Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2019-10-21 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by emmabat. In attendance were Student keyholders: alvareza, cela, mwnguyen, gshay, zackpi, mtheng, bds Associate keyholders: merolish, quentin, aglasgal Members: amigdal, mrittenb, mau | maximo, justicev, mitimmy, eltonlin Guests: '() Administrivia: cela: I would like to allocate $20 for cloud for SIPB uplink, we can't use xvm right now, so it's a stop-gap. glasgal: motion to white ballot cela: seconded emmabat: the motion passes. emmabat: I have something for SIPB advising, we had a study break saturday, hopefully we will try to have them earlier emmabat: IS&T has agreed to cover the cost of SIPB50, so we have a budget again! [everyone cheers] emmabat: we need paper cups and office snacks, motion to allocate $50 for these items. npfoss: motion to white ballot cela: seconded emmabat: the motion passes. aglasgal: you cannot actually underflow sipb budget, I believe people have tried. npfoss: don't we have a water boiler? emmabat: we have a kettle? npfoss: should we get a copy of secret hitler [tabletop game] for the office? we borrow next house's everytime. Motion to allocate $35 for a copy of secret hitler. npfoss: are people down for a game night this saturday? [everyone: yes] quentin second and white ballot emmabat: motion passes. Project Reports: bds: we have worked on the proposal for SIPB WISP, we will soon be ready to publish. cela: watch out this week for a policy proposal for SIPB Machine Room access. cela: scripts continue, scripts meeting is every week. cela: uplink is continuing to happen cela: hyades continues, we managed to push some refactoring changes, that were pretty big. merolish: I would like to say SIPB should try to continue organizing IAP classes! emmabat: I don't know what the timeline is for that. glasgall: the timeline is sooner than you think. gshay: is the deadline passed? alvareza: that is for for credit classes. cela: reminder that we have a document that has info on how to get involved in a sipb project. glasgall: Members of the board, I am standing here to deliver a message about the state of XVM: [begin transcript of glasgall's message] Members of the Board, colleagues, friends... I'm standing here this evening to deliver a message about the current state of the SIPB XVM project. Some of you probably only know me as the strange older person who shows up to meetings every few months to mumble something incomprehensible about disks and move to spend some of your money. As such, I should probably introduce myself before asking for anything more. My name is Anna Glasgall; my Athena username is 'glasgall'. I use she/her pronouns. Some of you perhaps once knew me under another name. I've been a SIPB keyholder for a number of years; in that time I've contributed a few bits and pieces to XVM, Scripts, AFS, Barnowl, and a few other projects. But I don't want to spend your time talking about myself, I'm here to talk about XVM. XVM, for those of you who may not have previously encountered it, is SIPB's virtual machine hosting service. We try to provide you with an interface such that you can click a button and a few minutes later have your own Linux server on MITnet. Perhaps some of you have used AWS EC2, or Microsoft Azure; you can think of this as being our smaller-scale, home-grown version of services like these. That we made _before_ EC2 was cool. XVM is currently somewhat lightly maintained by Mitch Berger (mitchb), Quentin Smith (quentin), Alex Chernyakhovsky (achernya), and me, and has been for years now. And that's rather the problem. I'm going to level with you: I am more than a little burned out. I'm willing to keep doing the fairly minimal keep-the-lights-on work I've been doing and I can try to do the deeper investigations and fixes as they come up, but if we want this to survive as a service with fewer long-standing major issues, or for it to evolve into something more modern, we _really_ need some help. I'm very happy to try to mentor people, but this is not something the four of us can do by ourselves anymore. I have limited time I can spend on the service. Mitch and Quentin and Alex have even less. But perhaps even more importantly, none of us are MIT students, and XVM, like all SIPB projects, is supposed to be a service run _by_ you, _for_ you. I will not deny that XVM, like any other production service that's been around for a while with actual users, is a challenging system to work on. HOWEVER. - Working on a production service with actual users will give you experience that you just won't get in any other way. - Working on a production service with actual users can be really rewarding - you get to point at neat things people made and say "I helped make that happen" - XVM's user base is relatively technical, as these things go, so user support is usually less detailed and involved than e.g. Scripts tickets - XVM is mostly Python. It may not be the best python ever, but it's for the most