Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 01/8/2001 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nathanw. In attendance were Voting members: tibbetts dmaze nathanw arolfe sly lgdean | yak Associate members: lnemzer cana hartmans jemorris kcr jweiss jhawk ingolia eichin klmitch | jered Non-voting members: Prospectives: aletta Guests: Treasurer's Report: hartmans: Treasurer has a thesis. Chairman's Report: hartmans: Chairman has a thesis. Office Report: nathanw: We're here, for the first time in three weeks. jweiss: Move to get rid of the Exabyte tape drive that used to be on portnoy at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. [kcr seconds] jhawk: Do we have any tape drives left? jweiss: No. It's not clear that the drive we have left is particularly functional. nathanw: Would we do users a service by trying to read their random tapes, or would we just eat their tapes? jhawk: We'd either help them or waste a lot of their time. We should try to help them if it's trivial for us to do so. sly: The last time a user came in, we did manage to read the tapes. It's useful occasionally. hartmans: Is it actually attached to anything? jweiss: No. hartmans: Does somebody plan on attaching it? jweiss: Not unless somebody brings in a tape. hartmans: If there are plans to connect it, keeping it is reasonable. jweiss: If we really want to offer the service of reading Exabyte tapes, we should consider buying a new tape drive. [motion withdrawn] jweiss: There is a box of old cables under planet-zorp. They're cables I decided we're either never going to use or we have too many of them. Move to discard at the discretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. [sly seconds] [white ballot] jweiss: Move to get rid of the old scanner. This is a scanner that was going to be hooked up to the old Mac, but the new one doesn't have a SCSI bus. [tibbetts seconds] [white ballot] jweiss: Move to get rid of the 1G disk formerly on the Mac, designated to NetBSD stuff, at the descretion of the Office Czar in Charge of Special Operations. See also "Mac doesn't have a SCSI bus." hartmans: Is that our disk? jweiss: Yes. nathanw: We have bigger spare SCSI disks coming out our ears at the moment. hartmans: We have no place to put them. [white ballot] jweiss: Move to get rid of opus. That's the R4600 in the rack; I don't think it's been used since it's been in the rack. hartmans: I've logged into it. We should get rid of it. tibbetts: If anybody cares, I was going to plug it into the KVM. jhawk: This is our last R4600? jweiss: Yes, but we have an R5000. jhawk: Were people doing specific R4600 ports? If so, the 4600 and R5000 are sufficiently different that having one is not equivalent to having the other. nathanw: AFAIK nobody here has done any work related to exploiting that difference. jweiss: The R4600 machines were removed from the clusters a year and a half ago. The R5000 Indys are scheduled to be removed this coming summer. [motion passes many-2-0] jered: What are Athena's current plans WRT SGIs? Are there newer toasters? jweiss: We did not buy SGIs for cluster deployment last summer. We are not planning to deploy any new SGIs to the clusters. jweiss: There's a piece of possibly SIPB memorabilia, namely the clock before that was the SIPB clock. It was replaced because it broke. It's been in the office forever; it's taking up space and I'd like to get rid of it. kcr: How difficult would it be to repair? jweiss: I don't know. I don't care. kcr: I couldn't fix it; I could see someone named Hawkinson being motivated, though. jhawk: [on phone] Oh, whatever. sly: Is this a lame wall clock like that lame wall clock? jweiss: It's lamer than that. I'll classify it as "junk". jweiss: Do people having feelings like cj? kcr: I'd like to try to make it work and make it run Debian. nathanw: We have a new machine which will be blessed as cutter-john. It's a Dell, which will run I/S Bleeding Edge Athena/Linux. tibbetts: We have another head space we could put the old cj in. kcr: I don't necessarily want head space for it. jweiss: It might not be a great idea to install a new head named cutter-john when the old hardware hasn't left the office yet. hartmans: The Dell will be cutter-john when it's installed. jweiss: People who have personal items in the office should remove them before we have to pick them all up on Friday. jhawk: We're out of floppies again. belmonte threw scads of them at us. Maybe we should put a little sign-out sheet next to them to encourage vaguely responsible use. I'll do that unless somebody objects. We might want to order more floppies to give Matthew's back. jweiss: Move to allocate $20 for floppies. [white ballot] [jweiss allocation: $20 for floppies] Office Cleaning Report: nathanw: The office is cleaner than I expected. hartmans: Did anyone respond to the mail about shampooing the rug on Saturday? hartmans: We need to get everything off the floor Friday night, not including desks or chairs. ingolia: The fish will be set to remind us. jered: What about this Exabyte stacker here? jweiss: It belongs to a member, not the SIPB. I need to talk to them. MIT Computing Report: jweiss: Garry deployed some Moira changes. Most notably, hosts now have a billing contact and an administrative contact. Computer Services: sly: webmaster