Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 03/17/97 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kretch. In attendance were Voting members: kretch, danw, foley, jemorris, sit, emhavens, fubob, nathanw, tlai, svalente, amu, djib, nygren Associate members: mkgray, klmitch, ghudson, mhpower, len18, jweiss, tlyu, eichin Non-voting members: Prospectives: tivol, jmorzins, gif, jfmurphy, cmceniry Guests: cc001227@mindspring.com (!mwp) Treasurer's Report: sit: You tell them. kretch: Due to oversight (insight?), our VMA account got credited this month with an additional $2,000,000, unfortunately, we can only do VMA stuff with it (like backing up the sipb cell to floppies). sit: Jane says it's probably a typo. ghudson: Isn't there also a 30 cent accounting error or something? kretch: Yes, 10 cents. mhpower: Straw poll: llama, emu or none of the above? [non-secretary's note: I don't get it either] Chairman's Report: kretch: I talked to Jim Bruce today about SIPB being a communication point between I/S and students. He understands that we get info through I/S staff/urops in SIPB. He says we can send him email when we find out about stuff asking if it's ok to let students know. He seems interested in getting student opinion. (Both because he wants to help students and because students tend to side with I/S more than the administration.) kretch: Straw poll: What to do about OLC moving? We could make web page and have a mailing list/comment form for students to respond, and we can compile responses and give them to jdb. Should be more useful than a letter to The Tech. jweiss: I don't want this to get bogged down in designing the information funneling process, but we need to make sure to present ourselves as who we are, not who we aren't. (ie, we're trying to help information flow; we are not I/S. We have no actual power over events.) mkgray: I agree with both of you and volunteer to implement it. kretch: [straw poll: many-0-3 for doing it]. We can discuss this on mailing lists that may or may not exist. ghudson: I move that we create a list sipb-discussion, and when something comes up in a meeting and we offline it, we send mail to sipb-discussion with bcc's to other sipb- lists, and keep further discussion just on sipb-discussion. [second by mkgray] ghudson: One of the complications is that sometimes we won't want to discuss something in a semi-public forum... I think sipb-staff is appropriate for that. (Less concern about noise level there, and this isn't that common a case.) Also, I forgot to add that any sipb member or prospective should be able to be on it, and it should be archived. mhpower: I think the whole idea of announcing the topics on one list and having the conversation on another list is just too complicated for this group of people. People who want the mail will subscribe to the list, and people who want to whine about the mail won't. ghudson: You might be right. I think if we can get conversation-starting types to do it right, and let everyone else just reply, it should all work. [many-2-0, it passes] kretch: The discussion about what to do about OLC moving will be on sipb-discussion. Office Report: sit: I finally got around to ordering the 2nd editions of DNS, BIND, and Sendmail. They should be here next week. mhpower: snork has a new monitor as of 3:00 this afternoon. It seems to work. kretch: Ditto for zsr. I've been lame about other books. jweiss: I took a look at the coatrack catalog. I was off by quite a bit last week. They run from $60-$150. I would like to move that we allocate up to $150 to buy two $60ish coat racks [seconded by sit] mkgray: Will it survive? Is it guaranteed? jweiss: I don't know. [white ballot] ghudson: I think we spent $3500-$4000 on equipment this year. Purchases for FY97 should ideally be made in the next 3 weeks. I wanted to buy a sipb server machine, but I'm not going to have a proposal by then. (Someone else?) If not, we could buy nicer monitors for some machines. nygren: When this came up last year, there were 2 possibilities, one of which got dropped on the floor. One is that we don't have a really good tool kit. We could spend $500 and get a really nice one. The other thought I had was to get a machine for Linux development (Since lime needs to be netbsd for scanner.) jweiss: I thought that's what cutter-john was for? nygren: It's a build machine. It needs a stable OS. jweiss: Oh, you mean Linux development, not Linux development! ghudson: We'd have to spend money, but I think desk space is a bigger issue. A crash and burn linux box is also likely to be a very non-useful office machine. nygren: Do people have any thoughts on getting a tool kit? mkgray: