Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-05-05 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: yoz, broder, mitchb, wdaher, jbarnold, jesstess, ternus, price, jwalden, nelhage, mathmike, golem, tabbott, andersk | quentin, jhawk Associate members: asedeno, belmonte Prospectives: neboat, dnawi, y_z Guests: Officer Reports: kaduk: I sent our proposed budget to IS&T. Mark Jones replied that he appreciates it and will get back to us if he has questions. Since I haven't heard any questions, I'm going to assume that it's reasonable and begin buying things. SIPB Projects Report: quentin: sipb-xen keeps marching towards more bugs in Xen. And towards a public release. price: We now have two machines running, in some sense. One running the service, and another capable of running VMs. How's migration going? broder: We can migrate paravirtualized machines, but migrating HVMs will either cause your machine to reboot or kernel panic, depending on your settings. price: I've seen broder bounce his machine between the servers, and ssh connections stay open. neboat: I've been working on the ParaVM autoinstaller to make an Etch install. I've gotten something that boots, but it doesn't seem to write data to the devices properly, so you get really strange errors. There's a possible fix. price: We've discovered a command that may fix this as a result of an unrelated bug. broder: There's also a remote control server that will enable us to in the short term load-balance VMs, and in the long term allow users to manage their VMs. tabbott: The Debian Athena config system was rejected from Debian for stupid reasons. We've resubmitted. broder: MacAthena got its first user who's not a member of the SIPB community. He had some trouble getting the installer working. price: If you're reading this, well, then I guess you're a member of the SIPB community, but MacAthena works, so if you have a Mac, you should use it. tabbott: If it works, you should advertise it. broder: There's one more thing I want to fix before we advertise: com_err. tabbott: That's probably not so important. mitchb: It'll be important to someone the first time they get an error *number* instead of an error message. nelhage: asedeno and I have gotten barnowl's unicode branch to work on non-debathena machines. In about a week or so, you should be able to use it by default. broder: I wonder if we can say something to cause mitchb to put non-ASCII characters in the minutes. mitchb: Good luck with that. price: njess upgraded the WordPress installer for scripts, and we tried to upgrade the WordPress installs that are out there. Out of 39 users who installed WordPress 2.0.2 and hadn't upgraded themselves, there were 5 that we could upgrade cleanly and 34 we couldn't. 32 had changed only the themes. The files they edit to do this are the same files that WordPress changes in security fixes (escaping changes, etc.). So, yeah, web software is a mess. Office Report: ternus: Last night we cleaned up a lot of stuff in this area [points to Laptop World]. We moved boxes of stuff over there. The KVM head is now up on the shelves because we've never seen anyone use it. quentin: That's because it was unplugged. ternus: Well, then that seems to be a good reason to get it out of the way. quentin: I think it should be fixed and then it'd be useful. There are office heads in the rack. tabbott: I think we should fix it and put it in the rack next to the couch so that someone who wants to use it can sit on the couch. price: This table is also taller than other tables, which makes it uncomfortable to type on with either a laptop or the KVM head. We should think about getting a different table. price: Look in the middle of laptop land. There's a lot of stuff there. [Enumerates power squid, power strips, adapters, sharpie, paper towel, lots of wires, etc.] I think lots of this stuff accumulates because there are so many wires: junk attracts junk. One possibility is to take the power strip and adapters and strap them under the table, the cords will still come up and could power machines anywhere. quentin: We could put the bricks above the table and then people could pull out more cord. belmonte: We must be able to get some thingamabob that could reel in the excess cord. dnawi: Will people be able to plug in their own stuff if these are under the table? price: We could maybe put the power strips on the legs of the table. belmonte: Today I placed quiche-lorraine's second internal hard disc in SIPB's USB enclosure. Unfortunately, I then discovered that the power brick for that enclosure seems to have been lost. There seem few ready options for making this drive accessible again: the Optiplexes and the Intellistation have no extra bay, and mega-man has the wrong type of connectors. I wonder whether anyone has suggestions as to how to deal with this. For my own purposes I'd be happy to take the drive back to my office and deal with it there, but it seems it should stay in the office since I'm not the only SIPB member whose project has data on it. I also want to take this opportunity to suggest for the record, as I did in my mail to sipb-office of 21 April, that such re-purposing of actively used machines be announced in advance so that existing uses and projects can migrate. quentin: quiche isn't being used at all right now, so we might want to install it in the machine room and put it on the W20 network. tabbott: We spent the $50 keyboard allocation from last October, so soon we'll have more keyboards. nelhage: I sent mail about dealing with machines in the office rack. It seems like basically nobody cares about anything other than bart, so I'll be dealing with making the other ones go away. price: This'll also help reduce fan noise. The remaining machines can be moved below couch level to be muffled. ternus: Speaking of fan noise, does anyone know how to reduce *that* [indicates the radiator noise]? quentin: You can turn it off. ternus: That doesn't lessen the noise. price: The year is almost over. The budget that Mark Jones and OIS seem to think is okay includes $1500 for a new office head. There are a couple office heads with issues. zsr and opus have had some issues; most of zsr's have been resolved it seems. We'll be getting a warranty replacement of the broken monitor. We could get another whole head, or instead, we could choose to replace a monitor. We have this one monstrous monitor that wdaher is enjoying right now. quentin: Are there other machines that could handle it? price: We'd probably have to buy a graphics card to go with it. There are two more meetings this term. We should make a motion at one of them for an office head or monitor. quentin: I don't know what the situation with the money is, but I'd like to request $10 for a USB hub to make the KVM functional again. price: Objections to white ballot? kaduk: I'm curious what happened to the previous working setup. [some discussion clearing up yet again that we don't know who messed it up] price: I'd like to purchase the Karl Fogel book "Producing Open Source Software" for $25. wdaher: Second. Other: quentin: There are two weeks left of term. Or rather, the end of term is sooner than you think. ternus: If anyone is interested in getting their ham license, I'm working on organizing a testing session before finals because during finals sucks. Other Other: dnawi: I'm trying to archive some of the Cokecomm account lines so that it's not taking up 7 pages all over the fridge. So, if your account disappears, just put it back. belmonte: You're not going to archive any of the all-star record holders, are you? [conversation leading to the suggestion of a Cokecomm High Score list satisfying this need] yoz: There was a picnic today. The marching band came. We were rickrolled. These are unrelated. The meeting was adjourned at 20:03. Minutes taken and submitted by mitchb.