Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 10/7/96 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by yonah. In attendance were Voting members: fubob, fastcart, hartmans, kretch, mkgray, jered, sit, sorokin, beaners, cordelia, yonah, elliot, marthag, nygren, danw | nathanw, rjbarbal, emhavens, foley Associate members: jtkohl, warlord, jtkohl, xiphmont, srz, jweiss, eichin, marc, jemorris, bert, mhpower, ghudson, rls, leira, len18 | abbe, raeburn, tlyu, jhawk, shabby Non-voting members: Prospectives: annmarie, aurora, amu, katyking, amsmith, laura, jfmurphy, daveg, justin, george@nh.mit.edu | lgdean, rdl, altair Guests: Treasurer's Report: jimmy the kvetch [kretch]: We have a treasury. Chairman's Report: mkgray: What day is best for clue dump (straw poll): Thurs slightly preferred beaners: George wants to be a prospective. [he should get an account; he's now george@nh.mit.edu] marthag: He's not the first teddy bear to have an account on charon. yonah: He's not a teddy bear. Elections: ghudson: If user comes in and asks a question, and you don't know the answer, where can you direct them? amu: Zephyr -i help. aurora: Tell someone to come back in the evening when more people are around. If you know where to send them, send them (eg, computing help desk, linux-help). katyking: Many questions can be forwarded to OLC stock answers. [also OLC and sipb@mit.edu] hartmans: Heather, you did lots of documentation. What do you look for when you make docs? aurora: Most important is clarity. Allow a user starting at ground zero to understand what they're reading. Make it clear, concise, and correct. danw: Aaron & Katy, what super powers do you have to offer SIPB? amu: I've used linux at home for 2 yrs, LaTeX for a while. Recompiled TeX for various things. Good at finding answers. katyking: Can identify what she doesn't know, and finding answers through other means. danw: This isn't meant to imply that super powers are necessary. mkgray: Name a service which SIPB used to support, that is now done by IS. aurora: latex is now handled by IS katyking: dialup is now IS amu: Nothing off top of head: discuss hartmans: To all, what are your thoughts on "What is SIPB?" aurora: SIPB is a service organization to serve the user community. Used to think it consisted of answering questions, giving docs, etc. SIPB is here to help users with Athena environment by providing services. SIPB is people interested in computers and helping in whatever way they can. amu: Not much more to add katyking: SIPB is a bunch of cool people and what heather said. It's a good environment for work and stuff. mhpower: Would it be good for SIPB to give a prospective an automatic second chance a month later if turned down for membership? aurora: Shouldn't be mandatory to come back in a month. Too much pressure. Too much structure. Bad. amu: Should have opportunity to have second change, but maybe can choose on their own how to wait to be nominated again. katyking: Not automatic for election, but if SIPB feels they belong in SIPB, they will come up for election again. sit: Should you be a SIPB member and why should we agree? katyking: More comfortable finding things at SIPB. amu: Because know a lot a people, can answer many questions. aurora: Prioritize work with activities in which she is a member. danw: List what you do if you need to close office. amu: Please log out, give a few minutes for prospectives to log out (could force them to log out). Ask them to leave, then lights off, lock door. katyking+aurora: Turn on the A/C. warlord: If you don't recognize someone, what do you do? amu: Finger at their machine, check the members and prospectives file. Ask them to leave. katyking: Hi, I am Katy, who are you? (Find out if member, then DTRT). Look them up. mkgray: What can you continue to do to help SIPB (what new super powers would you try to develop)? aurora: [Read the old minutes,] documentation maintaining. katyking: Documentation maintenance. amu: Linux and RedHat. Tex, LaTeX. hartmans: Need for some totally frivolous question: What are the 10 commandments and the relevance to SIPB amu: [Doesn't succeed] The list was put on the whiteboard. abbe: I'm wearing a floppy hat. How would you make the SIPB nicer, and how important is this? katyking: Was scared away from the office for a while. amu: High priority. Don't scare away users. Maintain stuff up-to-date. aurora: Was scared away for a while. People should feel comfortable to ask questions. kretch: You gain membership, then everyone goes out of office. User comes in around 1:30 AM, saying "can't update maillist". What do you do? aurora: It's just Moira updating. Wait it out. kretch: Suppose it happens at noon? amu: Find person responsible for moira. jweiss: Correct answer is ask -i consult. Tell someone that it's timing out. Follow instructions on paging people. cordelia: How much time do you spend in office? amu: A few hours a day. I don't have a machine in my room. Don't want to use up cluster machines during busy times. aurora: Lunch, varies. katyking: Few hours in the evening, depends on workload. Been here all nights sometimes. cordelia: Name a SIPB phone number other than 3-7788. aurora: 3-7789 amu: 3-7790 [wrong] katyking: There are a bunch which are answered with "wrong number". cordelia: 3-7789 3-7760 3-8361 3-7788 jhawk: 8-5831 abbe: How many psets have you completed in office with good grades? aurora: Course 