I think it's a good idea, but $500 is high for our tool needs. amu: steve is still having that video problem. I sent mail to Lou. ghudson: He doesn't do software problems. nygren: I think I've seen that problem in the cluster. If there are lots of bad video cards, we might have just gotten two bad ones in a row. ghudson: Does anyone object to running one of the office SGIs in 24-bit color mode to see if there are any problems? Rel Eng is thinking of switching to this. Does anyone object to me just doing this? eichin: Put a note physically on the machine. nygren: You probably don't want to do it to steve. kretch: Both Sparc Classics have 48M now. ghudson: mycroft wanted someone to mention that zsr is running a dhcpd. Does anyone know if this is bad in any way wrt network? eichin: We have to make sure it doesn't answer BOOTP. ghudson: That's easy. But we'd have to dynamically allocate addresses. I don't know if network would like that. mhpower: Sloan does it, so it's not out of the question. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: There's a cooling shutdown scheduled for 4 days this week that affects most of campus, including w20. You might have seen large portable air conditioners. Be aware. nathanw: There is now a new dialup machine IN TESTING. (sundial, aka sparc.dialup). People should beat on it. Computer Services: ghudson: As I mentioned before, we should buy stuff. In the service arena, we have a big problem with the news transport server, but we don't know exactly what to buy to fix it. If we don't come up with something to buy, we could buy a third sun AFS server-- jweiss: No, you're confused. Based on what SIPB has told me, I have gone ahead and arranged for the third AFS server to be ordered. That should happen in the next few days. People were also talking about getting something pumped (ss20?) for web service. I don't think there's a problem with that unless we spend a lot on news service. ghudson: So, it seems likely we can get a new sparc 5 AFS server, but there might be problems with migrating AFS off Ultrix completely, but I don't want to discuss it in a meeting. mkgray: web vs. www: One thing we decided to do was put a survey on www to find out how/why people go to www. Before i tell you the answers, I want to know what people think we should do given certain numbers. kretch: I think that unless the number of people accessing www looking for web is really small, we should probably do some sort of merge. eichin: What percentage of hits answered the survey? mkgray: I don't have that stat... but it's a lot of people's home page, so probably not that large. mkgray: So, before doing the survey, I decided the results should control what we did with www. (ie, if 90% of the people were looking for web, we should be mostly web.) Results: People looking for official MIT info was a bit over 25%, student home pages a bit under 25%, `other' was about 20%, SIPB services ~10%, and then other stuff. So, about 55% looking for SIPB stuff. I will send out mail with detailed results and my suggestions. mhpower: Is this mail going to go to anyone on `the dark side'? mkgray: I was planning to. ghudson: There was a recent flame war. One thing that came out of it was that a lot of people don't like the web.mit.edu top-level. Given that CWIS hasn't seen this, it can't make much of a difference, but I want to make sure that people don't say stuff to them `representing SIPB' if they're just representing themselves. mhpower: ra just logged a bunch of fatal hardware errors on one of its disks ghudson: I think the only volume jeopardized is contrib.specs.cpu SIPB Backup Report: kretch: I think AFS is happening. sit: penguin-lust and anxiety were done last week kretch: The tapes are a mess. I'll look into a rack for the UFS tapes. The DLT tapes don't seem to be as much of a problem. Publications Report: kretch: Can someone volunteer to do what I was being lame about? [No] OK, I'll do it slowly. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: '() CokeComm Report: ?: We're out. Other: mhpower: There were a number of penetrations of news servers running INN (not ours) over the weekend. Look for cool misquotes on sites like www.news.com and www.zdnet.com because they talked to me. Other Other: tivol: I know the people who work at news.com. It doesn't surprise me that they misreported stuff. mkgray: My brother's ska band will be playing on the Middle East on the 29th. I'll send mail to sipb-soc. nathanw: NEC is great, but Omega Micro sucks. kretch: I managed to resist the temptation to wear my 9-layer shirt to the meeting with Jim Bruce. The meeting was adjourned at 20:02. Minutes taken and submitted by danw.