Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-02-18 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: yoz, mathmike, jhawk, arolfe, price, quentin, andersk, jesstess, tabbott, jbarnold, kaduk, wdaher, jwalden, nelhage, lockhart, mitchb | ecprice Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: broder, biyeun Guests: Officer Reports: price: We have a membership election for broder. broder: Hi. I'm Evan or broder. I've been on campus since Fall '06, and here [SIPB] since mid-December. I do lots of things around the office. Primarily MacAthena. I've been helping out with scripts recently. tabbott: Title of a membership talk? broder: Can I come back to that? mitchb: Good title - unique! jhawk: You came to sipb as a prospective just to get printer bits. Give a good essay-style answer on printing at MIT and how it's doing. broder: Badly. Since building queues.mit.edu, I watch the printers, and fix two or three W20 printers daily. Managing them on Athena is straightforward, but much harder from not-Athena. Documentation for that is basically non-existent. Unauth jobs make it even harder. CUPS might help. jbarnold: Other than me, who was me before I was me? broder: You mean I can't use the infinite loop? Greg, Tim, you, you, jtu, ctl, tibbetts. tabbott: You included Jeff in the other-than-Jeff question. mitchb: Username of ctl? broder: golem arolfe: If in the office by yourself, what SIPB service do you most dread getting a question about? broder: The staplers. kaduk: I have an Apple iBook G4. Suppose I wanted some Athena functionality on it. How much could I have now? broder: There are fairly detailed instructions on the MacAthena site. First fink, the package manager. Also moira clients, discuss, /mit automounter, add/attach scripts which sometimes work depending on the locker. 10-15 Athena utilities I've never heard of but they were easy to port, so I did. Like get_cluster, just, there are some issues with xcluster/cview. price: What major things are still to be done? broder: It'd be nice to have zephyr packages, but I won't do that until we get krb5 zephyr. Same story with IMAP. I'd like to automate setting up Kerberos logins and AFS homedirs. Many of the tools need tweaking. Error messages are not quite as useful as elsewhere. There's a list on the website. jbarnold: What's the right way to fix printing at MIT? broder: I'm not too familiar with it, but my understanding is that CUPS will put you most of the way there. In OS 10, it's a bit more broken than you'd like, but I hear there's some support for Kerberos there. jbarnold: So it's a software problem, but the hardware is sufficient? broder: The 8150s have issues sometimes, but yes, mostly it's a software problem. jhawk: Last time I tried to get SIPB people to be interested in getting printer bits and using them judiciously, there was no interest. What do you think of this? broder: Huh? jhawk: Is it apathy? Opposition to what jhawk says? What? broder: Probably a little of that. If I hadn't been monitoring queues.mit.edu, I might have not noticed anything was wrong. jesstess: Did you do anything for sipb-iap? broder: I taught the Intro to Python class. jesstess: How'd it go? broder: Pretty well. We had to move to a larger room. There was too much time in the classroom; I should work on that. I also did a class on MacAthena that was poorly advertized and not well attended. arolfe: Tell me about who_fixes_what. broder: It a file in the......... info locker? mitchb: Yes!!! You win. arolfe: Where else can you find it? broder: That's the only place I know. [A few people point to the copy on the wall.] nelhage: [not to broder] How do we get updates to who_fixes_what? mitchb: Well, if you keep it open in an editor, when it changes, the AFS server will break the callback. jbarnold: This is a bit of a non-traditional question, but name 10 SIPB members who are not present broder: quentin, jtu, ctl, tibbetts, rayhe, keithw, belmonte, [pause... until mitchb whispers "OPS"] broder: cfox, zacheiss, jweiss kaduk: A more traditional question: name many SIPB services. broder: scripts, linerva, debathena, macathena, staplers, documentation, news, sipb-afs, RTFM, discuss, charon, sipb-xen, sipb-voip, SQL, office heads, sipbmp3, sipb@, locker software tabbott: What new service do you want to create? broder: MacAthena. mitchb: You used that one already. broder: The DEFCON sign. jesstess: Will it be integrated with our probabilistic office openness analysis? [see later discussion on office door sensor] broder: Um... yeah. andersk: Why do you want to be a SIPB member? broder: I think that SIPB holds a lot of influence over the future of computing at MIT in general, and I think that's something cool to be involved in. andersk: I move to close questioning. ecprice: I second. [Executive session begins] [Executive session ends] <16-1-0 broder is elected> tabbott: I get to sit down at meetings now! tabbott: About our guest account policy - we need to get seven things about people being sponsored; accounts doesn't need/want all of these, e.g. SSN. andersk: *hwaaaah* [falls to floor] quentin: This is not about guest accounts? tabbott: Right, only sponsored accounts. I move to remove items 2 and 3 which ask for SSN and desired username [because Accounts just gives them an account registration coupon and they choose that themselves], and replace with a single item asking for MIT ID# if