Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2018-09-10 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by alvareza. In attendance were Student keyholders: ikdc, cela, alvareza, mtheng, rsthomp, emmabat, robertch, yczeng, aathalye, nchinda2 Associate keyholders: dzaefn, slz, kenta Members: efjepsen, vex, ksmori, chxu, mcnallyc, merni, terryk, cvorbach, alokp, robertka, phuvp, gshay, mwnguyen, byrdm, jkoppel, | wqian94, npfoss Guests: kgarner, kbejgo, shulim, marcinja, btma Administrivia: emmabat: I'm trying to make the actual spreadsheets about our budgets, so that has happened. alvareza: Lef has ordered boxes to put things that people have left in the cabinets in, so we can actually assign the cabinets. There should be more developments this week regarding that. There was another thing that bpchen wanted to say about the SIPB calendar, there is currently as is two calendars that exist, there is an official SIPB calendar that is linked to on our website, and there is a SIPB office hours calendar, and in theory people can put the times they want to be in the office, so that non-keyholders can be in the office so that they can get to know each other better, a lot of time when you're a non-keyholder having access to the office other than this very moment can be very hard to get, so the question is whether there should be a single consolidated calendar that should be linked to at the website. ikdc: If the problem is [...], then I think the solution is to have two separate calendars that anyone can edit, and have a third calendar that contains both sets of events that is linked to on the wiki. emmabat: My question is that, is there no way to filter for a specific type of event? ikdc: I believe you can enable multiple calendars under the same account. emmabat: I think you can [do that] and it should be sufficient. ikdc: I think we can come up with a technical solution that doesn't involve [...]. alvareza: I suppose we should continue this discussion on mattermost, if you want to get on mattermost I should send out a link after this meeting to everyone who is a SIPB member, I think it should be stable. ikdc: Are they all managed by the same account? slz: It doesn't matter, it just works. alvareza: I'm gonna cut this discussion off. There is another thing that I'd need to get to before we end. emmabat: It's not like this is the most confusing meeting we've ever had. nchinda2: We have a nomination to make for efjepsen... for creating our Mattermost instance. He's been around for [four] years and somehow hasn't been prospectivised. kenta: Seconded. efjepsen: I accept the nomination. alvareza: Come see me after the meeting to schedule your election. Project Reports: cela: So, I'm here to talk about a project called the Hyades project. As you know, SIPB runs a lot of cool systems like Scripts and XVM... and if you try to use these projects, you'll realize that they are built on technology from hmm, ten years ago, and they are pretty outdated. And people are like, can I use Node, and we're like, no, and this is sad because we want people to use the latest libraries... They were designed rather quickly and... so we're developing let's call it a cloud service... like google cloud platform and make it available to members of the community, so people can upload cat pictures or run MATLAB jobs and things like that. ...there's a system called Kubernetes that you've probably heard of, this would hopefully be one of SIPB's provisioniing platforms that people can use to run things... you can just press a button and have resources... spur innovation in MIT's community and things like that. slz: If you're interested, come to me, I'll write down your Kerberos and [...] cela: Hyades is a large project and we need a lot of people. So the report is, Hyades continues. alvareza: My point is that SIPB has a bunch of projects, some of them may not be critical but are helpful to SIPB in the long run, like the Mattermost server. My goal is for members to talk about the projects they have and see if anyone is interested. So... cAPSLOCK you have a lot of projects. rsthomp: ...One of the things I've been doing is finding projects that new members would be interested in working on. Here there's a SIPB project ideas board that spans everything from [...] to crazy ideas that people thought of at 4am. One thing is we have a library of books that people might be interested in, but the only form of accountability is this sheet here... we have a bunch of Raspberry Pis that you could use [...] Another thing is the Doorpi... there are also temperature sensors in the hallway... if you're interested in IoT stuff, this might be the thing for you. There's also wakeup.mit.edu... if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can talk to Angel after the meeting because unfortunately I wouldn't be available later. Also my email is [...], you can probably find someone to give it to you. We'll have a hackathon soon for people to work on SIPB projects, which will not be next week because that's HackMIT. kenta: jmgrosen upgraded the ghc locker to version 8.4.3, so if you want to use the latest and greatest haskell compiler on Athena, you can add the locker. Also a shoutout to kaduk for helping us with the AFS stuff. alvareza: Also if you're interested in learning about how AFS works, how to SSH into stuff, etc. on our website we have lots of links to various documentation, there are also other links to [...] and other things that I recommend you take a look at, there are lots of resources that I didn't know about until fairly recently. npfoss: So may of you have probably used CourseRoad, which was originally a SIPB project, its creator graduated 3 years ago and there hasn't been sort of a maintainer since then, so I'm working on redoing CourseRoad with a modern web stack and also I was trying to keep the old one, but doing both at the same time is hard and that's why the old one is empty... An update from last spring is that major and minor requirements are very complicated, so complicated in fact that in talking to administrators I'm now part of the degree audit committee, which is actively looking for new degree audit software [room: laughter] so that is a thing that is, uhm, I no longer want to have anything to do with degree audits, I hope they will have an API that CourseRoad can use... so that's something that's really cool, I'll be here after the meeting, so come talk to me. dzaefn: CourseRoad did not actually start as a SIPB project. It was an independent project for years before it came to SIPB. [...] became a SIPB member really late, and brought it to SIPB. npfoss: And that's why CourseRoad is hosted on SIPB servers instead of [...]