Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 04/10/95 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by ghudson. In attendance were Voting members: jered, cat, marthag, cordelia, rshah, ghudson, yoav, nygren, hartmans, djib, fastcart, jhawk, yonah, nocturne, shabby, bert, jmmikkel, warlord, abbe, gamadrid, beaners, autumn, rjbarbal (for 10 seconds), tlyu Associate members: srz, proven, mhpower, mhbraun, eichin svalente, yandros, jweiss, marc Non-voting members: Prospectives: pshuang, sipb7(Rhonda Peck), mstachow, mwp, karat, shade, jhyun, fubob, ringrose, amsmith, foley, daveg Guests: Treasurer's Report: How much money do we have in the general budget? We have $1500 in general funds. If we spend it, we'll be over $1300 over budget. There were $12,000 in network expenses that we were not expecting, and we've been $10,000 under budget for the past few years. Discussion of how this was related to us getting a subnet, and that our budget was supposed to be increased when IS proposed putting us our own subnet. sipb-ether is the 3rd heaviest traffic ethernet at MIT. No good blank disks in the office. Clean up disks that you leave around too. Chad moves to allocate $50 to buy 20 blank floppy disks. White ballot. Chairman's Report: Membership questioning for Ping: Q: Why do we say "Hi Lou"? A: Because he's our friend. Real A: [not in minutes] :-) Q: Why are you dressed up? A: APO function at Wellesley. Q: How many times do you need bits that you would have as a SIPB member? A: Twice today. Q: What do you do [for sipb]? A: I'm a news.answers moderator. I collect periodic postings, dealing with submissions that are potential postings. These submissions get archived and sent out periodically. This involves SIPB hardware. Hang around instance help, being generally helpful to users. Q: When was the last time you answered a user's question? A: Just before I last logged out, a few hours ago. Q: How many SIPB members have been in your recitations? A: 6. Q: What would you work on if you became a SIPB member? A: My main project is to graduate. Just chugging with news.answers. More than enough work to do. Q: Describe APO projects that you've worked on.. A: Worked on Freshman letter. Packets sent out to freshmen before they come here. Helped revised it. Q: Would you take up more load to help make rtfm work better? A: As much time as I can afford. I'm currently putting more time than I can afford. Q: How many hours a week do you put in dealing with news.answers? A: 10-15 hours a week. Went from 11am to 10pm yesterday making a dent on the queue. Q: Why do you want to become a SIPB member? A: A couple of reasons. Pragmatic one -- already do a substantial amount of volunteer work using SIPB resources. Make use of it in a cleaner fashion. Spend a lot of time being helpful to people and FTGOS is a reasonable thing and something I enjoy doing and likely to continue to enjoy doing. Q: [Martha, breaking tradition by asking it after The Question] Other than getting root on rtfm, what do you view as being a SIPB member able to do for your project? What resources of SIPB would be useful to you as a member? A: I've pondered the first half of that question. In a lot of ways, one of the reason I haven't become a SIPB member so far is I've been able to get benefits from SIPB without being a member. This is a good thing. If I were a SIPB member, there might be further projects I might think of, useful services on the net or to the community that I wouldn't feel comfortable proposing as something SIPB to do if I were not a member. During executive session, the issue was raised that Ping may not have been to four SIPB meetings, as specified in the by-laws. The board asked for an EC ruling on this issue, and the EC waived the 4 meeting requirement for Ping, 6-1-1. Vote: 19-2-2. Ping is now a SIPB member. Office Report: Some people show up here only when the cluster is full. The SIPB office is not an overflow cluster for non-members. A dead mouse was found during executive session. Mice should move back to Lobdell. It was found in front of the refrigerator. Should we report it somewhere? Hotline? Martha reinstalled Oliver and ran every diagnostic. None of them showed up anything. If anybody has any idea of what could be going on, let Martha know. Unclear if hotline can help, except to call in service. They may replace pieces. Office was wired for 10baseT last week. They're not finished; they're supposed to come back and patch things up. They haven't yet. Jered requested that some drops be activated and some drops be deactivated. According to Tom Coppeto, we're supposed to have connections for 19 machines, not 19 10baseT drops; however, Matt says Lorraine approved 19 UTP drops, so it's not clear. Telecom was not happy with the contractor who did the W20 work, although a different one did our office. Chad will send out mail before reorganizing the office. Does anybody want to deal with Steve-Dallas? The AUI ethernet connection was not working. Jered is still working on getting a new ethernet card for Limekiller. MIT Computing Report: AFS had a small meltdown today. These may become more frequent unless operations can get new software they need and testing they need to install new hardware for parts of the cell. Look out; more AFS outages may happen in the future. Computer Services: Brian Reid calculated percentage of usenet articles and sites. Bloom-beacon is the 18th most influential news server on Usenet. Senator-Bedfellow is 193rd. Senator-bedfellow users post 3/4 of 1% of all usenet articles. old-rosebud hasn't been shut down yet. Greg will try to get to it soon. Clarinet is thinking of reworking their price structure. We will pay per 1000 students, although our price will remain about the same. SIPB Backup Report: SIPB AFS backup hasn't been done yet. Derek will try to get it done tomorrow. Publications Report: We have 5 copies of iLaTeX left. Are we still working on it? Document has mostly been revised. Chad and Bert will try to deal this week. R/O Report: IAP Report: CokeComm Report: Rachel Caileff is now Cokecomm. Other: CERT announcement: SATAN has a security hole. Details offline. CMU is having problems with their PTS server. On Wed. evening, there is a PGP signing party. Mail has been sent out. There is an article on the NYT business section regarding encryption export. It had the 4-line RSA perl script in a picture. Clue dump on kerberos tonight. What is on the back of the Boston Globe? Other Other: Sal got a cool new computer in the mail today. The meeting was adjourned at 9:00pm. Minutes taken and submitted by srz.