Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 03/13/95 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by ghudson. In attendance were Voting members: ghudson cat yoav shabby marthag jered jhawk autumn yonah nygren hartmans nocturne tlyu djib jmmikkel abbe bert beaners | gsstark Associate members: mhpower proven marc srz jtkohl yandros jweiss mcmullan svalente | eichin (0.5*dkk) Non-voting members: Prospectives: rshah mwp klmitch jemorris tritan elliot sipb3 sipb5 nathanw cordelia nathanw jeffk@ai aragorn karat hobbit daveg velly jhlin mstachow stephane Guests: Secretary's Gratuitous Pre-meeting Comment: DOS telnet to AIX >> Linux? Treasurer's Report: Treasurer is here. She met with lorraine and jane and figured out what is what. We're projected to go over budget by almost $1400. It's not a big deal but we shouldn't go over any more than that. If it hadn't been for the $12k network fees, we'd be well under, actually. If you want to get a req signed for over $200, get it initialed by an officer. cordelia: I heard they're doing away with yellow copies of the req forms, is this going to affect us? ghudson: we're not sure. Chairman's Report: ghudson: I'm filling out some ASA paperwork. Anyone know our faculty advisor? yandros: Corbato. ghudson: thanks. Anyone who wants to help with the midway (a lot) we have two early returns. yoav: I'd like to nominate pshuang for membership. Seconded. ghudson: I assume we'll find a meeting time when he can show up? yoav: He'll try to arrange to be online during the meeting... he'll be in California or something? ghudson: I'll do my best to try to arrange something. Do people think it'd be acceptable to do a membership election with questioning taking place online? srz: We've done this before. straw poll: 13-4-3. ghudson: I'll try to work this out. hartmans: What's he do? yoav: He does a lot. news-answers stuff, and a lot of it. bert: ping is the current jik. vote on nomination: many-0-2. ELECTIONS for rshah yoav: What've you done to FTGOS? rshah: I've answered a lot of questions, yes I know how to doublespace in ez. I specialize in internet stuff, mosaic... I know latex, I don't know frame but can figure it out. Autocad... I'm course 2, not 6... I've written a prelim draft of iInternet. Half of it is on the web. abbe: Are you part of an evil conspiracy of course 2's taking over SIPB? rshah: No, but I'll join one if you start one... bert: Ask yourself a question on some obscure topic and answer it. rshah: What's been hung from the ceiling? your hair... kooshes, clotheslines ghudson: Kevin... jhawk: On the public workstations that support doing so, how do you mount a UFS CD-ROM? err, ISO-9660. rshah: mount -t ext2 ... hartmans: man mount is the right answer... jhawk: In the case of the Sparc5's you'd have to note that the blah blah blah. cat: With the mention of stupid questions, whose hair is stuck to the air conditioner switch? rshah: shabby? *clap* *clap* *clap* yoav: When was the last time you helped someone walking in the office, what was their question, and what was the answer. At ~7pm someone asked how you cut and paste in an emacs window. jhawk: What's the appropriate thing to do if you're the only one in the office in the middle of the day and there's an AFS outage? rshah: Have I seen the system console do the lost contact messages? or are people saying it's slowing down? If I know it's slowing down, then I wouldn't go into the cluster, since I couldn't since I'm the only one in the office, I'd tell people how to log themselves out... how to reboot. yoav: You're all alone in the office, the annoying loud thing there starts beeping [he points at the fire alarm]. whaddyado? rshah: grab the save in case of fire box and turn off the ac and get out... close the door on the way out. cat: turn off the AC? rshah: that's what I've been told. ghudson: not clear what the best thing to do is here. nocturne: Someone's soldering in the corner of the office and there's a big puff of light and smoke, and half of the office loses power. What do you do? rshah: Make sure he's still ok. nocturne: I'm still ok. rshah: call hotline? make sure they have medical attention. ghudson: check the fuse box. hartmans: Linux experience? rshah: Since IAP. Decent success, three kernel upgrades, AFS 1.1.95-3, helped people with random questions, install questions, X questions. I've configured X twice and there's one coming up this week. I had a couple kernel builds go bad, and got out of