they were a student, or birthdate if not. jhawk: Renumber the rest? tabbott: Yes mathmike: White ballot MIT Computing Report: nelhage: IS&T got a site license for VMware; you can now get Fusion or Workstation from http://web.mit.edu/vmware/ price: mclamb reported hearing a talk by Theresa Regan where it sounded like they'd be offering a sipb-xen-like service. It sounded like an enterprise thing for departments, rather than a VMs-for-individuals service that would compete with sipb-xen. SIPB Projects Report: ternus: The door has a door sensor now. Notifications go to -c sipb-door -i open / -i closed and -c sipb-auto -i door. There will be a shiny new web interface, fingerd, etc. soon. It's plugged into cutter-john presently. It does everything except address quentin's question about Gumstix. It logs to /afs/sipb/project/door. tabbott: Will we get statistics about the likelihood of being open? ternus: You can process the raw data, and feed it to some RSS-hyper-zephyr-feed-thing. Office is 60% probable to be open for the next hour. jhawk: What's the poll interval? ternus: Every minute on the 01 second. arolfe: I move to get rid of the Ultra5 that was ronald-ann, the U5 that was rosebud, and 5 external SCSI discs from those. jhawk: Are you trying to become the OCICOSO? arolfe: When I asked jweiss about these last week, he said to do it. No comment on the broader question. price: I second. asedeno: barnowl will not eat linerva's CPU anymore; it will have a select loop soon. arolfe: There'll be an auction of old hardware after the meeting. yoz: I automated adding entries to the whats database at the hackathon. It now has entries that had been waiting since May 2006 in it! price: So, it's a script in the locker? yoz: It's only really usable by me right now. jbarnold: Who was the last person before you to add stuff? yoz: It's been intermittent; maybe 1 out of 20 entries get in when someone thinks they're interesting. quentin: OS 10 server admin tools run on a non-server machine! [demonstrates that logging into csw with username debathena and no password will boot debathena] price: I believe there was a hackathon yesterday? tabbott: A new libnss-nonlocal was released. Private workstation config is now the default instead of public dialup config. There's a public workstation package with graphical gdm-style logins as well. arolfe: There's been a recent problem with system:anyuser-writeable directories in AFS getting lots of spam stuffed into them I found 9 such www's, 5 web_scripts's, one belonging to a 6.857 TA. nelhage: I successfully found minor bugs in both bochs and qemu. wdaher: I reduced the size of the rss-zephyr code by some large percentage. jesstess: He claimed 300%. tabbott: Debathena is working on releasing system config packages; there will be email soon. They can be found at http://debathena.mit.edu/config-packages/ broder: Macathena stole some pieces of those config packages at the hackathon. tabbott: People can use our scripts to do diversions and undiversions. Office Report: jhawk: I went to get the books Greg had approved last week and I had approved earlier. I got "Learning Python," and "Python in a Nutshell" should be here soon. I will probably move to punt my allocation from 1/7/07 for a Logo book if I can't find one sometime soon. nelhage: Vol 2A of Intel 64 and IA32 developer manuals are here now. jhawk: The shelf they're on is bowing. Well, it was bowing before. price: The table in the back will soon be empty, thanks to Alex. Education Report: mitchb: The other day, we successfully found a use where someone needed the last copy of iDiscuss. This person was nelhage. Despicably, he put it back when he was done. price: The next day, Anders also needed iDiscuss. jbarnold: I dutifully put it back when he was done. mitchb: I move to allocate however much money it costs to make 30 more copies. nelhage: Didn't you conclude that we had more copies in the cabinet? mitchb: Yes, four. I think we should have more than that. Also, I believe the one copy that is out may pose a health hazard; it was apparently full of dust and very dirty. jhawk: If you use the last of some documentation, print more. Other: price: CSAIL's IMAP supports GSSAPI and Athena principals on ACLs. quentin: The Class of 2010 brass rat is being released tonight. mathmike: I bought a computer called "Eee." jwalden: RFC2606 reserves the example.com domain. Google's anti-phishing stuff put example.com into their blacklist. broder: What was Google's response to this? jwalden: Basically, "what the heck?" It was fixed like an hour later. mathmike: On Saturday, I was one of 4 MIT students who won a free trip to Las Vegas by doing well in a Bridge tournament. wdaher: Windsington has a flooding problem. Only my room was affected. mitchb: In playing with APO's new voicemail, I made a typo that resulted in me hearing SIPB's outgoing message (never used since we don't send calls to voicemail). It's from a long time ago, and is jtu saying that we're closed due to asbestos abatement. [Much laughter] mitchb: Also, because I was too busy laughing, I didn't manage to hang up in time to avoid leaving an empty message in our box, which resulted in only the jhawk-phone lighting up, and almost nobody who should've known the password for it did. [Even more laughter] Other Other: '() The meeting was adjourned at 20:13. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.