went through its database and cleaned up 500-and-some entries that doesn't make sense, so we're set for the deactivation. kcr: rosebud got upgraded this past week, and the sipb cell has now passed 200 gigabytes of capacity. We're barely using a third. tibbetts: MP3s in the sipb cell! dmaze: I played with the outland locker today. i386_linux22 is now a symlink tree pointing towards i386_linux3, not just a direct symlink. The real motivation for this was to rebuild xwrits to work properly on Linux. hartmans: There was this fun with 3c905Cs. Do we have any ways of getting one? sly: Also linux-dev, also 3Com sucks. The 3c905C seems to have changed something in its firmware to cause the current driver on the SIPB Linux install disk to not work. Seph built a new install disk that works, but we're still having issues with it, so we are trying to find a card that doesn't work with the original install disk so we can test things. hartmans: There are some 3c905Cs that work and some that don't. kcr: 3com wouldn't call the on-board thing on that a 3c905. nathanw: Actually, they do. kcr: Does this include the on-board Ethernet on some things? sly: We think so; we're trying to find out. We know there is a user with similar issues. hartmans: If we had a way of identifying the card, I was going to propose to buy one, but we can't. hartmans: sipb cell is likely to go to AFS 3.6. We're now at 3.5 something. jweiss: We're going to 3.6, possibly 3.6p1. yak: A while ago, people were talking about desupporting SIPB NetBSD-Athena 8.2 and Linux-Athena 8.2. How long do we actually care about i386_linux3 and i386_nbsd1? jweiss: As much as we know is that I've been resisting desupporting things until our new installed is up and running and deployed. sly: We were currently searching for a way to upgrade from Red Hat 5.2 to 6.2, but Red Hat's upgrade process is so broken that there's no way to fix it. It's unclear whether we will ever be able to tell people there's an upgrade path. nathanw: We can still say it's not supported at some point. sly: Right, but we should stop waiting for an upgrade. kcr: We had similar issues between 4.2 and 5.2. The people working on the installer need a drop-dead date, though the 3c905C issue may affect this. tibbetts: The linux-dev people were being lame, but they're working now, so we shouldn't yell at them. In a better word I would claim this was because they're all students and it's IAP, but everyone knows that is not the case.. SIPB Backup Report: kcr: They did themselves. I'm channelling Garry. Publications Report: nathanw: We got more copies of the things I ordered. kcr: Should we get a copy of tibbetts' new one-sheets? tibbetts: No, they're aimed specifically towards classes taught by SIPB people. I made a bunch and spent $4 on copies. Orientation Report: '() IAP Report: sly: [channelling xela] With last minute additions we now have 16 IAP classes, with an 17th pending the instructors saying they're ok with the room & time we were able to get. Remarkably enough, only one of the classes is in the first week of IAP at all --- zeno's emacs class, which started at 6 in 4-237. Next week we have python, linux-athena, unix software development, crash-and-burn C (formerly caffinated crash course in C), and we start LaTeX, the crash course in C and the software engineering workshop. The rest of our IAP classes are: advanced internet topics, postscript, brl ("scheme for the web" --- this is really cool; people should look at it), perl, crash-and-burn c++ and java, SAS, and decrypting DVDs. jhawk: Next time I should bother to read the mail from the IAP sucker before IAP starts so I can complain about things like my class being scheduled against the SIPB meeting. CokeComm Report: jweiss: People should take down empties. There are an awful lot back there. cana: There are no fulls obscuring the empties, i.e. CokeComm sucks. Other: sly: The network security team is offering a class this Wednesday from 7 to 10 PM in 1-190. It's called Concepts in Computer and Network Insecurity. It's being taught by Kevin Fu and Roger Dingledine. Other Other: eichin: The company my brother works for in Hartford, CT is looking for an embedded Linux programmer. They do voice-over-IP phone hardware. kcr: North Carolina is warmer than Massachusetts. The Lucent RG1000 cheapo access point is a little more expensive than the Airport and doesn't claim to be quite as flexible, but you can configure it from a Windows machine. It's uglier than the Airport, too. sly: Mystery Hunt is this weekend. I'm part of a team. We're looking for people. jhawk: I got this doohickey. Unfortunately, I was supposed to get two of them. kcr: It appears to be a dipole antenna. tibbetts: jhawk, did you order things by part number again without really knowing what you were ordering? klmitch: Oklahoma is not warmer than Massachusetts. Airborne Express took two weeks to deliver a package to me, even though it had already arrived in MA. aletta: I found a phone number for Solaris tech support. I couldn't use the Solaris 8 x86 installation disks to install Solaris 8, apparently. There's an installer on "Software Disk 1 of 2". jered: Costa Rica is even warmer than North Carolina, and sunnier too. eichin: It's Elvis's birthday. The meeting was adjourned at 19:57. Minutes taken and submitted by dmaze.