them without losing files. nathanw: What tools would you use to help people looking for the plural of the word 'koosh'? rshah: xwebster, hacker's dictionary in the office, martha, and my wild guesses. jhawk: If you're elected, what sorts of long-term projects do you anticipate, or what long-term directions do you see SIPB taking, that you can help with? rshah: being a SIPB member means ... something, missed it. As a member, I'd encourage other people to become prospectives... Where do I see the SIPB going? Forward, taking in new prospectives, showing them great things, I could help people decide policy, but I don't really see my being a member as deflecting the SIPB from some evil plot or something. marthag: What do you see as the goals of the SIPB? rshah: They're, first of all, helping people. It's also to expand the Athena computing environment, and to stand for students at MIT. marc: Two part question. Do you eat Chinese food, and how many times have you been to Mary's since it opened? rshah: yes, and 7. svalente: I move that barry ask the question. shabby: friendly amendment to sal's motion. Change it to "I move that barry ask the question and sal be barry." Accepted, voted on. Passed. rshah: I want to be a SIPB member so I can help people, so I can expand my abilities to learn different things. I feel I have numerous friends in the office, and being a SIPB member is cool. @executive_session() 15-0-4 raj wins. marc: I propose we put a limitation on guest accounts, in that no accounts shall be given out without a particular expiration date in mind. I think, as current policy, it should be enforced. bert: I think the current policy, if enforced, would be sufficient. ghudson: We don't know how to deal with people who come in and claim to do work for SIPB, but we don't have a list of stuff for people to do for us. We can't tell if they want the account for what reason. srz: Is there currently a sponsor listed for the guest accounts? I'd like to move to have the accounts moved from two weeks to six. jhawk: I don't think the typical use of sipbn accounts should be for prospectives at all. rshah: I believe the policy should be that the prospective should be given an account if they want to try it. It should be brought up at the next meeting that they were given an account... hartmans: The case of someone wanting an account should at least be delayed until the next meeting. We can actually give them some time. You should never give out the last free sipbn account to a prospective. marc: When I got the guest accounts created, it was for people with relatives visiting, like abbe's sister. It was not intended for prospectives or long-term anything. First and foremost, this is a student organization. This might end up turning away people who would be great SIPB members. If we are serious enough about a person as a prospective, we should be serious enough to go to accounts and get them an account. I'd like to have us vote on something in the next few weeks if possible. yoav: I'd like to make the point that we're not supposed to be a grease account organization. bert: We're talking about two classes of cases. We have the case where someone visits for a week, and we have the class of people who are willing to be prospectives, and will try to FTGOS. We need guidelines for the second class of people. We might want to try some things. The question is should we be giving out accounts to people who don't have one? marthag: I think the first class of people is well-defined, and dealt with. A sipb account was sponsored by a person who had their athena account taken from them because they didn't know about that. Have them show up to a meeting and ask for them once... proven is the exception... mhpower I don't think that we should be giving thes account to prospectives at all, even thought we say that the resource use is minimal. I think that one thing we should do is sit down with the IS people and ask them `how bad' it is to have guest accounts. sgw: seems that we can simplify this down to: some small number of the sipbn accounts can be used for prospectives, and use the others for . We could bring it up at a meeting/vote if there's a problem. bert: do sipb-sponsored non-member accounts automatically expire? no. We should deal ourselves, not make them do it. Yoav concurs. :-) yoav: why not use sipbn the way it was originally intended, fifo allocation, and create another class of accounts for prospectives? yandros: Before