Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-10-01 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk aseering jbarnold jhawk jwalden k_lai mathmike quentin tabbott Associate members: asedeno | mitchb Prospectives: haoqili jesstess price ternus wangaj | mclamb Guests: kyoki Officer Reports: '() MIT Computing Report: quentin: IS&T is now offering “personal SIP accounts” to anyone in the MIT community. Go to and click on the Personal SIP Accounts link. yoz: Last night, the AFS server polyphemus failed and there was an outage of about half an hour. tabbott: There seem to have been some reprocussions of turning off authentication on the printers, where people have print jobs that they can’t remove. quentin: I think if your username matches, it works. nelhage: My understanding is if the (username, host, auth) triple matches. jwalden: The cluster combo is changing sometime. tabbott: Supposedly today. SIPB Projects Report: ternus: I’m still working on the Debathena stickers. quentin: I tried last week and had horrible success trying to allocate money because there were four members here. danjared and I are setting up sin.mit.edu, a generic SIPB Nagios/syslog server. To that extent, we want to use one of the IBM x335s from jweiss. We’d like to allocate money to purchace two hard drives for it. Unfortunately the price is $420 for each 146 GB (10K SCSI hot-swap with appropriate rails). eBay has it for $250 but it’s unclear whether we can get reimbursed for eBay purchaces. jhawk: We can. jbarnold: Dude, buy all new machines. mclamb: Can you buy a SATA controller and give it SATA drives? quentin: We tried to remove the SCSI backplane and it didn’t work. Also it requires a proprietary power connector. tabbott: Is the intention that this would be used to monitor the status of all SIPB projects, or more of a scripts-like model where users can sign up? quentin: I was thinking of it as just for SIPB services and highly secure. jbarnold: Can we use one of the other two machines? quentin: We think the hardware is sketchy. mitchb: Why don’t you leverage off the RAID ops has already provided, and log into AFS? quentin: We were worried about that not being secure, especially with AFS not being encrypted. jbarnold: You can do your own crypto. quentin: We still need a server to do that with, and a drive to boot the machine. jbarnold: I think it would be cool to provide a computron service to the MIT community. Currently CSAIL has a cluster for this which is kind of a pain. If vinegar-pot had double the hardware, it would be able to do that. I think we should upgrade linerva and shuffle machines. mclamb: Can you boot from the SAN with iSCSI? quentin: The point is that it’s a single self-contained machine that’s highly secure that in theory should never go down. It shouldn’t have dependencies on things like AFS that go down frequently. tabbott: I think this discussion needs to move offline. We should plan an actual discussion on this. Does someone want to email sipb-machine-room? Office Report: jhawk: Office temperature control is wonkier than usual. Apparently the thermostat on the wall controls only those two units, is misbehaving but might sort of work. tabbott: We have this table which we acquired off of reuse, which seems to have taken up an inconvenient location in the office. One proposal is to replace one of the tables back here; this would involve getting rid of five drawers. [discussion with vigorous pointing] mathmike: I think it would be great to garbage-collect drawers if someone wants to do that, but otherwise we should just get rid of this table. tabbott: Is anyone willing to deal with the coordination of garbage-collecting these drawers? jbarnold: I’m willing to help/prod someone else to do it. jbarnold: I think it would be great for the chair to deal. tabbott: I think it would be great for someone other than the chair to deal with something. [more discussion with vigorous pointing] k_lai: I’ll deal with it. tabbott: We have three machines in the rack, bart-savagewood, quiche, and deathtongue, that it would be nice to attach a KVM to. The difficulty with our current KVM is that it is a PS2 KVM, causing difficulties with the extension cables we have and so on. tabbott: I think nethack can be moved to the machine room, because it’s realy loud. mclamb: Does anyone have experience with the Java-based network KVMs? quentin: We talked about getting one for the machine room; we should return to that at some point. I don’t think it’s good for the office. quentin: I think we should get one 8-port KVM that supports both USB and PS2 computers. tabbott: You should investigate what you think we want to have. jhawk: We seem to be short one of our two burgandy staplers. jesstess: Can I fix the office head layout text file? quentin: Would people be okay with putting jesstess on system:www -c sipb? tabbott: Sure. jesstess: Do people like the fact that there are T-shirts? We’re mostly out of small and medium. tabbott: I think it would be reasonable to order more, or punt the current design and make a new one. jbarnold: In the past SIPB has done jerseys with UIDs on the back. They haven’t been as popular. Education Report: tabbott: I think we had an Ask SIPB column recently. jhawk: I think there’s one running in tomorrow’s paper. price: There’s a cluedump tonight: keithw on the law, in 56-114. For the people who are not familiar with who keithw is, jbarnold: and therefore aren’t aware that it’s going to be the greatest cluedump ever, quentin: Are you saying it’s going to be better than the scripts cluedump? jbarnold: For the people who haven’t read the talk announcement: [dramatically] “Keith and co-conspirators created the qrpff six-lines-of-Perl DVD descrambler and the LAMP campus-wide on-demand music service while he was a Course 6 undergrad and grad student, and his longtime efforts toward a serious, honest dialogue in the copyright wars may have made him the only person from ‘our side’ to have made MPAA uber-lobbyist Jack Valenti's jaw drop in person.” mathmike: Will this year’s law cluedump be substantially different from last year’s? price: I believe not. price: Next week is scripts, same time, same place. Possibly the following week, I will give a Haskell cluedump. price: $25 it turns out is not enough money to buy as much food as people want to consume. Move to allocate $25 more for the night, and to raise the standing allocation from $25 to $50 per cluedump. tabbott: That’s approximately an additional $200 for the term. tabbott: IAP is getting soon. tabbott: …er than you think. Other: mitchb: I have finally been paid for the Aeron. tabbott: In other chair-related news, additional chairs will be arriving in two weeks or so. nelhage: So we’ll have someone else run the meeting when you and I aren’t here? mitchb: I’ll forward a tracking number when we have one for your new officers. price: HCS had a barbecue on Saturday. quentin: More SIPB members attended than HCS. price: For the record, HCS operated the grill with no help from SIPB. quentin: I think we should have a barbecue in the spring to return the favor. price: I’m assuming there will be another HCS barbecue in the spring. tabbott: We should have a non-barbecue event to invite them over to. Other Other: tabbott: There’s this MIT State of the Institute forum being advertised. jbarnold: If anyone with significant Linux experience wants a CSAIL UROP, talk to me. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:03. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.