Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 09/29/97 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kretch. In attendance were Voting members: kretch yonah harrisj fubob jfmurphy jdaniel amu nathanw svalente foley | jered elliot yoav nygren jmorzins gutnik katyking Associate members: ghudson abbe srz kcr mhpower jweiss | shabby marc yandros Non-voting members: Prospectives: jewell cmceniry aellwood yana99 "Martyn Peck" sly ocschwar | xela Guests: peace Treasurer's Report: '() Chairman's Report: We have an election for jewell. fubob: What'd you do? jewell: I program; I'm a senior in course 6; I work in computer graphics, optimizing graphics pipelines. I've worked for a company for four or five years that does that. I program in C mostly. My thesis is on simulating Ultimate Frisbee. kcr: What have you done for us lately? jewell: I ran SIPB computer tours, and spent time here with students who would really rather be running Windows 95. nathanw: What have I got in my pocket? [Okay, it was "what am I holding in my hand?"] jewell: A palm pilot. kcr: In what frequencies is single sideband traffic allowed in the 30m band. jewell: None. nathanw: The building is on fire and no one else seems to have noticed. jewell: Probably pull the fire alarm, take the Save in Case of Fire box, yell at the people in the clusters, and go downstairs. harrisj: Are there any particular projects that you would like to work on for SIPB that you would feel that being a member would help you with? jewell: I'm interested in a CVS server for student use, but that has a lot of permissions issues. Inessential Food Ordering seems like a necessity. This term is bad, but I like to do projects in general. kcr: What does j3e and "applesauce" have in common and what do they have to do with SIPB? jewell: Well, applesauce is how you find SIPB people. kcr: "Applesauce" is how you find SIPB people in a crowded theatre. J3E is "single sideband modulation" which is "ssb" which is "szechuan spicy beef". svalente: Who was kretch before kretch was kretch? jewell: Yonah, I believe. Then I would guess Greg. [Wrong.] nocturne, then Greg. kretch: Can you point to four office machines and name them? Recently, I can't. jewell: [Does so, picking machines that hadn't moved.] harrisj: Who don't you know here? jewell: [cmceniry, oscchwar] kcr: I move that Sal ask the question. svalente: Tell me... I was wondering... why exactly is it... I was just curious... [kretch interrupts] as I was saying, I was wondering about this for a while... why exactly is it that you want to take over the world? No, wait... why do you want to be a SIPB member? jewell: There are people who hang out here with clue and whom I like to hang out with, so I can fix things rather than finding people to fix things, and because I would feel awkward being indefinitely not a member. The vote is 19-0-1. jewell is a member. Office Report: kcr: Yesterday I dived into my pile of random hardware, pulled out an RT disk, and tried to give snork some more swap space. While doing this, I corrupted the root partition, and now it's in worse shape than it was when I started. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I do have all the necessary pieces to make it possible to install an RT. I don't feel like doing it, though. However, if the SIPB wants me to, I will. Straw poll whether I ought to? [1-5-many. Apathy reigns.] kcr: Move to remove snork from the office at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations (jweiss). [Seconded.] yoav: The people who normally mind aren't here. marc: Matt Power is here, and we know jhawk's arguments. elliot: I think if it's auctioned, Karl shouldn't get to buy it. svalente: We last tried this pretty recently. kcr: The situation has changed in a couple of ways: it's the term, and when the decision was last made, snork could still boot. mhpower: I don't think Karl's messing it up is a good reason for SIPB to get rid of a machine. yoav: Move to table the motion for a week, announcing over email. [8-10-6, fails.] svalente: The last attempt to get rid of snork was on 7-21-97. jewell: How many Athena RTs are there on campus? [Just ours.] [Post-meeting: mwhitson points out there's one at fenway running on MITnet.] srz: Friendly amendment to only get rid of it if it isn't booting Athena within two weeks. [Accepted.] jweiss: Did Karl trash just the partition table, or the partition? kcr: I think I trashed the partition. [Motion passes many-2-2.] kcr: I move to get rid of hodge-podge at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. [Seconded.] svalente: This also failed 7-21; there are good reasons to put it on a rack and do NetBSD or BSD 4.3 hacking. kcr: It's been sitting that way for two months. srz: Friendly amendment that iff it's not in a rack within four weeks, we get rid of it. [Accepted.] jweiss: I would like to amend the word "rack" to "reasonable spot in the office." ghudson: It's not in a rack because we don't have a rack with shelves yet. We can make the motion in four weeks; there's no reason to make it