Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-02-11 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk aseering ctl ecprice geofft jbarnold jesstess jhawk kaduk k_lai mathmike nelhage price quentin rayhe tabbott yoz | jwalden mitchb Associate members: asedeno jweiss Prospectives: broder haoqili rishig Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: I’ve replaced the constitution in the office with one that is up-to-date. broder: And significantly less yellow. tabbott: It’s time for officer elections. We’ll start with chairman elections. tabbott: [reads duties of chairman] arolfe: I nominate nelhage. nelhage: I decline. arolfe: I nominate tabbott. tabbott: This year it is time for me to cast aside my chair. I decline. jbarnold: I nominate price. price: I accept. jbarnold: I nominate jesstess. jesstess: I decline. nelhage: I nominate jbarnold. jbarnold: I appreciate it but I decline. tabbott: I nominate arolfe. arolfe: No. What’s wrong with you? jbarnold: I nominate kaduk. kaduk: I decline. yoz: I nominate ecprice. ecprice: Decline. tabbott: Nominations are closed. price: I think the most important job the chairman has is finding new fresh blood for the SIPB and finding productive projects for them to do, and making the two meet. I have experience carrying this out. I was president of the Harvard Computing Society, an analagous but smaller organization with a similar mission. ctl: Do you believe you can handle the weighty responsibilities of a SIPB chair while still maintaining the quality of your research work? price: Yes. ctl: Do you believe you can maintain the quality of your research work while still handling the weighty responsibilities of a SIPB chair? price: That’s not the board’s problem. quentin: Do you plan to be around next year? price: yes. ecprice: Do you care about procedural nitpicking? price: Only to the extent that it prevents other people from wasting time caring. quentin: To what extent will you prioritize SIPB meetings over your other responsibilities? price: I don’t have other responsibilities Monday nights. [price leaves] <17-0-2, price elected> tabbott: We will now open nomination for vice chairman. tabbott: [reads vice chair responsibilities] nelhage: It’s somewhat vaguely defined by the constitution. Keeping track of projects, taking charge on some things in the machine room, organizing hackathons, generally helping with projects, dealing with stuff when the chair’s not around. rayhe: I nominate jesstess. jesstess: Yes. broder: I nominate nelhage. nelhage: I accept. asedeno: I nominate quentin. quentin: I accept. yoz: I nominate kaduk. kaduk: I accept. jesstess: I’m frequently accused of fangirling course VI. While I don’t know a lot about what goes on in the machine room, I will take the time to learn; I will delegate jobs. nelhage: I’ve been vice chairman for the last year. I don’t think I would do anything hugely differently. I would potentially be slightly less lame. I took charge of purchacing the sipb-xen hardware, and organizing hackathons. quentin: For the past six months or so I’ve been running scripts.mit.edu as the team leader. I’m very involved with several other machine room services including syn, sipb-xen, AFS. I know the machine room well. I’m often here for hackathons and almost always from meetings. I’m not yet jaded enough to not want to do anything. kaduk: I have little present experience with machine room services, but I feel I would be able to familiarize myself with them sufficiently quickly to be an adequate vice chair. I have had leadership roles in organizations in the past. I’m around the office a large amount. mathmike: What year are you all? jesstess: Junior, but effectively a freshman in course VI. nelhage: Junior. quentin: Sophomore. kaduk: First-year grad student. geofft: It’s the end of the year. There are $3000 left. We need to spend it. What would you buy? mitchb: Do you mean what type of RAM would you buy? nelhage: Upgrading linerva. quentin: I’d first ask service maintainers. Failing that, upgrading office heads. kaduk: [same] Otherwise, improve the audio equipment in the office. broder: For or against Mac office heads? kaduk: The new Mac has received lots of attention. It’s worth waiting to see if this holds up. quentin: I’m obviously for Mac heads—specifically triple-boot Mac heads. nelhage: I don’t personally use office heads, but the new one seems popular. I’m against triple-booting machines. jesstess: If they get used, fine by me. mathmike: Most if not all of you were nominated for chair as well. Would you possibly accept a nomination for chair next year? kaduk: I would possibly accept such a nomination. quentin: Yes if