. slz: Hi everyone, I'm Lizhou, I just graduated so I'm technically a cruft now. Scripts is probably one of the more successful projects... Unfortunately you can only serve static files [on Athena]. Scripts was created to serve dynamic stuff... it's been a while, the project needs some modernization, which is part of the reason why Hyades exists. But right now we still have 5000 users or so, it hosts everything from people's personal websites, lab websites, and time-to-time mission critical websites that really shouldn't be hosted there, like at one point of time the CPW rooming service... one big thing is that we're always going to support our users, scripts is only possible because as a volunteer service we don't guarantee any support, at the same time Scripts is easy to use so [we don't need to provide that much guidance]... One part is helping users, the other is [...]... Scripts is still the easiest way to host a website. Unfortunately due to historical reasons acquiring an mit.edu hostname requires [something to do with IS&T]. We still need to find a way to get SSL certificates [...]... so that's the more challenging part, but the less challenging part is [hony], and that one is a simple Python webapp is easily hackable. And lastly to get deeper into the backend, there's also the architecture of scripts... we'd definitely love to be able to set up a... so currently since all the maintainers have graduated, the operating system is stuck on Fedora 22... so the idea is to [...] which would make upgrading server. So this comes down to a lot of server-side work, which helps to improve scripts... at some point we should [host a ClueDump] on how scripts work... It's a big project, which is why there's a lot to say. cela: Related to that, briefly we have things regarding our machine room, currently it's very disorganized, there are lots of old servers in there, if you want to help and are interested to learn about how a datacenter actually works, come talk to not me because I need to go... come talk to me at the next meeting [haphazardly leaves the room] slz: So this one is more about server administration. SIPB also runs mirrors.mit.edu, from time-to-time we receive emails when one of our things stop syncing, and some other important place depends on us for software... Mirrors is also in need of some organization, because it's old... now we're trying to move it to slightly newer old hardware. The reason why [...] is because it's just a static file server... but it's definitely showing its age. There are two parts, one part is simply moving it to new hardware, which is is traditional Linux server administration... the other part is rethinking the whole architecture... moving everything to containers... if you have experience in this, I would love to hear from you. kenta: [...] is connected to a giant disk array system... so if you're interested in seeing how a commercial-grade disk array system looks like, you should see mirrors... slz: It's not actually very impressive, it was very impressive when it was bought but... kenta: 40TB is still very impressive... slz: Another thing I wanted to point out about mirrors is that you need to guarantee the integrity of the software it downloads... alvareza: Another SIPB project that hasn't been mentioned, but which is integral to SIPB's operations... and that is maintaining the SIPB office. I'm going to take a few moments to talk about the various features of the SIPB office... the first thing you may notice is the Vive... there's the huge TV oiver there called nucular-jukebox... there are also office supplies in the Monolith, behind Ray Hua... we also have a whiteboard which you can erase unless someone says do not erase, there's also soda in this fridge... we should probably fix this... [slz: there is no CokeComm] there is no CokeComm... if you're interested in helping with the office, come talk to me, or Lef whose kerberos is elefthei... we want some people to spend more time in the office... making sure that systems work, like reinstalling Debathena on all the office heads... if you don't necessarily want to get involved in a technical capacity, the office is a place where you can get involved, being in the office is also a great way to get to know people. npfoss: The first board game night happened, and there were many people there. alvareza: Are you planning on hosting more in the future? npfoss: Yes but not this weekend because HackMIT. Other: emmabat: Classes start sooner than you think. wqian94: Halloween is sooner than you think. It's vaguely CS-related because you get flashing lights for it. wqian94: Add day is sooner than you think? dzaefn: This is getting to be other-other. wqian94: Okay, I rescind my statement and will state it again in other-other. emmabat: You can just say to move it to other-other, I think that's sufficient. slz: Firefox 32 has been released. [...] emmabat: You didn't have enough RAM to download the RAM. alvareza: Next house's internet is actually down right now... I live in third west... I got a wifi-card... I tried installing new drivers... and then I got mad at that and then I tried to network with my laptop and learnt a bunch of networking stuff but that still did not work... so I'm kinda deadlocked right now. kenta: My work bought a new computer with a glass case on it for an actually good reason because we have an FPGA card inside with LEDs, so you can look through the glass case to see the LEDs, this is the first time I had a glass case computer for a reason that is actually useful. emmabat: You mean, not just for the a e s t h e t i c s? Other Other: wqian94: Add day is sooner than you think. dzaefn: The [...] wildfire has lost its record as the largest wildfire in Californian history. wqian94: Career fair is sooner than you think. ikdc: Can we like ban that joke? alvareza: I'm sorry, but the younger generation must suffer this. emmabat: No more than three jokes of that form. ikdc: Only use it in reference to IAP. The meeting was adjourned at 20:08. Minutes taken and submitted by mtheng.