Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 01/22/96 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by ghudson. In attendance were Voting members: yonah, cat, marc, hartmans, jered, ghudson, nathanw, djib, rjbarbal, tlyu | abbe Associate members: mkgray, kcr, srz, svalente, shabby, rls, mycroft, mhpower, jhawk, mhbraun | sgw Non-voting members: Prospectives: jfmurphy, pipa, tap@cs.umb.edu, rasta9 | fifo, kretch Guests: Treasurer's Report: ghudson: Clarinet raised their prices (from $4K to $6K to possibly $10K in the future), so we have more money available to spend this year, because I sent mail to Lorraine about the price increase and she said we might as well pay it out of some other non-SIPB budget. This means that this year we can probably spend the money we would otherwise have used for Clarinet. mhbraun: Did you find out where/when in our budget athena hardware service fees go? ghudson: Not yet. marc: I found the keys that the treasurer lost. jrbarbal: The treasurer now lives in a place managed by someone with an IQ larger than a cucumber. Chairman's Report: rjbarbal: In case you thought I had forgotten, I have been working on the bylaws amendments, but I won't have anything in time for the elections. ghudson: I should probably talk about elections now. last year's elections took 2 1/2 hours because we asked questions of candidates first, so this year we will probably follow the old rules and not have a question period. shabby: the chairman is now living somewhere hopefully managed by someone with an IQ greater than a cucumber? ghudson: I'm still technically homeless, and I've only spoken to bureaucrats at the Niles Company so far. rjbarbal: When will elections be? ghudson: Second meeting of february. cat: I'd like to nominate kretch for membership. seconded, accepted hartmans: Has kretch finished iAthena, and if not, does he plan to? I think it would be more appropriate to nominate him afterwards if he plans on finishing it soon. ghudson: It has not typically been a requirement in the past the people finish projects before being nominated. kretch: I probably won't be finished sufficiently soon. ghudson: Election would be held at the first meeting of the new term. motion passes many-0-1 Office Report: ghudson: We have a new hole punch, courtesy of Jessie. I don't know if she bought it herself, or used the money we allocated. [Someone thinks she used the allocated money.] kcr: The office is a pit. jweiss: I move we allocate enough money to buy two toner cartridges. seconded ghudson: friendly ammendment: $300 motion passes on white ballot tlyu: There's a new copy of the red book; it was slightly more expensive because the price has gone up. ghudson: I move to allocate $5 to cover the difference. motion passes on white ballot. jweiss: Someone should volunteer to get new cartridges and get rid of old ones. cat volunteers kcr: I did some investigating, and the office supplies people claim never to have received a req for a cleaning tape, and Lorraine says we weren't charged for one, so Athena support has donated a cleaning tape. mhpower: A number of SIPB members can recite the entire 10.001 problem set without ever having seen it. jhawk: Our metal garbage cans were replace by a smaller number of plastic ones. jweiss: That might be strictly incorrect. I believe some of our metal garbage cans were replace by a larger number of plastic garbage cans, and replacement of various garbage cans in the office will probably occur again sometime in the future. abbe: When my mother calls the SIPB office, people should remind her that I don't live here and that she should call my room every so often. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: There will be more AFS server shutdowns this week. Computer Services: ghudson: I applied a software patch to bed last night which causes it to use 1/8 as much memory for each news reading connection; it seems to work. If it continues to work then we have a 1 gig disk (here) and 2 64meg simms (coming) which may not be needed for bed. ghudson: Thursday night/Friday morning we will be upgrading the SIPB server net from an AUI repeater to a UTP repeater, giving us five more network ports. We're planning to get a new AFS server from Ops. Before that happens we need to upgrade the network, get a disk enclosure for our new micropolis drive, and upgrade our AFS software to 3.3A. For the last part, I'll need to get people's opinions and plan, hopefully during the next couple of weeks. mhbraun: The demark for the sipb network will be at the machine end of the cables leaving the UTP repeater, so we may not unilaterally change what comes off the UTP repeater (but we can change what goes on single-port and four-port transceivers, etc.). SIPB Backup Report: jweiss: Everyting was done last week. ghudson: This is a one-week warning. Next week I will probably make a motion to allocate about $5000 to get a DLT drive. Backups have started to take a long time because of new disk space. ops has now had dlt drives in production for some time, and it seems to be faster. Also, we seem to have more money now than in future years, so this might be a good time. marc: Given that we do lots of backups for various machines, maybe it would be better to just get a robot tape changer for the exabyte. sgw: The advantage of DLT's is that they're really high density (as well as being fast). marc: I understand that, but