now. jered: People interested in crufty hardware should actively do something about the rack. kcr: I withdraw the motion. kcr: I move to get rid of the Power Macintosh at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. jered: It's still a pretty powerful machine. yandros: As soon as we get the rack up, it will go on the rack. It can serve stuff. It's been waiting on the rack. srz: Who's dealing with the rack? kcr: My next motion will have to do with that. yandros: We could also put it in a corner, but it requires dismantling parts of alf-mushpie to get it up. nygren: We should probably keep the Mac until we have rack issues resolved. If we're actually getting rid of hardware which is still modern enough, we should dispose of it in some way that will get closer to the actual resale value than a SIPB auction. marc: If there are people who are really using slower machines, we can just give it to them. yandros: Or return it to the property office. jweiss: It may be too new to deactivate. yandros: Just to clarify, there are active plans to use the machine as a server as soon as other hardware is out of the way. kcr: I'm not convinced that people couldn't have been doing that already. nygren: I think that the argument that "it could have been done by now" is not really a valid argument if people are still actively planning to work on it. People have other deadlines, and shouldn't be jumped on. srz: I think we do have to set a time limit for certain projects. I think we should give people a month to deal with a rack and then assume that we don't have a rack. marc: The rack is being inconvenient. If it looked like the rack was evolving in some way, I wouldn't complain. jewell: Didn't the rack recently evolve? kretch: Yes, we got it from Alex recently. We need to find a place for it and some shelves. mhpower: I think Stan's time schedule of a month to get a rack located and in production is not realistic, given the time frame SIPB takes to do other things. I think we want until at least IAP. srz: I think if there isn't any progress in a month, we should assume we don't have it. There has to be some progress made. [Motion fails 2-many-7.] kcr: Move to allocate $500 to buy three shelves for the rack. [Seconded.] yoav: I was about to bring up a motion to buy a computer. $500 could be used to get a faster processor. I'm worried about budget, given the price. ghudson: [Simplifies to:] We have plenty of money. [Some concern about the price and looking into alternatives.] mhpower: I think it's inappropriate to allow Yoav to comment saying that it may be a good idea to spend money on something else, and not allow people to respond. mhpower: In terms of Yoav's alternative plan to spend money supporting Windows 95 people, my opinion that is that we don't have the resources to support students using Windows 95. marc: I think there is a big difference between supporting Windows 95 and having a machine in the office. fubob: What makes the shelves so expensive? kcr: Typically they are more than just aluminum. jewell: Can we try plywood and bolts? ghudson: We shouldn't worry about money so much. xela: If this happens, if someone could pass me a parts list for the shelves, I can shake a few trees and maybe get discounts or free shelves. [Motion passes many-none-4.] kretch: It's nice to send mail before making motions like this. kcr: Move to allocate up to $400 for three more zip drives for the office; one for the Macintosh, one for a Sun, and one for an SGI. [Second.] marc: Can we get IS to spring for the Sun and SGI ones? yandros: They're only $130. jweiss: I don't believe they have piles of them sitting in a room. fubob: Do we want to wait for zip drives which do both SCSI and parallel? [No.] srz: Are the zip drives in the clusters yet? [Yes.] Have we had questions? [Yes.] For both platforms? [Yes.] [Motion passes many-1-3.] yoav: A lot of users have come in with requests to having things like Word 7 documents read. My standard answer is "go back home and convert it to Word 5" or some such. We should have a Windows 95 or Windows NT machine that isn't a dual-boot machine. I move to allocate $3500 to get a good PC. ghudson: We talked about this earlier; it conflicts with what we're doing with servers. [Discussion about dual booting.] kretch: We can do dual boot, and kick people off. This hasn't happened because (a) it's been on a nice machine, and people don't know what's going on with it. Most people were not sure that you could dual-boot the machines. It may be that if we throw more effort at it, we can do a dual-boot machine. jweiss: While buying a PC may or may not be a bad idea, buying it so that we can run Windows would be a bad idea. ghudson: We have a standing passed motion to run Windows on granola (dual boot). srz: Any problem with using limekiller? gutnik: Overloading services. srz: But that way we only kick people off of one machine. kretch: lime may not be spiffy enough. nygren: I haven't had a problem with the Mac taking up useless desk space; I've been bothered by game-playing on machines