Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-01-07 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk arolfe jbarnold jesstess jhawk jwalden kaduk mathmike nelhage quentin rayhe tabbott | aseering Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: biyeun broder ternus | dvp Guests: Raphael Rush Officer Reports: MIT Computing Report: quentin: SIPB had a machine room party. tabbott: We got rid of the shelves and put machines on racks. The wiring is much better. There’s a pile of Ultra60s at the back of the office. We’ll probably be putting them on reuse soon. arolfe: It would be nice to have extension cords for connecting power strips to the UPSs, and also more gigabit network cables. I move to allocate up to $140 for four extension cords and 20 network cables (7′, 10′, and 25′). quentin: As a result of the machine room work, a couple of services are still down. The only user-visible one is IPv6. Also captain-crunch (VoIP) and syn (Nagios) are down. jhawk: There was an announcement from Mark Silis half an hour ago about MIT developing an optical network between upstate New York, here, and Baltimore. quentin: Upstate New York is a second path to our location in New York before we head down to Baltimore. SIPB Projects Report: andersk: We stole one of the LVS machines from the machine room and put it in the rack to use as a scripts monitoring server. tabbott: A lot of Debathena things are being checked into the Athena 10 repository, and we have been explaining how things work to Greg Hudson. broder: MacAthena has a distribution mechanism (still needs some work). We have packages for Moira, attach, athrun. We also have code for a /mit automounter and a couple other things. The next big thing to do is create an uninstall mechanism in our package manager. quentin: Everything MacAthena has is currently on coleco-sidewinder. broder: I can provide instructions for installing it on your own Mac. ternus: I got a shipment of door sensors. I’m going to be putting one together for the SIPB door. Can someone give me root on lnitp? tabbott: Is that on? quentin: Office heads are liable to go down at random times. ternus: This doesn’t require 100% uptime. asedeno: There has been progress on the Unicode branch of Barnowl. It’s usable but still not done. It’s in the Subversion repository, but not deployed yet anywhere. mathmike: course.mit.edu is now an Open Search provider, so you can put it in your Firefox search bar. It will even give you suggestions. broder: I’d like to request a 100GB external hard drive and a Tiger license so I can see if MacAthena works on Tiger. quentin: Their license doesn’t let you install it multiple times. broder: The license would be $70–$80. nelhage: We should get a bigger drive. broder: Move to allocate $250 for an OS X Tiger license and a 500 GB external hard drive (Firewire and USB) to be used for MacAthena and other projects. Office Report: jhawk: There was a recent resurgence of LOGO in the office. It suggested that we ought to have a LOGO book. I move $60 to get a copy of the canonical LOGO book. broder: Do you know what that is? jhawk: No, but I’ll find out. jhawk: I have an outstanding allocation to get another copy of the LaTeX book; I will deal with that. We also have a bound copy of the beamer manual. tabbott: There have been growing piles of CDs. We should come up with a better way of organizing them. tabbott: We also need to clean up this machine room stuff. quentin: The old PS2 KVM was moved to the machine room, since we got the replacement USB KVM a few months ago. There are now a few machines that need to be put on the KVM and we don’t have cables. Move to allocate $120 for four KVM cables. Education Report: dvp: There are classes. broder has the first one at 9pm today. If you’re teaching, you should check that the times are correct on both the MIT and SIPB sites. broder: Someone apparently showed up at 9am because they misread both sites. dvp: IS&T is offering similar classes but charging hundreds or thousands of dollars. Other: jhawk: rayhe got shaved. rayhe: This is an old thing. kaduk: jwalden got trimmed as well. nelhage: Today was the First Annual MITstache, the MIT Moustache growing competition. It’s not too late to join! dvp: Send mail to bpepper if interested. rayhe: What’s the prize? asedeno: You get to run MITstache next year? Other Other: jesstess: I’m declaring course 6 tomorrow! Help me pick an advisor. jhawk: The libraries have a beta interface to their replacement Vera system . You should tell them why it sucks. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 19:49. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.