nominated. nelhage: Certainly potentially. jesstess: Probably. geofft: What do you think is the most pressing thing SIPB and IS&T need to talk about? quentin: Athena 10, because that’s the next thing hitting both of us; SIPB is invested in the Athena 10 release. MacAthena is something they’re interested in talking to us about, and I have state with that. scripts, sipb-xen. nelhage: At this point SIPB and IS&T are doing a reasonable job talking about Athena 10. Things like scripts and sipb-xen where IS&T might be interested in working on some of the same ideas. It could also be interesting to hear what they’re planning to do with rethinking clusters. quentin: They’ve talked about removing machines and leaving keyboard, monitor, and mouse. jbarnold: There are no plans. jesstess: Encourage discussion of MacAthena. kaduk: It seems there’s a surge of remote services used by the MIT community; dialup servers and web hosting seem fairly popular. Also the possible transition to fewer clusters. [candidates leave] tabbott: Would any voting members object to dropping quentin from the aballot? quentin: I would like to remain on the ballot. tabbott: Our next election is for treasurer. tabbott: [reads treasurer responsibilities] rayhe: It’s not really as glamorous a job as the description would make it seems. For the most part I’ve been figuring out how to order office supplies, submitting RFPs, etc. tabbott: It’s true that it’s more about dealing with receipts than advising the board, but they’re both important. quentin: I nominate rayhe. rayhe: I won’t be here for the second half of the year. tabbott: You’re still eligible. rayhe: I accept. geofft: I nominate jesstess. jesstess: I decline. mitchb: I nominate kaduk. kaduk: I accept. quentin: I nominate myself. quentin: I accept. nelhage: I nominate mitchb. mitchb: No. tabbott: Nominations closed. rayhe: I’ve been treasurer since tilia stopped being treasurer. I don’t have a huge desire to remain treasurer, but will if elected. kaduk: I have served as treasurer for other groups in the past. quentin: I’m a sophomore; very involved with several groups in MIT, so I understand how the interactions work between MIT and student groups. I do not hold any other treasurerships yet. I feel I would be a competent treasurer for SIPB. tabbott: rayhe, did you have to attend procurement training in order to be treasurer? rayhe: It’s a real pain in the ass; it’s—never mind, it’s a great job. Yes. There are people you have to meet with and email to get the powers of treasurer. price: Suppose another student group you’re involved in has an item they need to buy, and you think you can make it happen faster if you do it through SIPB. rayhe: SIPB is ten times slower than anything else, so this is just impossible. jbarnold: If you want to order laboratory gasses such as helium, we have the ability to make such purchases much more quickly than other student groups. mitchb: That’s not entirely true. quentin: I promise that I will not purchase anything for another student group using SIPB’s money. rayhe: I make no such promises. rayhe: What is a financial signatory actually allowed to do. mitchb: In the ASA database, this allows you to sign paperwork. Having SAP bits lets you create requisitions. rayhe: It seems odd that anyone can create RFPs. tabbott: That’s why we have a treasurer to audit our transactions. mitchb: You can see that the money went away in SAP and then scream bloody murder. [candidates leave] tabbott: Secretary. tabbott: [reads secretary responsibilities] andersk: You show up every week, take minutes in UTF-8, and email them to sipb-minutes. price: Minutes have been very detailed in the past few years, but this is not required. We need to have a record of meetings, with a minimal sense of what was discussed and definitely what was decided. quentin: I nominate andersk. andersk: I decline. kaduk: I nominate jesstess. jesstess: I will do it if nobody else will do it. nelhage: Motion to close nominations. kaduk: I nominate jhawk. jhawk: I guess it’s not my problem yet, right? ctl: Second. jhawk: Damn you, ctl. Now it’s my problem. jhawk: I decline. quentin: I nominate jbarnold. jbarnold: I appreciate it, but I decline. ecprice: I nominate jwalden. jwalden: I’m not going to be here around mid-June, but I can do it till then. rayhe: Keep in mind that the secretary has ultimate power because the minutes are the only official record of the meeting. quentin: I nominate mitchb. mitchb: I need to be guaranteed that I will not encounter any violence outside the office over my taking minutes in ASCII. tabbott: Nominations closed. jesstess: Start with them, and I will be here in the fall. andersk: Will you take minutes in UTF-8? jwalden: UTF-8 is good. kaduk: Will you take minutes in ASCII? mitchb: Yes. jwalden: If by ASCII you mean UTF-8, then yes. ctl: Are any of the candidates not reluctant candidates? jwalden: I don’t really mind. mitchb: I’m not reluctant. quentin: With what verbosity do you intend to take minutes? jwalden: Maybe a touch shorter. jesstess: When I chose to read through the minutes, the funniest parts were the exchanges that were preserved, so I would make an effort to preserve them. mitchb: I believe in very verbose minutes. I try to capture everything. [candidates leave] tabbott: Members at large. