Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2018-04-23 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by alvareza. In attendance were Student keyholders: cela, bpchen, elefthei, alvareza, mtheng, mcyoung, slz | dukhovni Associate keyholders: quentin, asedeno, glasgall Members: sargentd, rsthomp, amigdal, wmoses | npfoss, cvorbach Guests: '() Administrivia: glasgall: IS&T mailed to SIPB staff today... standing allocation for disks... disks being disks they are likely to fail sometime, so I propose that we put aside some money for buying disks... I am not proposing this this evening because I only sent the email [earlier today]... [so sometime next week] asedeno: Speaking of disks, [...] one of the [XVM] servers threw a [disk failure] so we took a [...] from a [box] and we should replace this disk... There was also concern about other Western Digital disks that are other disks that are enterprisy-rated disks... glasgall: The difference between enterprise and non-enterprise is important here because [...]... I would like to allocate $615 for [hard drives for XVM]... cela: Seconded. alvareza: Seconded. cela: Motion to white ballot? alvareza: Are there any objections? [allocation of $615 for XVM drives passes] ... [allocation for $700 for AFS and XVM drives passes] dukhovni: I would like to discuss the possibility of reserving a [venue] for an event that the [...] and ASU want to run in mid-May... They and the ASU want to give a talk on [...]... alvareza: I will talk to you after about reserving the rooms [etc.] dukhovni: I won't be available later but I wanted to check with the board if this is okay given previous issues about [reserving venues for our profits]. dukhovni: I would like to get back to them sooner rather than later... so could people either approve this or... alvareza: We can definitely make the reservation, but we can't make any real promises until we get it approved. mtheng: Nomination for rsthomp, CAPSLOCK. cela: Seconded. slz: Seconded. alvareza: Do you accept the nomination? rsthomp: I do. alvareza: Come see me after the meeting... slz: I would like to allocate $340 for a Staples 24-sheet professional series cross-cut shredder. cela: Seconded. mcyoung: Motion to white ballot. [allocation for $340 for a Staples 24-sheet professional series cross-cut shredder passes] Project Reports: mcyoung: So, on Friday, those paying attention to reuse.mit.edu would have noticed that a certain datacenter was put on reuse. I looked at this and decided, no this is not worth my time. This turned out to be false. Later at 2pm, people on zephyr were getting very uppity about it. ... I believe Cel said to grab an entire rack of servers. The next 5 hours is a story of [names a long list of people]... asedeno: I saw a lot of servers, but did you actually get a rack? mcyoung: Yes! cela: We also got six different UPSes. mcyoung: Oh, sgw also helped. With a car. So yeah, we've got a full server rack full of servers... slz: I would also like to memorialize the fact that we found a brick in the machine room. The main purpose we used to brick for is as a pivot for a long lever which we applied to get a server rack over a [bump] in the machine room. ... They are probably not that useful. mcyoung: They all have disks, which probably suck. They all have memory, which probably suck. They all have processors, which probably suck. cela: There are [other racks] that we didn't get because they are older. quentin: I would like to [help ... say] that there are three racks waiting to be delivered to SIPB. glasgall: SIPB AFS had a terrible last week. We had two disk-related outages... Secondly, XVM also had a terrible week. ... red light on one of the disks. This turned out that the disk was bad... we installed monitoring on the disk, [installed a new one]... RAID... asedeno: While we were dealing with the AFS issue, quentin and I decided to renumber split-atom-blues. SIPB UPSes are also having a bad week. I am the latest in what I assume is a long line of people to discover that if you plug a serial cable into an APC UPS DB9 port labeled "serial comm"... it will drop the load. glasgall: For the sake of people who don't understand the jargon, what does "drop the load" mean? asedeno: Everything plugged into it loses power. That does not sound like what a UPS is supposed to do. ... I put tape over the port saying that you need to use a special APC cable or bad things happen. Also, since then, three battery packs on SAB have had their replace battery lights come on. quentin: The UPS management controller has been crashed for the last, like, 24 months, and all the management values did not change... so it's entirely possible that the batteries failed sometime in the last 24 months. mcyoung: Think about it on the bright side. They are lead acid batteries, which are *not* known for exploding! glasgall: This is in fact sealed lead acid batteries, which means [hydrogen buildup]... slz: The SMR is not an enclosed space, by virtue of the hole in the wall. mcyoung: I noticed that the fan is no longer in the hole. Is this your doing? cela: Related to our UPSes losing power, that means that a lot of servers went offline. One of these servers is Multics, which used to have 10 servers of uptime... In other words, now that Multics no longer has 10 years of uptime, we can no longer tell this to all the prefrosh, so there is no more use for Multics... glasgall: