Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/20/2000 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nathanw. In attendance were Voting members: nathanw dmaze alex_c golem amu kolya tibbetts sly arolfe lgdean | yak Associate members: belmonte cfox zacheiss hartmans jweiss mycroft rls cana jhawk | kcr Non-voting members: Prospectives: int18 Guests: Treasurer's Report: sly: We were billed twice by ASA for the $30 for the orientation mailing. I'm talking to ASA to try to get it fixed. I also ran budget numbers. Under our current costs and allocations, and subtracting the Athena service fee, we have about $11,600 remaining. We also have a $6900 bill from ClariNet for the upcoming year of service which we need to decide whether or not we want to pay. jhawk: It's not actually a bill. sly: No, but we do need to pay by 1 December if we don't want service interrupted. nathanw: We didn't pay for ClariNet out of our budget in 1997, 1998, or 1999. sly: We did pay last year for 1999. jhawk: We paid last year. nathanw: Right, but not the three years preceding. The fact that it keeps ping-ponging is funny. sly: Can we get a straw poll of people who actually use the ClariNet service? In particular, the clari.* newsgroups? [A handful] hartmans: Who uses Usenet? [Many more] kolya: I'm trying to get actual stats. nathanw: I think we should probably pay. sly: If people aren't using it, I don't see why we should pay. They've dropped four of the six comics, and I don't know how many people use the news parts. kolya: In the past three days, 100 distinct hosts accessed the clari.* newsgroups. tibbetts: I don't think we should pay for it. jhawk: If the point of this discussion is to figure out whether we should pay, we should decide the criterion first. tibbetts: I don't think we will pick even vaguely useful criteria. sly: Presumably we'll have some stats for next week; they'll include Thanksgiving, but we're probably better off waiting to discuss until next week. sly: A bunch of the ClariNet groups are free, and some other stuff is subscription. kolya: We don't get any ClariNet newsgroups if we don't pay. sly: Some groups can be accessed for free via the Web. Chairman's Report: '() Office Report: mycroft: I have a copy of the GIMP user manual that's three years old. The office would be less cluttered if we didn't keep stuff like this around. Office Cleaning Report: rls: Is there still a mouse problem? belmonte: The SIPB mouse was last sighted in the ESP office (467). nathanw: We have three traps out, and they're all still set. It's all CokeComm's fault. belmonte: We have killed the SIPB mouse twice, so there shouldn't be too many more live ones. MIT Computing Report: zacheiss: 8.4.17 for Linux and IRIX tonight. For Solaris, if we can figure out this bizarre bug. nathanw: It's my bug! I'm so proud! (It's Java that breaks, not me that breaks.) Computer Services: hartmans: news.answers has been trying to do stuff, and in the process keeps breaking the file servers. It broke twice yesterday. Once they just caused their volume to go away; about 30 minutes later, the file server core dumped. sly: We also have this issue that right now we're paying $1000 [per month] for private network 10mbps service. Right now we have 100mbps service, which technically is $4000. We can't afford this, and definitely can't once the rate review happens. We won't be getting more money this fiscal year, so we need to talk to the network group. jhawk: Some of the presented options may not be legitimate. Specifically, at the moment we pay for the network service (independent of drops) of the office and the machine room together as if they were one network, and pay as a network. We probably wouldn't be permitted to purchase the network and the drops individually. Not having a private network might not be an option. sly: That is only partly true. While it's true that we pay for a private network that includes the machine room and the office, we don't pay a per-host IP address cost. We do pay a per-drop cost for the machines in the office. We really need to talk to network and see if we can get the bandwidth and keep the machine room separate from the rest of W20, but with a better cost structure. mycroft: Why don't we threaten to put the machine room on the same network as the rest of the building? jweiss: That's a poor way to deal way with people. There are less ineffective ways to deal with the network group. sly: I talked to Cecilia, and she suggested that IS might reconsider some things, but it's not clear when things will happen or how much money will be involved. jhawk: We've been aware in the cost that there might be a future large increase in our fees, and I thought Cecilia had tentatively approved more money for us. sly: I/S hasn't done that evaluation. zacheiss: Jeff felt very strongly that more money would be provided, but that was for the original rate review. He's also not one of the financial people. jhawk: We can get it out of his slush fund. SIPB Backup Report: zacheiss: Yeah. nathanw: I'm going to check up on you. zacheiss: No, you're not. nathanw: I did last week. Publications Report: cana: we have no iZephyr, just a pile of Zephyr Quick Answers. We're really low on cluster cards, adn a little low on iAthena. jhawk: We have some cluster cards. jweiss: Move to allocate $50 for up to 50 copies of iZephyr. sly: We moved that in September. Did we get those copies? cfox: I might have flaked. jweiss: At the same time, deallocate any unallocated money for the document. [jweiss' motion: white ballot] [jweiss allocation: $50 for 50 copies of iZephyr] jhawk: Do our new minutes allocation format take account of this magic sort of motion? dmaze: No. tibbetts: Someone should write something about how to play music on the cluster machine. cfox: I suggested this to the stock answers people. Consolidating our documents with the stock answers might be good. jhawk: Nobody reads the stock answers, even consultants. Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: nathanw: Getting closer. Any status updates? I haven't heard any. We've got a bunch of classes. CokeComm Report: '() Other: hartmans: I've been packaging Kerberos 5 and OpenAFS for Debian. It'd be cool if people could take a look at these packages, try them out, and report bugs. I'm also starting to write up a document as to why it's legal to export these from the US. dmaze: Targeting stable or unstable? hartmans: krb5 is targeting stable; OpenAFS is targeting unstable, but the -5 version of the source package will build under stable. Other Other: mycroft: I sniffle in the general direction of North Carolina as I watch the RHAT stock price tumble precipitously. jhawk: I'm going to do a bulk order of power strip liberators. They're one-foot extension cords suitable for plugging wall warts into outlets. If you'd like one, send me email before midnight Eastern tonight. $1.79 each. mycroft: The Linux Business Expo at COMDEX sucked this year. We were far from any decent booth babes or other attractions. nathanw: If they created a NetBSD expo, it'd be like one of those smelly janitor's closets that nobody ever finds. dmaze: (The following announcement has not been endorsed by the Bank of jhawk NA, John Hawkinson KB1CGZ LLC, or any other entity.) Myra, the cashier lady at the Grove, isn't getting her fix of $2 bills. If you ever eat at the cafeteria in NE43, pay her with twos; it makes her happy. nathanw: We are currently missing the first hour of The Learning Channel/LSC's presentation of "Scrap Heap Challenge" in 10-250. jhawk: I bought one of those 10base-T network splitters. It kind of sort of works, sometimes. tibbetts: RPM sucks. The meeting was adjourned at 19:51. Minutes taken and submitted by dmaze.