Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-06-25 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk jbarnold jhawk kchen k_lai nelhage tabbott tilia Associate members: asedeno mitchb ocschwar Prospectives: | price Guests: Officer Reports: tilia: According to SAP, and still using last year’s Athena fees, we have a little over $600 to spend. I’ve been calling lots of people about what the Athena fees are going to be. tabbott: I believe we have one new Athena machine this year, oliver. So in theory, they probably increased. jhawk: It also should include meadow, which we weren’t paying for last year but should have been. Also the base amount could have changed. tilia: Apparently there’s been a lot of reorganization. tilia: As a general reminder, if you buy things, give me receipts and send me email soon. tabbott: I think we only have one whiteboard eraser. MIT Computing Report: andersk: Sucks. ocschwar: Something about MIT wireless. If a guest brings a laptop here that had been configured for a different IP address, it will still ask for that IP address, and MIT’s DHCP servers will agree. asedeno: I think they just don’t say anything, and the laptop assumes that it should keep the same address. jhawk: This is because there are some legitimate non-IS&T DHCP servers on campus. jhawk: There was a DNS server failure on Friday or maybe Thursday, shortly after a DNS update at noon, where all three MIT DNS servers were simultaneously updated to the same broken set of configuration files. No DNS resolution worked. It was fixed in about 15 minutes. mitchb: They moved to quickly resolve the issue. jhawk: If we used the standard system where two servers get the zone from the other one, we wouldn’t have this problem. jhawk: There was an outage of connectivity to the SIPB machine room on Thursday night, which was once again caused by people plugging in equipment in outlets near W20-410T. People should perhaps consider calling the office before taking drastic action in similar circumstances. It does highlight the fact that we have been unable to negotiate emergency power or a UPS so that the SIPB machine room would not go out when this happens. SIPB Projects Report: nelhage: The hardware for the new SIPB virtualization project has finally started to arrive. We have a RAID array sitting in the machine room waiting to be installed. The UPS will probably be arriving tomorrow. We’ll probably have a party sometime this weekend to install the hardware. Office Report: jhawk: We have a new signal generator. It seems to work okay. The only real liability is that it doesn’t have an LCD display. I might pick up a cheap counter. tabbott: There are a few things on the whiteboard. Do we still have cable ties? I think we seem to have lost them. tabbott: There’s this fax machine issue. If we want to use it with the analog phone port in the back, we need a phone cable extension. I think that’s also a cheap standard part. jhawk: Sure. tabbott: Pencils. jhawk: Do we really need to do this this way? tabbott: No, but it’s on the whiteboard… tabbott: We now have this VT-320 in laptopland. I feel like this is not a good permanent space for it because it’s in the way. jbarnold: geofft might argue that it’s his laptop. mitchb: Then he should put it in his lap. Education Report: tilia: IAP is sooner than you think. tabbott: It would still be nice to have someone interested in IAP next year. mitchb: We should figure out the number of cluster cards we want soon. jhawk: We usually ask for a couple thousand. I would say 4000 is a good number. jhawk: It might be nice to get the pocket references without the extra crap. jbarnold: You’re saying that on average we give more than 10 cluster cards every day throughout the course of the year? I think that sounds high. nelhage: jhawk, are you organizing some kind of secret underground cluster card black market? Other: tabbott: I went on this field trip by plane to a conference in Canada without a passport, and got away with it. nelhage: Does that make you a terrorist? tabbott: Probably. jbarnold: Why would a terrorist want to go to Canada? tabbott: I unfortunately failed to send a postcard. Other Other: '() Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 19:45. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.