If we want to continue bragging about 10 years of uptime, someone could go in with kde and change the uptime... slz: We no longer care about the uptime of servers and instead about the uptime of services. cela: SIPB address numbering continues to happen. This involves a really, really gratuituous number of emails. MIT deleted, ... or reserved 71 hostnames. A lot of these are XVM hostnames... but a lot of these are servers running services. If you run any of these servers, please talk to me [and I can help you get anything you need]. asedeno: Can you help us get 18.181.0.0/16 back from Amazon? ... cela: Isn't 18.18 where they are putting their new public addresses? quentin: Yes [...] [lots of utterances of the number "18"] slz: Two Fridays ago, I was trying to find out what happened to the old scripts host that... it turns out that the machine no longer POSTs... I guess the great mirrors migration project is indefinitely put on hold... so I guess I'll ask Cel later to borrow one of the old scripts hosts. Relatedly, Debathena is going to have a hackathon soon, so stay tuned. cela: I'm not going to be here over the summer, and I'm the Vice Chair with access to the machine room... if someone would like to sign up to be remotely-actuated hands, please come talk to me. [could we talk to CSAIL...] mcyoung: Most robots drop most things most of the time. slz: Or we can negotiate with the Canadian government to build a [Canadon] 3. Other: '() Other Other: rsthomp: If you feel a sudden desire to buy Bitcoin... [at BAHfest they said that cryptocurrency is powered by hot boxes that cats like to sit on]... cela: As of Friday, sophomores got their brass rats! [displays brass rats] mcyoung: ... The 2018 one looks like he's holding a carrot. slz: I think this news is one week old, but apparently someone found a vulnerability in the program "beep". Apparently it's some obscure race condition in the code. mcyoung: Apparently Google's messaging story continues to be on fire. They have removed engineers on Allo and have put them on Chat. Which is not Hangouts... npfoss: I want to hear about this. Because I use Hangouts, and I'm annoyed that it sucks. slz: ...Google document explaining why Hangouts sucks. ...I don't think you feedback will be appreciated. mcyoung: Unless you tell them that you liked the bugs. npfoss: Apparently Michael Bloomberg is covering the part of the climate deal that the US is refusing to cover... alvareza: [intense counting] WE HAVE QUORUM! Election of wmoses: alvareza: Billy, who the hell are you? wmoses: I ask myself this question all the time. I, depending on the amount of free food, am either a 2018 senior or a first year grad student. ... I helped Lef with CPW ... like to put a lot of posters all around the SIPB office, and put up lots of pictures of cats until someone in charge of cats came to ask what was going on... slz: How do you double-space a CPW poster? wmoses: You put [two pointing in different directions]... mcyoung: Close your eyes. What color is the carpet? wmoses: I would like to say purple, but I'd say brown because definitely somewhere there is a stain that is brown. mcyoung: The correct answer is closer to "dirty maroon". slz: Has the carpet been replaced, ever? alvareza: A question was sent to me by email, by... saying, I can't be there, but what's the cosine of 60 degrees? wmoses: Yes. mcyoung: Billy, what are all the different things that are in various cabinets in the office, that are not people's drawers? wmoses: There are the one-time pads and frisbees in that drawer, we have a myriad of duct tape... I feel like there's definitely a myriad of other things including raspberry pis... mcyoung: Also included are minutes going back to 1969, and lots of manuals to machines we no longer own. cvorbach: What are the names of the cabinets? wmoses: I'm not sure what the actual names are, so I'm going to instead come up with funny names. The black box are "should come up with more different kinds of tape", the cold box is "...", the in-case-of-fire box is, "in case of a thermonuclear war..."... is there any other boxes that you would like me to come up with names for? asedeno: [points to air con] wmoses: The biological cooling vent. asedeno: [points to other air con] wmoses: The biological cooling vent's best friend. mcyoung: [I think if I were screwed to the ceiling I wouldn't be your best friend.] alvareza: What do you like about SIPB and what can be improved on? wmoses: I like how people are really genuine... I think the thing that needs to be improved on is to be a little bit more open, to be more inviting to other people to try out new things. In my past few years ... I felt like SIPB was rather distant [...] alvareza: What's your favorite book on the SIPB bookshelf [...]