Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-07-02


The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott.

In attendance were 
	Voting members: andersk arolfe aseering ctl danjared jbarnold
		jhawk nelhage quentin spang tabbott tilia
	Associate members: asedeno | mitchb
	Prospectives: price | zev
	Guests: 

Officer Reports:
	tilia: I finally figured out how much our Athena fees are.
		Last year they were $1795.  This year they were
		$6200+.  Since we’ve been planning on them being
		something like $1795, we are $3500 in the hole.  I
		don’t know if we totally are since it’s a new fiscal
		year.
	jbarnold: Do we know what our budget is this year?
	tilia: No.
	tilia: The Athena fees are more because they started charging
		us a software fee and an Athena support fee.

MIT Computing Report:
	'()

SIPB Projects Report:
	danjared: Last night, quentin and jbarnold and I decided that
		it would be good to have a nagios machine that is not
		virtualized.  We set up one of the old machines that
		quentin donated for this purpose.

	nelhage: All of the hardware that we were expecting to arrive
		for the virtualization project has arrived.  This
		includes a new UPS with 12U of batteries, a RAID array
		with 12 TB storage, and a new SunFire X4200 with 12 GB
		RAM (instead of 16 GB as we were expecting).
	nelhage: The DIMMs that it shipped with were in fact 1 GB
		instead of 2 GB sticks.
	mitchb: [after the meeting] What?  You ordered incorrect RAM
		at the end of the fiscal year?  What is this, a
		tradition?
	nelhage: We had an installation party on Friday.  It all seems
		to work to some minimum degree of turning on.  We’ve
		been working on installing the Sun, but have
		encountered some difficulties possibly related to the
		RAM.
	nelhage: We had a meeting on Sunday to discuss the software
		setup.  A bunch of people expressed interest on
		working on parts, but there are still tasks that are
		unclaimed.  Talk to Tim or me, or email sipb-xen.

	quentin: Of the six machines that jweiss/ops donated, four
		came with no hard drive.  I’d like to propose buying
		one SCA hard drive for each of the four machines.  We
		have a choice of several hard drive at different
		prices.  There are 146 GB 10K drives for $272, 146 GB
		10K drives for $359, or 300 GB 10K drives for $419.
	quentin: These are from the IBM website.  I cannot find
		hotswap drives from any other vendor.  Newegg does not
		even stock drives with the right connectors.
	jbarnold: What are you planning on using the machines for?
		I’m a believer that no machine should not have RAID.
	quentin: We had a rough plan: two for asterisk, two for
		scripts backup servers, and two for scripts LVS.
		Email was sent to sipb-machine-room.
	jbarnold: Another disk-related consideration is that the
		sql.mit.edu machines are approaching disk capacity.
		They’re 80 GB SATA drives in RAID-1.  We’re going to
		want to upgrade those drives in the near future.
	jbarnold: One option that exists is switching sql.mit.edu to
		these new machines, but there are questions to be
		answered first.  The current sql.mit.edu machines are
		dual-processor single-core 3 GHz Xeon machines with 3
		GB RAM.  We probably don’t want to switch.
	tabbott: Let’s talk about this after the meeting.

	tabbott: andersk and I have been making progress on Debathena
		for Etch and Ubuntu.  It might be ready next weekend.
	jbarnold: Define “next weekend.”
	tabbott: No.

Office Report:
	jhawk: The black drawer that has been allocated for storing
		Coke has sharp screws in the back that puncture Coke
		cans.

	jhawk: The configuration of IFHP on the print server that
		serves Meadow has been upgraded to approximately the
		current version, so all the cool -Z options work.

	jhawk: There’s now an extra cable on the signal generator for
		hooking it up to other stuff.

	jhawk: We received some hardware with screw holes that were
		not tapped.  Is it worth getting tools to add threads
		to holes that don’t have them without leaving scraps
		of metal behind?
	jbarnold: I doubt that anyone but jhawk would go through the
		process of using said tools.

	danjared: The office was temporarily a pit in Laptopland.  It
		was mostly fixed.
	nelhage: Also, VT320s are not in fact laptops, no matter what
		geofft thinks.

	tabbott: People should clean the whiteboard occasionally,
		because if things stay there for a long time, it’s
		annoying to erase.

Education Report:
	nelhage: IISTYT.
	quentin: OISTYT.

Other:
	jhawk: I have a lot of $2 bills again.  See me after the
		meeting if you want them.

	aseering: For Mac users of Adium, I compiled a binary of zhm.
		It’s in my Public.

Other Other:
	danjared: A friend of spang and me, mako, was elected to the
		FSF board last week.  He’s also an MIT student.

Discussion Report:

The meeting was adjourned at 19:56.


	Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.