Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 01/12/98 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kretch. In attendance were Voting members: kretch elliot amu harrisj jfmurphy amsmith fubob | gutnik Associate members: tlyu eichin jhawk kcr klmitch danw mhpower marc ghudson | cat jweiss jemorris yandros Non-voting members: Prospectives: yak "Martyn Peck" gisele rif | xela mmunsey mdakin Guests: Treasurer's Report: '() Chairman's Report: '() Office Report: marc: Carpet report? kretch: I'm still working on it. I need to talk to Rose. jweiss: We have a new vacuum filter. It will make it here from E40 as soon as I remember to bring it here on my way. kcr: I'm toying with the idea of declaring the beginning of spring term a "coat rack empty" time period, in order to get people to take back old coats. ghudson: We were supposed to get an Ultra today, but it didn't show up. jhawk: jweiss sent joewelch mail about it. jweiss: Do we know where we're putting it or what we're unputting? kretch: No. jweiss: There seems to be two options for unputting: bill and savage. I don't really care which one goes, but what do we do with it? I think the options are upgrading lnitp (the xcluster machine) or deathtongue (random Sparc OS development). It's notable that Athena is now using Classics as xcluster machines. kretch: I suggest that bill lose its head space, and discussion on what to upgrade occur on sipb-discussion. jweiss: Some people like the head on bill, so people may care about which monitors go where. This can probably be handled off-line. jhawk: We might want to think about upgrading upgrading binkley (webserver load monitor). jweiss: Strawpoll on upgrading lnitp versus deathtongue. [Poll results were lnitp: 1, deathtongue: 3, apathy: many.] jweiss: Sounds like we should just go ahead and do deathtongue. kretch: Let's discuss this on sipb-discussion. jweiss: It's been SIPB policy not to make motions about where machines should go. mhpower: I think it's annoying when people decide on their own where machines should go. Maybe we should change the policy. jweiss: Move that bill loses it's head space [Seconded.] jhawk: I've been disappointed with the calibre of machine on top of the cabinets. I think this is a good opportunity to improve this. It's not a cluster machine, which is another reason to put it up there. jfmurphy: People get hurt climbing or can't climb up there. xela: I don't think we should have uniquely interesting machine somewhere where someone might be physically unable to get to it. jweiss: Just because bill loses its head space, it doesn't mean savage can't from where it is. [Motion passes 7-1-10.] ghudson: Given number of abstentions, perhaps the old method of loose consensus is superior. jhawk: There's no evidence that loose consensus is better. In fact, since we reached a decision with a vote quite easily, this implies it works pretty well. Office Cleaning Report: kretch: There were reports of scattered cleaning. The SIPB office is a shared resource, and we need to take care of it. People should be more enthusiastic about cleaning up. MIT Computing Report: Computer Services: amu: RedHat-Athena 4.2 is finally released. fubob: When is 5.0 coming out? amu: Not for a while. jhawk: We were supposed to get an SS5 server with the Ultra (for AFS). marc: The scanner has been acting flaky lately. It seems to work now, but I'm not convinced it's okay. gutnik: The machine was acting flaky in general at the time, so it might not be the scanner itself. mhpower: I got a request for a new news.answers maintainer account. Anyone know who [describes person] is? [No one did.] jhawk: Why hasn't this come up in the past? mhpower: In the past members of the news.answers moderating team have always been members. SIPB Backup Report: kretch: AFS is happening now, UFS is happening now too. Cool. Publications Report: yak: We appear to have publications. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: elliot: The Internet course is this week, Tuesday through Thursday, 7-10 pm, in 1-390. We've got 88 people preregistered. xela: I attended C^4 (the Caffeinated Crash Course in C) today. It was amazing. kretch: khsiao said there was a really large turnout this year. They almost filled up the classroom (4-270). CokeComm Report: jweiss: Take cans & bottles down! harrisj: We took 15 flats down during office cleaning. yak: We have no candy. Other: mhpower: There's a new security hole under many Unixes that's related to overflowing i-node reference counts. At least on linux, a user can load their own libc and raise their privileges to root. kretch: Can you estimate the number of links one need to make? mhpower: Well, under linux it's a 16-bit field... danw: Coming soon, nawm2. I can't believe it's not a windowmanager! kretch: I got a user-to-user ticket yesterday. Other Other: kcr: Grey17's loss of a network connection is looking more permanent. harvard.net is giving up on providing DSL connectivity to that part of Cambridge. We're investigating other alternatives. yak: I made something that lets you read Usenet with MH. harrisj: MediaOne sucks... our January install date has been pushed back to march. ghudson: We have a record amount of minutes per member present. [Statement withdrawn later due to excessive argument.] yandros: My idea of playing Ultimate upstairs in Johnson was so popular that 6 groups are doing it, so we can't get time. However, if you're female, you could try to join the women's team that plays from 9 to 11. The meeting was adjourned at 19:50. Minutes taken and submitted by elliot.