squeezed in between useful machines. jered: lime would not run Windows 95 very well. kcr: It wouldn't run Windows 95 very well, but it would run it. It doesn't matter if it takes five minutes to load things as long as we have the capability. jmorzins: I agree with Stan that it would be a good idea if we could get Windows and the scanner on the same machine. lime might be too slow, but do people disagree with having the same machine do both things? yandros: I am skeptical of the idea because we have failed too many times in the past to get machines to dual-boot at all. I think we would be better off having a dedicated machines. jered: We would probably have to buy software to use the scanner under Windows; it would be difficult to get images to users' accounts. kretch: We are already thinking about purcashing PCs as servers. Given that a lot of thought is going into that, we may want to table this motion, because if we do get a PC, we may want to wait and see what we want to get. gutnik: Yes, it does matter if it takes you 5-10 minutes, because the whole point is to make this convenient for users. jfmurphy: I'm running Windows 95 on a 486DX2/66 on a machine at work. yoav: We should support Windows 95; it is the most popular operating system. A 486 won't be fast enough. xela: I hear a concern about file conversion; utilities to do this on the Mac exist. yandros: Microsoft is screwing us; we can't do it. xela: I can't imagine why we'd put a scanner on a Windows machine when we have a Mac. abbe: I don't think speed is an issue for file conversion, and we want to not encourage people to play games on the machine. yandros: It sounds like this would be good for sipb-discussion. Please? srz: Move to table this motion. It's one third of our budget with no notice. [Meta-motion passes Many-none-2. Yoav's motion is tabled.] ghudson: We moved machines around. limekiller wound up sort of in back; we can switch it with btc. gutnik: We punted a head spot on the tables. mhpower: Some people thought that it would be good to do a three-way rotation of lime, bill, and yaz, because the current arrangement crunches myself and mycroft, making it hard to work. jweiss: Move to allocate up to $300 for two toner cartridges. [Seconded.] [Many-0-1.] jweiss: I would like a straw poll with no discussion on whether people think that keeping that empty SCSI enclosure is useful. [1-some-many.] [jweiss moves to get rid of it and withdraws the motion after ghudson points out that it's server hardware.] abbe: Straw poll: who thinks it's a good idea to install Windows 95 on limekiller to see whether it runs okay. [some-5-6.] marc: Does anyone know where Windows media would be if we had it? [No.] kcr: Move to allocate up to $400 for adding another 32MB to portnoy. At the moment it has the least memory of any supported Athena machine in the office. [Seconded.] kretch: The new sparc 5s come with 64MB. kcr: Sun memory is rather expensive, but it won't actually cost that much. jweiss: As I recall, it was about $250 for 32MB last time I looked. yandros: Do we want to spend money on this Sun if we're going to get another one? It doesn't seem under-memoried to me. nygren: Can we take memory from an older machine? [No.] [Motion passes 13-3-7.] Office Cleaning Report: Things got cleaned. And we gained some table space. MIT Computing Report: ghudson: 8.1.11 goes out tonight to the Athena cell. fubob: othomas is looking for some west campus RCCs. If you're interested and have lots of time, email othomas. Computer Services: jered: I sent mail; I put a property sticker on the drive on penguin-lust per the instructions of someone in the property office. elliot: I haven't talked to the linux-dev people yet, but I thought it would be cool if we sent a press release to The Tech when we made a Redhat-Athena 4.2-based release. Does this sound reasonable? yonah: I think the recent security issues make it a good idea, since we could encourage people to upgrade. [Straw poll: some-0-some.] SIPB Backup Report: foley: I only backed up half of non-AFS, but I'll get to it. kretch: AFS happened. foley: Someone said that the exabyte was making a "groaning goat" noise. kretch: It's probably the enclosure. It's getting dealt with. Publications Report: kretch: We got new LaTeX stuff. yandros: We need iAthena. jdaniel: I didn't get to that. R/O Report: '() IAP Report: kretch: The preview came out today. nygren: Do we have an IAP sucker yet? We need a volunteer. foley: I believe the registration date is by October 10, so we shouldn't waste time. I'll send mail. CokeComm Report: '() Other: '() Other Other: kcr: Grey 17's network is reported to be in place at long last. jered: I brought back a bunch of sugar Coke from Canada. Add yourself to coke-lovers. nathanw: I got a brain! marc: Stuff happened in the House related to cryptography, but it was in-depth. srz: Moxy Fruvous tomorrow in the Paradise in Boston. jweiss: If people are interested there will be post-meeting ultimate. The meeting was adjourned at 20:44. Minutes taken and submitted by ghudson.