? wmoses: Before you mentioned programming languages, I was going to say CLRS. slz: Ask someone in this room a question that they do not know how to answer but they really should know how to answer. wmoses: [to alvareza] Since we're going over CLRS, if I have a list of n numbers, where each number is [at least k away], what is an n log k algorithm to [sort] the numbers? alvareza: [flips CLRS frantically] I would just say radix sort for now, but I do not know... wmoses: They are not bounded. mcyoung: Compiler intrinsic. I assume this problem is simple enough that Intel has already solved it. alvareza: While I mull this over, I want you to take out your right hand... do you solemnly swear for the next question to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? wmoses: I swear that I will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. alvareza: Do you swear on your love of algorithms that you will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? wmoses: I swear on my love of algorithms that I am telling the truth about telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. alvareza: Do you swear on your love of algorithms that for the next two questions, you will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? wmoses: I swear on my love of algorithms that I will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. alvareza: Have you ever been part of the Student Democratic Society? wmoses: No. mcyoung: Oh oh, what's the last four digits of your social security number? alvareza: You don't have to answer that question. bpchen: What is your favorite and least favorite programming languages, and why? wmoses: I'll tell you a story... in high school AP CS ... we had to write a Dijkstra code in Java... I wrote it in Python... I wrote an interpreter in Java which I used to run Python in Java code... I'd say that's my most favorite... not saying it's useful, but it's just very funny. For least favorite, I'd say whitespace, because every time I print out the code sheet, I can't tell if I missed out a semicolon. elefthei: What was your favorite CPW event and why? wmoses: I like what the hackathon became, because we got to talk to the prefrosh about a lot of interesting questions... alvareza: For every letter in the alphabet, can you name a SIPB keyholder whose Kerberos starts with that letter? wmoses: I'm debating between trying to answer the question, and reminding you of a wonderful radix sort question... and suggest that there is a wonderful algorithm in there that would help you determine the list. mcyoung: ... You can't do it with keyholders because there is no keyholder whose username starts with u. wmoses: We'll start with A. achernya, ... alvareza: [stares] wmoses: ...bbaren, cel, or cela, technically... I'll skip and I'll go to Lef for e. Oh, emmabat for e... oh I already have e. ... I can pretend that faraday is a keyholder. mcyoung: Faraday is one of Cel's cats. ... g! [there's one in this room] [glasgall does not react] quentin: There is? Oh, there is. wmoses: ... ikdc. Oh yeah, jesse. k... mcyoung: There's an example that's part of the SIPB zoo. wmoses: ...kaduk. l... It's not Lef, cos he starts with an e. For m there's mcyoung. N, [...]... q, quentin? r... alvareza: You can include members and keyholders. wmoses: I can't think of an r. s, slz. Oh yeah, CAPSLOCK start with an r. [Their] username starts with an r. rsthomp: I really want the capslock mailing list because it's reserved for some reason. ... They reserved the word... quentin: Capslock is a former user... you can email accounts. wmoses: T. ... There's definitely someone whose name is Thomas... mcyoung: Turns out that T is a common letter for starting names. wmoses: Is there actually anyone with u? [to slz] There's this person who you were telling me about earlier. mcyoung: The large Russian. wmoses: Oh yes, Victor. W, [...]. X... Is there a y and z? alvareza: There is a y... and a z. mcyoung: There is a very well known z. alvareza: The Zuck. alvareza: I can assist you. [opens cabinet]. [...] ... oh, lucyyang is an l. For d, there's dzaefn. For g, there's glasgall. mcyoung: Another b would have been bpchen. elefthei: Billy, what's your favorite type of tree? wmoses: I really like the yellow ones that go down like that... you can make [...] into a weird tree. alvareza: Any other obnoxious questions? mcyoung: Ah yes. What is your favorite color? wmoses: Blue. bpchen: Explain what is going on on the board. alvareza: He wrote it! wmoses: [maximum bipartite cardinality matching problem]... alternatively we can talk about CPW plans, Maxwell's equations... ssh-ing into Athena... Riemann zeta function... proving that 1 = 0.999... more Maxwell's equations, how to use sipbmp3... mcyoung: What is that purple stuff over there? wmoses: Ah yes, the reminder for 2019 to tell the prefrosh to bring their laptops. mcyoung: What about that purple stuff over there? wmoses: ...it looks like a propagator... Feynman diagrams... [...] elefthei: What's your favorite opcode? [...] wmoses: If it has something like Load Effective Address, that'd be fun. mcyoung: What [is the color of this particular shade of brown]? glasgall: I object to this question because it can't be answered by colorblind people. wmoses: Unfortunately I can't come up with the HTML hex code for this because that would be my go-to answer for this... I would say it is the color of dying markers. elefthei: Oh yeah, I don't actually know the answer to this one, but how do you play music in the SIPB office? wmoses: [...] print [...] slz: Why do you want to be a SIPB keyholder? wmoses: For the memez. There are so many wonderful memez. To be able to partake in all these memez, that is what's important. ... SIPB is a really wonderful group of people... projects... I like hacking on stuff, you guys like hacking on stuff... in favor -- opposed -- abstain 9 -- 0 -- 1 [wmoses is elected as keyholder] alvareza: Congratulations Billy, you are now a SIPB member. I mean, keyholder. The meeting was adjourned at 20:45. Minutes taken and submitted by mtheng.