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.