one problem we have is changing tapes and doing backups when the office is closed. sgw: You can also get robots for DLT's marc: That would cost even more. mhbraun: Tapes cost more, but are rated for reuse. Also, we could re-arrange the backups to require fewer tapes. sgw: I've done research seperately. The tapes are $70-90 per cartridge, but it equals out because of storage space. jhawk: One wonders what this means with regard to putting multiple machines on a single tape, or leaving space blank. Either might be a problem. People doing backups on different machines might be different groups. jered: Server backups take a long time because the transfer takes time, and DLT's do that well. ghudson: A robot would possibly let us do backups more continuously, but wouldn't solve the problem of letting others do backups. tlyu: Is the system we use now for backups capable of doing multiple machines on one tape? Whether or not we want to put multiple machines on one tape, our backups aren't physically secured anyway. jweiss: It can put multiple machines on one tape, using one machine to back-up another, requiring giving one machine root access on another (something we haven't wanted to do in the past). Even if we get a new drive, we don't have to switch everything over immediately anyway. Some machines don't take that long (only 1/2 hour) now anyway. Having larger capacity tapes would make AFS backups easier (no tape-switching required). marc: Would a robot help? You can expect-script hitting return. jweiss: It might. jhawk: It's worth noting that the DLT' have a 1.5 mb/sec transfer speed (greater than available net capacity), and there might be streaming issues. ghudson: We should speak to someone from Ops about that offline. srz: Can someone compare DAT v. DLT v. Exabyte? ghudson: If we're going to spend money on a tape drive, we should get one which we'll still use in a couple of years. sgw: DAT drives don't seem to be as rugged as DLT/Exabyte. DLT is based on the TK50, but DEC claims to have gotten things right this time, and it seems to work fairly well. srz: I'm concerned about reliability. I don't think Exabyte is. sgw: DLT is probably better than DAT. srz: How about capacity? sgw: 2-4gig for DAT, 5-20gig for DLT (uncompressed). ghudson: AFS has about 12-13gig, +4 soon to come (not all used). jweiss: current backups take 2 exabytes, uncompressed. sgw: I believe if you have a multi-volume save set, recovering a middle volume is a pain. Also, greg has mentioned that this will be proposed later, so maybe this should be hashed out in email rather than here now. ghudson: I think if people are proposing alternate ideas (like robots), that's best done here; hashing out details should be next week. jweiss: It's worth noting that Ops has done work using DLT's running off of Sparc5's. Our current backup machine is running Ultrix; this might have to change, but we should check what works. jered: if you pay more for the "DEC-approved" version, DEC garauntees it will work with DEC machines. it'll also read TK50 cartridges. srz: What are prices? jered: DLT $4400-4500; $1100 for DAT. mhpower: If the Exabyte breaks down and we stop using it for backups, it would be bad because the single tape price for DLT is more expensive than most students are willing to pay. sgw: Refurbishing an exabyte costs about $450. abbe: Why did you say we'll have more money this year? ghudson: Windfall from not having to pay Clarinet, but having budgeted for it. tlyu: AFS backup is in progress, and the first tape took over 6 hours to fill. Publications Report: ghudson: I printed out 50 copies of the new NetBSD installation document without checking in the file first. jhawk was upset. jhawk: We seem to be out of iAthena. kretch volunteers to get new copies. ghudson: I move to allocate adequate money ($100) for 50 copies (only 50, since we might have revisions soon). motion passes on white ballot R/O Report: '() IAP Report: ghudson: Stephane is running an animation thing in 2-105 until 8:30. jered: The linux class was successful, thanks to Emil Sit. jhawk: Planning for the NetBSD class will take place after the meeting. hartmans: We will be using limekiller for the class. srz: The java class is being moved to Wednesday the 31st at 7pm in 6-120 because 1-390's projector is broken. CokeComm Report: jweiss: People should find out the difference between redeemable and non-redeemable cans and bottles. shabby: There was a large run for variety on Saturday. Other: marc: There are way to many Newtons in this office. jweiss: Various SIPB members can receive email from their grandmothers. This is more amusing if you've read old minicourse documentation. eichin: A bunch of old SIPB members got together this weekend to watch a hockey game. Other Other: eichih: Mary Chung's has been open for over a year at the new location. rav-eaters have now eaten more than $7000 worth of food there on Monday nights alone. sgw: Every time I've opened a newspaper recently, I've seen Stan in the business section, most recently in the Boston Business Journal; Stan is the sneakers in the "suit and sneakers" article about Dimensional Insight. jered: Karl threatened that if I continue to listen to Firesign Theater, that I will turn into Bill Cattey. kcr: It wasn't a threat, but an observation. marc: I'm kicking shabby's butt in war. The meeting was adjourned at 20:06. Minutes taken and submitted by yonah.