part halfway reasonable code in a reasonable language. And I *promise* you that "helped maintain a virtual machine hosting service with hundreds of users" will look good on your resume. If you end up working on XVM, you'll learn about: - Python - Linux - Debian/Ubuntu - Kerberos - AFS - Networking (TCP/IP, routing, DHCP, DNS, etc) - Networked storage - Xen (and virtualization in general) - Sysadminning/operations - probably other things I'm forgetting Note that this is *not* a list of prerequisites for working on XVM, it's a list of "these are things you will gain experience with if you work on it". Some of them are a bit less shiny now than they were a few years ago, but the general package is still stuff that's good to know and will give you good things to talk about in job interviews XVM has been the cradle of SIPB services (and other cool projects at MIT outside SIPB) for years now. If you want to help that continue to be the case and learn some useful skills along the way, we'd love to have you. If any of this has caught your interest, please talk to me after the meeting, or email me (glasgall@mit.edu). I'll also be posting some of this information to Mattermost and updating the SIPB Project Roles document. We have a number of smaller projects (fix some annoyances in the website, add some minor features to the VM startup mechanism), medium-sized projects (replace the Java VM console with NoVNC), and larger ones (upgrade XVM to a newer version of Ubuntu and Xen, which it very badly needs) that you'll be able to work on. Thank you for your time. [end transcript of glasgall's message] [[SUSTAINED, TUMULTUOUS APPLAUSE]] cela: I want to agree, this is a great opportunity to learn. I wish I could do this, but I don't have the time, so you should. merolish: as far as career training goes, this is as good as it gets. Other: '() Other Other: cela: tomorrow is asexual awareness day. Election stevengo: can someone record this moment for posterity? stevengo: I am stevengo, I am a PhD student in anthropology, I study people and computers. It has been great to npfoss: what SIPB projects have you worked on. stevengo: I have made a documentary about sipb! and helped with cela: what is your favorite term or word that you have learned through being around sipb? stevengo: other other. glasgall: How do you double space a documentary stevengo: you ask other SIPB members how to double space stuff, and record their responses. cela: close your eyes: name as many things on the ceiling as you can. stevego: [enumerates items on ceiling] cela: what is this? stevengo: Uhh its the ctrl-alt-deleter? [demonstrates ctrl-alt-deleter] zackpi: name the locations of as many golden fuzzballs as you can? cela: name two things you might do in case of fire? stevengo: save the save in case of fire box. play frisbee outside the stud. cela: the other answer is to hit breakers in the breaker box (if a computer is on fire) emmabat: where are the squacles from? stevengo: [**confused**] what?? npfoss: what is your favorite thing on the bulletin board? stevengo: the stapler play? gshay: close your eyes, what is the color of the carpet? stevengo: yczeng: whats your favorite book from library? stevengo: I think the manga guide to database, but in absens [npfoss administers the oath] npfoss: have you been, or a current member of the SDS? stevengo: unequivically, no. cela: what fictional character should be keyholdered? stevengo: I feel like the lorax would be a great addition to SIPB. npfoss: name two things sipb does well, and two we can do better. stevengo: one, the work you do to support infrastructure, and to make students lives easier is done well. Another thing you do well, is to make the meetings/office a fun space for people to exist in. two things to do better, this is changing, but broadening the public perception that, there is a lot of talent in this room, but making sure that we can open it up to other people. the second thing is that we should change the carpet. cela: which head do you scritch kerberos on? stevengo: I think this one (the playful head) [SIPB is unsure if it is quines or quines (pronounced differently)] cela: name a book about SIPB stevengo: quine the graphic novel about SIPB by stevengo mwnguyen: pitch a sipb tv series. stevengo: the adventures of doorpi will be the first season, the saga of turning it on and off. season 2 will be the 50th os SIPBith. there could be a prequel that shows the backstories of those characters. cela: what do you do if the FBI shows up? stevengo: call the chair. next I would quickly impersonate some other student group. npfoss: why do you want to be a keyholder. stevengo: I would want to watch the colors of the carpet change, no it is because I have committed to being a lifelong scholar of computing culture, and I would love to continue to be part of that, for me. [stevengo is keyholdered YNA: 13-0-0 ] kenta: the 0 byte python script does print it self. The meeting was adjourned at 20:20. Minutes taken and submitted by alvareza.