Minutes taken and submitted by jcb.