12: 1 pset (art) amu: Several katyking: 3 all-nighters here nygren: Pick member who is not Len, ask them a question that demonstrates your knowledge. (stump the member) amu: Bert, what are the five font attributes for Tex and defaults? [Bert fails] size, family, shape, encoding, forgets katyking: When was jis nominated? kretch: before I was born [wrong] katyking: May 1978 aurora: Who's working on Inessential Athena? cordelia: gsipb, aurora, kretch, mtbear (lists the ACL) mkgray: What's ring0, and what's its significance? amu: Protection level where programs can do anything under Multics, which was the first OS supported by SIPB. srz: Why do you want to become a SIPB member? auora: Morning person, needs to get in office to check documentation which has been bled on. amu: Weekend mornings, could keep office open, root passwords for linux dev. katyking: No problem getting in. It's about time to help. Voting happens. Results: amu passes 20-0-1, aurora passes 18-2-1, katyking passes 18-1-2. yonah: Congratulations. New members should talk to Sam after the meeting. rjbarbal: Nice, friendly bylaws amendments on the bulletin board [by gene-simmons]. Correcting spelling mistakes, etc. Current Bylaws misspell Bylaws. Read them before next week when he'll move to change them. bert: Can rjbarbal spell out the exact changes? rjbarbal: I tried that last time, it failed. hartmans: Elections next week. yonah: annmarie, gutnik, daveg. Office Report: jered: There are 6 bad, decrepit chairs in the office. The sitting on kind, not warlord and ghudson. They're the old black ones. Straw poll: does anyone really want to keep the old chairs in the office? Can we replace all 6? Nobody especially objects. New chairs: The expensive kind, the back tends to slip down. The not so expensive kind holds up pretty well. Straw Poll 2: Arms adjustable or non-adjustable arms for arm chairs? so-so. Move to allocate up to $1200 for 6 chairs, 2 with nonadjustible arms, 1 with adjustable, 3 without. Passes many-2-3. jered: On some PC's, keyboards and mice suck. 2 issues: $300 for 3 new keyboards $180 for 3 new mice, to be placed as we want. Mice will be logitech on cutter john. Keyboards require discussion. nygren: Not sure there are keyboards that enough people will like to make it worth it. jered: Motion to allocate up to $200 for 3 logitech mice for quiche zorp, lime, granola. nygren: OEM version is ~$20. Get that if we can. jtkohl: Are there enough lefty people to get a non-handed version? jered: I'm lefty and I use them. katyking: I'm left-handed and always uses mouse right handed. Motion Passes many-1-6. jered: move to allocate up to $300 for 3 new keyboard. We should discuss which keyboards. danw: "everyone hates zorp's keyboard"... except me. We won't find consensus on any of them. Buying new keyboards won't help. marc: I liked it until I had to deal with control and space bar. I don't have wrist problems. We won't find one that everyone thinks is perfect, but we probably can find one that nobody hates. kretch: Send mail about which keyboards people like, find out how people feel, and bring it up again later 1 keyboard at a time. Suggests jered withdraws motion. jered: wants more discussion now, but withdraws motion. marthag: Because people like different kinds, let's not buy 3 same keyboards, especially for same OS. Then more people will be happy. jhawk: Move to table the keyboard motion until jered sends out mail about types under consideration and next week we move to purchase only one of each type. Oops, this is an invalid motion because jered withdrew his. ghudson: We don't want one kind of keyboard. We want diversity in keyboards. There are some keyboards that very few people will like, maybe zorp's does. We want to pick the keyboards we want to replace, vote on it, and replace it with something different. marthag: Move to allocate $10 for new refrigerator light bulb. jered: How many sipb members does it take to vote on changing a lightbulb? Motion passes many-3-2. sit: I've reinstalled cutter with Redhat-4.0.0, It seems to be working, mail sent to sipb-office about it. jered: Do we have a policy on getting personal mail delivered to office? no. jessie: Did we get fantastik? yes. marc: keyboards will break if they get swapped a lot. It would be best to find a keyboard that everyone could live with. Most of the time the office isn't empty enough to choose machine based on the keyboard. jhawk: It's nice if there's a chance to find what you like. MIT Computing Report: jhawk: w91 router crashed and people noticed. This is disturbing since it isn't actually routing anything useful. danw: New sparc moira server is in testing. Hopefully it will be up in December. Moira will probably go down every Saturday night. yonah: cluster combo changed Friday night. warlord: Lou came by with a CP asking if anyone was in the machine room. If you go in, make sure you deal with the alarm properly, jweiss: and trip the request to exit sensor on the way out. ask jweiss if you don't know what this is. warlord: redhat athena 4.0 has been released. motions about this in later reports. Computer Services: marthag: fans on one of the disks on bed and one of the afs servers keep stopping. We need new enclosures for them. abbe: clarifying what enclosures are and fans are. Getting a new enclosure involves also getting a new fan. jtkohl: are they R^2? are they warranteed? yonah: yes. jweiss: enclosures are probably not under warranty any more. ghudson: I have a backlog of things to do including getting 4 1Gig disks, I can also buy 2 half-height enclosures, but it will take a few weeks. Our other options are fairly limited. We can get some from ops on a temporary basis. jhawk: it would be nice to have new SCSI cabling at the same time to minimize outage. jweiss: can we take this offline? warlord: Like I said last week, I want to set up 2nd afs cell for people to learn afs administration without getting bits in sipb.mit.edu cell. If you're interested, send him mail. He has some responses already. ghudson: There's already a cell in e40, the watchmaker cell, that nobody really cares about it other than SIPB. Maybe we could give bits to interested sipb people on that? Will talk to tom about it. SIPB Backup Report: hartmans: afs did happen last week, thanks to ASO tape drive. solaris is different with respect to devices. ghudson: Falcon called me about the DLT drive. They had internal confusion, it's in transit on the way back to us now. marc: how was it shipped? jhawk: get a tracking number next time. foley: anxiety got done last weds. Also, ordered 2 exabyte cleaning tapes which should have been here by now, has anyone seen them come in? marthag: picayune is happening now. Penguin-lust and charon are not done. It's hard for me to do them because I can't log in as root from off campus, which is where I usually log in. If other people are interested in doing backups, it's easy to learn, talk to me. The document to look at is /afs/sipb/project/foo-server/common/backups/HOW-TO-BACKUP. Publications Report: aurora: iZephyr and the associated 1-page guide are just about done. I'm working now on iAFS. Mailing list doc-maint for people interested, add themselves. It's also a place to send doc bug reports after things get out. bert: Should the list be named sipb-doc-maint? hartmans: ACL should be gsipb, sipb-acl, etc. mkgray: archive it in discuss meeting, also. Take it offline. yonah: do you want to allocate money? jweiss: Move to allocate up to $100 for up to 50 copies each of iZephyr & zephyr 1 sheet. White ballot. warlord: A new 1 page Getting Started with Redhat-athena document is about done. It's been bled on. Move to allocate $20 to make 200 copies of it. jhawk: does this replace existing 1-sheet? [yes] yonah: how quickly will this be out of date? warlord: months. mkgray: it will be buggy? let's do less. warlord: A lot [3 doz?] people have bled on it, it should be fine. White ballot. yonah: are we low on anything? mhpower: Someone should talk to Athena doc people, CSS, TPS, whatever it's called now, and see if they have problems with us duplicating their topics? Second, our publications can and should reference each other. ghudson: iMatlab has been done with knowledge of the TPS people. jhawk: iKernelcrap doesn't overlap any I/S documents. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: elliot: I'm organizing an IAP course on the Internet. I have a mailing list. If you're interested in helping, talk to me. kretch: This is the only course I know about. If there's more, talk to me. jweiss: It's IAP planning month. tlyu: Inessential Postscript will be taught. If someone wants to help me put together a syllabus and slides, talk to me. nygren: Intro to Unix Software Development. To help, talk to him. proven: Pthreads class again. To help, talk to him. CokeComm Report: '() Other: sorokin: Lou says the correct response to ants in the cluster is to throw out whatever was bringing them in and step on them. mkgray: Infocom game interpreter is being installed in outland. I bought the CD with a ton of games, but I can't install it on athena. sorokin: Does that have lurking horror? mkgray: yes. bert: We should have a lurking horror server. amsmith: I'm writing a minicourse on Autocad. I'm looking for people who have used autocad to provide real examples. kretch: mkgray forgot to mention that he's writing SIPB: The Infocom game. warlord: No, that's lurking horror. kretch: a new one. mhpower: The New York Times mentioned a group of universities are working to create Internet2, an new national network for higher education. sorokin: They could at least call it Internet 2000. marc: NetBSD 1.2 was released. warlord: PGP 3.0 created its first key. jhawk: ssh 1.2.15 and 1.2.16 were released. Other Other: jered: an Infocom-like game based on EC is being developed. xiphmont: I've been back for a week and and Internet expo comes up in 10 days. sit: I have Nick's comedy stop tickets. Everyone I know already went. Bug me if you want to go. It's not free if you're under 21. sorokin: If you say you don't have ID and you're an MIT senior, one guy will ask you what "the really big hack" was, and if you say the car on the dome they let you in. nygren: linux security list people say there are holes that let you get root for libc 5.3 and below. upgrade to 5.4. jhawk: dole's web site was hacked in favor of clinton this morning. danw: I'm -1 dan light points. foley: The itty bitty cluster combo things should be done on the LSC paper cutter next time. cordelia: The 1st senior house mural is done. danw: The second. bert: If you're running netwatch.pl, go log into the cluster. jweiss: Auction after meeting. yonah: According to one of the calendars I use, I'm 21 now. The meeting was adjourned at 22:01:05 EDT. Minutes taken by fubob and abbe and submitted by abbe.