Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/2/98 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by elliot. In attendance were Voting members: nathanw, pipa, hartmans, elliot, amu, sly, jered | yandros, yoav, sit Associate members: rjbarbal, yonah, jtkohl, jhawk, mycroft, mhpower, jemorris, jmmikkel, srz | jdaniel, fastcart, xiphmont Non-voting members: Prospectives: jmercado, elereina, cyruse, gamache, tb, golem, seph, lyudmila, mwp@mwpnet.com, gif, belmonte, devnull@gnu.org, aidan, zacheiss, pocky, lnemzer | ocschwar, ansbergc, int18 Guests: Treasurer's Report: nathanw: We have a bunch of money; for equipmentish stuff for the office, slightly under $10k. We have other money for other categories. Chairs would come out of that budget. yonah: We have a treasurer. mycroft: And he appears to be doing his job; we should applaud. Chairman's Report: elliot: The chairman is here; even doing his job, sort of. Office Report: jhawk: In the past month, liner notes to BNL Stunt disappeared out of my jewel case; I want to know where they are. mycroft: One of the ventilation units in the back makes loud noise when activated. Mail should be sent to fix-d-zone, and copied to sipb-office. jdaniel: It would be cool if we ordered staples and tape. [pipa volunteers.] jered: I move to allocate $100 for office supplies. [second white ballot, passes.] Office Cleaning Report: tb: Office cleaning happened; the people in the room actually helped. It is already a pit again, though. MIT Computing Report: zacheiss: doom lists for 1998 exist; lerts will go out at the end of the week. mhpower: What is the status of news.answers accounts? hartmans: I will try to deal later this week. The default action is not to get rid of the accounts; it is important that we deal in reasonable time, but it is not critical it happen before lerts. tb: Any Andrew users in the room or reading these minutes should send me mail with what parts of Andrew they use. yandros: Earlier this week danw said we were out of uids. zacheiss: we now have 271 new free UIDs or so. Computer Services: lnemzer: I volunteered to install Lyx; if people could help, it would be cool. sly: If you didn't get webmaster mail from me and thought you volunteered, then I didn't know that you volunteered; you should let me know. jweiss: There is a dead VRC16 in the machine room. It will go away. SIPB Backup Report: jweiss: I did charon and penguin-lust yandros: I believe that no backups are more than a week old. [No one knew about afs backups.] Publications Report: yandros: I tried to stop gif from ordering iAthena but he was too efficient. People should bleed on the new iAthena [on the bulletin board]. Claims to be copyright in the year 198 among other things elliot: This would be a good thing for people who don't have vast Athena clue to do; you are the target audience. Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: amu: Yak will do a course on sh scripting; he talked to xela. nathanw!xela: Errata: In last week's report I said we had committments for 10 classes, and gave a list with 10 items -- unfortunately, Intro to Java was on the list twice and TCP/IP networking wasn't on it at all. The IAP Office has extended the deadline for getting information into the printed IAP Guide. You now have until next week's SIPB meeting to tell me if you want to teach something, and to write your class description. We now have committments for 14 classes, two of which will be offered twice, once in the first half of IAP and again in the second, for a total of 16. Nearly all of the classes have been scheduled and the rooms confirmed. To date, SIPB's IAP 1999 offerings are: Crash Course in C (C^3) (offered twice) belmonte Caffinated Crash Course in C (C^4) khsiao Introduction to Java srz Practical Security using Crypography gamache Postscript biomorph Intro to UNIX Software Development nygren tcl/tk aidan xml eichin lex & yacc tb TCP/IP Networking jhawk Athena: How it Works kretch Customizing Emacs & elisp basics devnull@gnu.org Perl gemery NetBSD/Athena lnemzer The schedule should be complete or nearly so by next week's meeting. CokeComm Report: jered: We have very little soda. pipa: I'll get to it, but I need a volunteer to come to BJs sometime late this week. Other: jered: The rumors of a security hole in sshd have been greatly exaggerated as far as we know. tb: I will be doing a clue dump on Under the Hood at Athena. It will be next week. aidan: NT5 and NT4 do not appear to co-exist happily at all. My attempts to make the office machine do this have failed. yonah: Working on getting HP upgraded to a new OS. tb: A memo from MS senior management on the threat of open-source software has been released. Comments by ESR; see /mit/xela/www. Other Other: jered: I got a new phone and can even place calls from the SIPB office. pipa: Fresh Samantha stains carpet well. mycroft: Hpux 11.0 has a bug that causes it not to communicate well with any version of NetBSD. yandros: Directory lookups on Linux are slow if you have 300,000 entries in them. jhawk: We had an emergency power shutdown that didn't effect emergency power much. mhpower: If people are relying on sipbvax for their web server, it may become different. The meeting was adjourned at 19:52. Minutes taken and submitted by hartmans.