Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2024-07-15


The meeting was called to order at 19:33 by rgabriel.

In attendance were

        Student keyholders: rgabriel, psvenk

        Associate keyholders: almonds, kenta, scj643

        Members: '()

        Guests: bhalstea

Administrivia:

        rgabriel: Did we still need to talk about merch?
        
        psvenk: I don't have an idea. Ann was asking for ideas or just for what to draw. Otherwise it can be something random.
        
        rgabriel: We can have a fuzzball sitting on boss baby for example.
        
        [discussion about ideas]
        
Project Reports:

        almonds: LLMs continues to not continue.
        
        scj643: We need to register boss-baby on the network. The new motherboard has a different mac address, and I forgot to write down the old one.
        
        [discussion about the network]
        
        rgabriel: Someone in the EC should send an email to IS&T.
        
        kenta: What has worked in the past is that a student sends an email to IS&T.
        
        rgabriel: mailto continues. I have revived it to use Moira indirectly.
        
        kenta: does logging on to the dialups and using chpobox no longer work?
        
        rgabriel: It has always worked. In a Discord conversation, I told people to do that, and they asked me when mailto would be fixed. I said I could try in the summer if they pinged me, and they did remind me.
        
        scj643: The surface book got a cursor! Exciting! For context, I am recovering a Surface Book that wasn't booting.
        
        rgabriel: Any projects that want to continue?
        
        scj643: Vault wants to continue but I still need to send the email to hardware ops.
        
        almonds: Take the time you need. I'm so busy.
        
        rgabriel: Also Matrix wants to continue, I am just very busy.
        
Other:

        almonds: I am curious. Does anyone have any tips for running Python 3.12 on web_scripts? It builds 80% of the way on the Fedora 20 scripts server and then I get an error about the sys module. It takes around 30 minutes to get to that point.
        
        rgabriel: kenta do you have any pointers?
        
        kenta: Dependencies have their own dependencies and it might be an issue down the tree. I don't know much about Python, since I wrote my first Python script this week. I have been more on the perl side.
        
        rgabriel: What do you think about Python now that you tried it?
        
        kenta: For the specific thing that perl is really good at (text processing line by line), Python feels very clunky.
        
        almonds: Yeah, that's fair.
        
        almonds: I will paste the error that I see in the "Other" channel, and I will continue looking into this.
        
        rgabriel: What are you trying to run on scripts?
        
        almonds: Just anything on Python 3.12. The current version is 3.3
        
        rgabriel: Ah, that's old! I think you are running Fedora 20. You should try upgrading to Fedora 30 first.
        
        scj643: I got the surface to run Fedora!
        
        almonds: One reason that I want to run 3.12 is for my MITES students, since they could use their own lockers. But if I have to switch to Fedora 30, they would have to do so as well.
        
        rgabriel: I think you could try creating an environment specifically for them.
        
        almonds: Sounds good. Is there any jail software you recommend?
        
        rgabriel: Not personally.
        
        scj643: Give them Docker containers. It will solve everything. This is what we do in JupyterHub. It resets every time you do something stupid.
        
        almonds: I might revive some old chroot/quota code I have, it's just so basic, it has nano and I haven't even tried to use scp/rsync with it yet. I'm looking for a simple solution, but I think it will be complicated no matter what.
        
        scj643: I would also recommend Podman but it would complicate it. If you are really crazy you could use Kubernetes. Don't use Kubernetes.
        
        scj643: How many kids are they?
        
        almonds: 20
        
        scj643: Then you could just give them a VM.
        
Other Other:

        scj643: Don't work for Dell. This is your weekly reminder.
        
        kenta: We have had other SIPB people work for Dell. Someone said Dell has a significant difference in work environment between those working on consumer-oriented versus enterprise-oriented products.
        
        scj643: I work IT at Dell. Don't work for Dell, because you cannot get any promotions for remote positions. Otherwise, you have to go into the office 3 times a week.
       
       rgabriel: I recall we had much more people last summer. I don't think we could even hold events right now.
       
       psvenk: Last year we had colclark.
       
       rgabriel: colclark is around. He is working for SOLE.
       
       bhalstea: Is this from his position as ASA president?
       
       rgabriel: He is employed by SOLE. I imagine that has a part in how he got the role.
       
       kenta: I personally feel one of the main tasks of ASA is to protect student organizations from SOLE. So it feels like he is switching sides. Optimisitically, maybe he feels he can do good working from the inside.

The meeting was adjourned at 20:06.

        Minutes taken and submitted by rgabriel and others present.