Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-02-25 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: k_lai, tabbott, nelhage, price, mitchb, andersk, mathmike, quentin, broder, jesstess, jwalden, jhawk Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: njess, wajahat Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: The Treasurer is not in possession of info regarding the finances of the SIPB. price: Curious. How does that come to be? kaduk: I need to coincide with the previous Treasurer. tabbott: gsipb membership changes were made to synchronize it with members_and_prospectives, and it was added to sipb-afs-sync. tabbott: I did a sipb-acl cleanup. nelhage: I'm going to do a sipb-afsreq cleanup. mitchb: I'm thinking about differences between gsipb, sipb-members, sipb-private, and members_and_prospectives as a result of the gsipb conversation, to see if we really need all of them or if there's a better way to maintain these things that track very similar information for slightly different purposes, because they're pretty far out of synch with each other. If you have thoughts, feel free to send them to me and I'll compile them so that we can think about it more coherently. tabbott: You're aware of the reason for the sipb-staff/sipb-private distinction, right? mitchb: Yes, that one's clear. price: sipb-members... it's a good name, but why does it exist? SIPB Projects Report: broder: MacAthena's new ibuild server came in, is being set up now, and will move to the machine room maybe later today. price: And it does...? broder: debuild:Debathena::iBuild:MacAthena. quentin: The machine room KVMs have some problems, like spontaneously switching between machines, some machines aren't supported by it because they're USB only, some have corrupted video, some have the KVM destroying their blanking signal... I'm thinking of replacing them with the same model of KVM that the office has. One with 24 ports is ~$1,200. E-mail me suggestions, and I'll mail sipb-machine-room with a proposal. I'm not going to make a motion at this time. jhawk: Strongly consider multiple smaller KVMs. Also, it's a design issue that some KVMs reset when a connected device (or maybe just the currently selected one) resets its video hardware. quentin: I'm thinking of an 8-port KVM for each rack daisy-chained so they can all be accessed from the same head. tabbott: Debathena will soon be adding support for the adduser command to add a local account for a username that already exists in moira, overriding the moira account. The postfix user is an example of problems caused by usernames that exist in moira and might reasonably be added as local accounts. I also sent mail about the configuration package project, which has generated lots of responses. quentin: Only one personal attack so far. price: That's pretty good! nelhage: It's unclear anyone in the thread has actually read and understood the proposal yet. tabbott: Russ Allbery talked about how Stanford used to use a similar system to what's bring proposed back in the day. broder: I'm working on making it more straightforward to do development on sipb-xen. The package copies in an SVN checkout. Evan thinks this is a horrible idea; Tim doesn't think it's so bad. mitchb: Hey Evan, want to tell us anything about quickprint? broder: Sure. Quickprint is no longer printing everything using the username 'quickprint'. It will now use the user's username based on their certificate, and so now users can remove their own jobs from printers that don't require authentication. Making it work on authenticated printers is harder. Office Report: jhawk: "Python in a Nutshell" and our second copy of "The LaTeX Book" arrived. I'm curious if people think it's worthwhile to have "The LaTeX Book" bound. As mentioned previously, the Logo book allocation is probably going away soon. price: meadow is low on toner. jhawk: We've used our last cartridge. I move to allocate $300 for 4 toner cartridges. price: About how long will that last us? jhawk: 18 months. price: Forks, label maker tape, etc. These seem to be office supplies, and there's a standing allocation for that, so jhawk can you buy those? jhawk: I don't have SAP bits. price: Oh... kaduk, can you.... you don't have SAP bits either. Well, hopefully you will soon! njess: Nobody logs in and uses csw or oliver because they're drawn to other machines instead. Perhaps if we moved their positions, they'd see more work-related use. jhawk: In the past, hot seats being cluster configuration machines has been seen as desirable. Maybe it's not as important any more. tabbott: That does seem valuable. broder: oliver would still be conveniently close to the door, even after this swap. price: Okay, if someone wants to deal with swapping them, go ahead. It's good that this was brought up for comment, but it doesn't require a formal motion. njess: Okay, I'll do it at some point. tabbott: There are still boxes in the back of the room under the table; maybe we should deal with them. kaduk: I worked at that table last night; it was usable. mitchb: At some point last night, I noticed that it looked like the 3-hole punch had detonated and left a trail of paper circles all over that area. I vacuumed it up, but if people occasionally empty it out into the recycling bin, it won't be able to do that anymore. quentin: Didn't some tool over there break recently? jhawk: Yes, I sent mail to the former Treasurer requesting that he buy a new Swingline. Other: quentin: DHCP on the dynamic VLAN has been pretty iffy lately. There are 10-15 minute windows where nobody can get DHCP, then it starts working again. Wifi in the SIPB office has also been flaky. price: Other other? Err, that is "further other?" quentin: There was an FCC hearing about broadband this morning. Other Other: jwalden: Pakistan killed YouTube over the weekend apparently. quentin: Yeah, for about 2 hours. The Pakistani ISP advertized a bogus BGP route for YouTube that null-routed it, and was more specific than the real route, so it took precedence. price: Wait, so they killed it beyond just in Pakistan? quentin: Yes. mitchb: Oh, that explains why I couldn't use it... I just assumed that RCN sucked. The meeting was adjourned at 19:51. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.