Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2008-07-07 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by price. In attendance were Voting members: kaduk price quentin jhawk | geofft mitchb Associate members: asedeno belmonte | kchen keithw kenta Prospectives: xavid Guests: bbaren Officer Reports: kaduk: We have a budget of $19,800, the same as last year. Out of that, $7k-8k will be taken out for Athena fees and TSM fees and such. kaduk: The label maker in the office is out of tape; I will buy more. SIPB Projects Report: xavid: On the subject of Athena cluster signs for SIPB, IS&T won't pay for them, but they will put them up if we print them. price: XVM just got its new hardware. We have five huge boxes from Dell; four are 8-core 24G servers, and the fifth is a storage array with ~12TB usable storage. Pretty soon we'll have more computing power than we know what to do with (but our users will fix that). price: Orientation is coming up in about 2 months. Traditionally, we run two activities - Computer Tours, going to all the machine rooms including W91, CSAIL, and we get jis to come and regale an audience with his stories (always popular). Neither is a huge amount of work. Story Time means sending e-mail to jis; Tours involves coordinating with a large number of people. Volunteers are welcome for both positions. price: In the fall, we have the cluedumps series, which we've done for a few years. You basically come up with something interesting, find someone interesting to give the talk, and convince them to give it, and then convince an audience to show up for it (and buy food). I did that last year; mitchb and tabbott did it the year before. quentin: scripts will be moving to Fedora 9 in the next week. geofft: This is important for people who are running compiled code on scripts; they may need to upgrade to avoid breakage (e.g. the moira locker). price: IAP is sooner than you think. We need a volunteer to coordinate classes. Office Report: jhawk: meadow has moved print servers again, to arbor-eater, and now it prints from SAP. jhawk: Al, our regular UPS driver, is on vacation. Don't be surprised if your packages go astray. kaduk: There is a PCI SCSI card left over from opus. If no one objects, I would like to borrow it for one of my personal machines. I will send mail. geofft: What is the bedding next to the couch? price: It's been there for at least a week. geofft: Is it clean? belmonte: It's been on the couch in the SIPB office, and you're asking if it's clean? jhawk: The left mount point for our screen was falling out of the wall. kaduk and I removed the screen, and it shouldn't be put back up until more engineering is done to secure it. price: Any volunteers? jhawk: I volunteer rayhe. kaduk: The SIPB white board in the hall also has a mounting failure. There's a bracket that it rotates around and it is missing one of its four screws. mitchb: Why didn't you immediately lower the DEFCON level? kenta: Any discussion on the scanner? kchen: Someone did mention the fact that having a duplex scanner is useful. I don't know how well this works, and I've read reviews that have said it jams a lot. It seems to be useful to keep a duplex scanner. mitchb: The last time I tried to scan, I couldn't get either scanner to work. jhawk: My understanding is that the ADF sometimes comes loose, but once it's working, it tends to stay working. keithw: In the past, we have used an auction to get rid of SIPB equipment. price: jweiss is no longer volunteering to run auctions. First-come first-served seems easier than running an auction. belmonte: It seems to me that it has been traditional in SIPB to dispose of such equipment by auction, with proceeds collected into the auction fund. Do we have any reason to diverge from that tradition? geofft: Can I steal the scanner and give it to kenta and hope that no one will arrest me? kenta: I'll totally call the police on you. quentin: I think the best course of action is to dispose of both scanners, since serious concerns have been raised with both of them, and replace them with one nice scanner. belmonte: I volunteer to run an auction at the close of the meeting. keithw: Has there been a motion? If someone wants to get rid of the scanner, there should be a motion. belmonte: I move to dispose of the scanner at the end of the meeting at my discretion by auction. kenta: I will research buying a new scanner and post ideas to sipb-office@. Other: geofft: We need to think about getting a new KVM for the machine room. The ones we have now are somewhat incompatible with current machines (PS/2 only, etc.). If we want to get a new one like the one in the office rack, it will chain cleanly. I believe it supports up to 512 machines behind it when chained. mitchb: If we're rethinking KVMs, it might be nice to be able to access any of our machines from the head at the desk rather than hit-or-miss luck about whether you get to sit at the desk or stand at the rack. quentin: Those KVMs (like the office rack) cost $500 each, without cables. price: This sound like a substantial but feasible purchase. geofft: This is especially important because most of our new machines are coming USB-only. jhawk: I was disturbed to discover the optimal mail client for dealing with my spamscreen folder seems to be the mitmailscan client written by Robert Basch. Other Other: quentin: The Fourth of July happened. mitchb: ...on schedule! kaduk: The chemistry department came out with new T shirts saying "V@mit.edu". The meeting was adjourned at 20:01. Minutes taken and submitted by quentin.