I was membered, there was a problem with slime accounts. We made an extensive policy about this and it's there in /afs/sipb/admin/text/guest-accounts/. If we followed it, it'd be ok. hartmans: I move we reaffirm the policy there. ghudson: Friendly amendment to reaffirm the policy on sipbn accounts as well. srz: How about just getting a status report next week? ghudson: The motion on the floor is to adopt and/or reaffirm the policy in the path above, and that we also do not give out sipbn accounts for more than two weeks, and the secretary is responsible for these things. nygren: Friendly amendment to have sipb-ec be told about sipbn accounts? hartmans declines. marc: Friendly amendment to have sipbn accounts as a separate issue. hartmans: no. marthag: The problem for me is that the reason people have started using sipbn accounts for prospectives is because when people walk in there's no way to evaluate the person immediately. It's easy to deactivate someone's use of a sipbn account. ghudson: the policy doesn't say we can't review guest accounts earlier than one year. jhawk: I object to considering this motion without people having read the document in question. ghudson: I think there's some value in voting on this. jhawk moves to table this 'til next week. hartmans withdraws the motion. marthag: straw poll on who thinks the current policy is fine? as written... 7-8-7. People don't know the current policy. ghudson: There will be a status report next week. shabby volunteers. Office Report: jweiss: The office is a pit. Someone threw all the keyboards out of the cabinet, they should put them back. yandros (again): The office will be reorged sometime soon. sgw: I removed large pile of things that should have been in the shelves, but were in fact in a pile of junk in front of the shelves, and put them back in the shelves. cordelia: Before you do any of that, send mail to people so we can be around to give input. yoav: There should be four new CD-ROMs and a book sitting next to opus. jweiss: The office czars are being extraordinarily lame. The commodores that were supposed to have been dealt with haven't. rshah: I tried to put the c64 into working order. There's a bunch of stuff next to the couch, like a CD player. People look into it. yoav: We used to have a Commodore set up. People didn't like it. cordelia: limekiller's keyboard is scrod. Would SIPB like one of his? Yes, thanks. MIT Computing Report: '() Computer Services: jhawk: the athena cell copy of the sipb locker is out of date. yandros is dealing, slowly. SIPB Backup Report: jweiss: charon was done late last night, AFS was done this morning and this afternoon, and picayune is going now. jweiss: several meetings ago, we allocated money to get a new cleaning tape. someone should volunteer to deal. anyone want to volunteer? cordelia volunteers. jtkohl: vault? jweiss: I've been rotating stuff through the vault. Publications Report: marthag: iLaTeX? is it updated? yandros: neither bert nor I dealt with it. We'll @i(really) deal this week. yandros: I move we allocate enough $ for 50 copies (yoav: max $100, amendment accepted) for iLaTeX once it's updated. white-balloted. svalente: I'll someday update iLinux-Athena to not mention the translators. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: jered: I have to talk to george! shabby: jcb dealt. He's @i(great). Other: jtkohl: I'm somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 done with porting dosemu to netbsd. marc: We changed the name of BBN Internet Services to BBN Planet, and they're getting Suranet. mhpower: on a related note, it's announced tomorrow that DEC's OSF/1 is renamed Digital Unix version 3.2. jered: The t-shirt order was returned. autumn: I've been attempting for a few months to give the AFS talk. someone should bug me into doing it sometime. mhpower: I'm trying to get a disk to fail. marc: jis has a program that burns out hard drives. ask him. Other Other: shabby: Wednesday's my birthday. I'll be 22. svalente: Friday's my birthday. I'll be 23. cordelia: copying a srvtab over your services file is a dumb idea. autumn: I got into Stanford. mhpower: NE Flower Show this week. email me. cat: I ran netbsd this weekend, but my computer is pitiful. sgw: I must point out, though I work for BBN, I do not work for BBN Planet. yandros: Ultimate after the meeting. talk to me. jhawk: Martha does work for BBN planet. The meeting was adjourned at 21:02:01. Minutes taken and submitted by shabby.