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: The test print server serving meadow and ceres has been upgraded to Linux. If you see problems, email bug-print. jbarnold: Does it have the new ihfp.conf? jweiss: It has the same ihfp.conf from the old test print server. SIPB Projects Report: arolfe: The second AFS server upgrade happened. Now you have to think of SIPB projects that use lots of disk space. nelhage: There was a local privilege escalation vulnerability announced Friday. Linerva was reinstalled as a precaution. broder: The newly prospectivised ccpost and I are doing work on trying to finish the DEFCON sign. arolfe: The Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations has attempted to delegate back to me the problem of getting rid of all the old hardware we punted from the machine room. If you want old Sun hardware, keep your ears open. broder: In the last couple of days, I built queues.mit.edu, which is designed to be lpq for people who don’t know how to use lpq. It’s also trying to replace cview printers. asedeno: Does queues let me dequeue jobs? broder: No. I don’t know if this is reasonable to do. People are encouraged not to use Kerberized lpr, so there’s no way to authenticate these requests. tabbott: One project someone should do is setting up a CUPS server for the MIT community. It’s hard to print from Debathena on Gutsy without such a system set up. tabbott: I built SAGE, a package of free Mathematics software, on Athena. You can run it from the sage locker. I’ve also been working on packaging it for Debian. tabbott: Athena 10 is moving along reasonably well. tabbott: I heard recently that a cluster in the Nuclear Engineering department is being installed with Debathena. tabbott: There was a meeting today about finishing the migration of stuff.mit.edu onto scripts. broder: rayhe was interested in upping the allocation for the new MacAthena build server to cover the higher of the two models of Mac mini. I’m personally indifferent, but it does have twice the L2 cache. Up from $850 to about $1150. Move to allocate $300. quentin: Are you bumping anything else? broder: You might get increased hard drive space, which doesn’t matter. quentin: Those machines use laptop motherboards, and therefore having more cache is very significant. quentin: scripts deployed Server Name Indication, which allows supporting web browsers to be given the correct SSL certificate for virtual hosts. nelhage: Is it supported to get certificates for our own vhosts? andersk: Soon, not yet. Office Report: price: The office copy of Learning Perl is the second edition, which dates from 1997. We should buy the fourth edition. The office’s Python library is woefully inadequate. We should get Learning Python, and Python in a Nutshell. All three of these books are about $27 on Amazon. Move to allocate $100. nelhage: My order of Intel manuals arrived. There’s a copy of the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architecture Software Developer Manuals on the shelves. We’re missing volume 2A, the instructions beginning with A–L, because it’s on backorder. quentin: Is this Itanium? nelhage: No. Intel 64 is Intel’s name for the AMD64 architecture, as opposed to IA-64 which is the Itanium. jbarnold: Itanic. jhawk: Move $40 for a bound copy of the 6.033 course notes. jbarnold: Waseem has a copy he was going to donate to SIPB, but it’s not bound. yoz: I have an extra copy too. nelhage: jhawk will use his discretion. nelhage: The Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations is in his first meeting in… jweiss: I don’t know. Hi, all of the prospectives. jweiss: Move to allocate $10 to destroy old backup tapes. tabbott: You mentioned you’re planning to move the AFS server backups to TSM. jweiss: I am planning to do that. Other: jhawk: [see flyer on the whiteboard] Other Other: jweiss: Blood drive this week, downstairs. kaduk: Bicycling legend Sheldon Brown died this week. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 21:22. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.