Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2025-07-28 The meeting was called to order at 19:39 by psvenk. In attendance were Student keyholders: psvenk, innaavo, rgabriel, turino14, dtemkin Associate keyholders: scj643 Members: ilyag, Kshitij, guoj1112, dsisson Guests: '() Administrivia: psvenk: Welcome to the SIPB meeting! scj643: I wanted to buy more Jolly Ranchers. psvenk: We already have two bags of them! scj643: Theyre all melted. dsisson: We already have two bags. scj643: How about you put them in the fridge? ilyag: I would maybe use an airtight bag in the fridge. dsisson: In previous months we had the Melona popsicles. They were Korean honey dew flavored popsicles. psvenk: Given the low rate of depletion of snacks in the summer, as you've noticed, we should defer this conversation. We will need to go on a snack run for the prefrosh. I won't be back to campus until August 29th, the day of Midway, so it might have to happen without me. turino14: Will you be able to join on jitsi or will someone have to preside over the meeting? psvenk: Someone will likely have to preside over the meeting. I will be in a sufficiently different time zone to likely not be at the meeting. I will not be at the Monday meeting before Midway. [discussion over Bluebikes as rgabriel joins the meeting] [the station closest to the student center is down, so rgabriel leaves to dock it elsewhere and is late to the meeting] innaavo: Do you want a fun fact on our finances? psvenk: Yes please! innaavo: We spent 25% on our budget last year on food. psvenk: That's actually lower than I expected. turino14: Lower than I expected too -- we even had the SIPB55 barbecue! Project Reports: guoj1112: Both ARK and Hydrant continue. For ARK, I finished submitting the PR that splits the frontend into 5 pages. There was some weird issue with Prettier that I submitted another PR for, but I will not be fixing it here because I'm afraid it will make merge conflicts, I think. For Hydrant, I am slowly but steadily chugging away at automated tests, and I haven't seen any failing or flaky tests yet, so I will hopefully submit it sometime in August. ilyag: Also, for ARK we added a pytest-based test suite for the backend. dsisson: Every time I've asked about hardware ops, there's no hardware ops. turino14: We'll resume meetings in late August when we're back. psvenk: Most projects are on hiatus for the summer. dsisson: I'll find one once I get more motivation. turino14: We're planning to upgrade the RAM and storage on LemonPepper, it is our VMHost. I didn't know we had a VM from MotorSports. psvenk: There's an fsae-telemetry server that we apparently already have for motorsports they're asking for 64-128 GB of RAM. How much RAM is there for LemonPepper? turino14: I think there's 96GB. I think it's good to provide more powerful services for community members. I don't think our capacities are too good right now - we only have Lemonpepper. I would like to upgrade things for next semester. psvenk: I'm not saying we shouldn't have the Motorsports server, it's not the end of the world. I'm undecided. I just want to make sure that if another club comes tomorrow and says we would like another server that has 128 gigs of RAM how many resources do we have? Right now, this isn't a huge strain of resources, but we might need to put restrictions on what types of usage we have. If someone wants to train LLMs, first of all we're already doing that in SIPB LLMs, and secondly it would be extremely resource-intensive. psvenk: My intention here is not to be overly strict or punitive and I understand that most clubs are in a much worse financial situation. dsisson: What does the VM's actual usage look like? Do they need that much memory? psvenk: I think they built model vehicles and this is for real-time location data and stats to be collected about the performance of those vehicles. dsisson: It can be swapped out most of the time turino14: we need to confirm rgabriel: If it's only gonna be used some of the time, maybe SIPB could get a Kubernetes cluster for such projects? I don't think Lemonpepper (libvirt) VMs can be dynamically resized, they'd need to be rebooted. scj643: Just suspend it to disk. Can't it swap out the virtual ram to disk? psvenk: I have no idea on the specifics of what they are doing, but given that they were receiving funding from GEL and would use it to pay for hardware, I have no objections to SIPB maintaining the physical upkeep of that server. turino14: So they buy the server themselves and we just keep it? scj643: They provide the physical hardware. psvenk: They don't need to bring it, if they provide the funding, I have no objection (in general). Otherwise, then it's on a case by case basis. Seems pretty reasonable request as long as it's not straining our financial situation. That's another point in our favor. turino14: One issue I remember talking to amigdal is that SMR depends on the trust of the devices in the SMR and that's why IS&T is better for colocation than the SMR psvenk: The SMR depends on what? [to complete missing words in the minutes] turino14: essentially when you boot the machine the machine is saying TCP/IP(??) for example if one server messes around or gets compromised somehow then it can interact maliciously which is not ideal scj643: I vaguely remember you can prevent MAC spoofing by using [specifics]. rgabriel: Our network does not even require having a MAC address, just say I want to be 18.whatever and it'll be given to you as long as it belongs to SIPB. scj643: Put stuff behind the firewall so certain IPs map to certain MAC addresses psvenk: Is this an issue even for lemonpepper? rgabriel: Yes, the VMs act as if they are directly connected individually via Ethernet. psvenk: Until/even if we have these measures in place to improve security, we should still have some amount of oversight to make sure we know vaguely what is running, which appears to be the case. (To be clear, I'm not accusing Motorsports of anything; this is just a general principle.) rgabriel: I remember the meeting in which they came and asked for it and we created it. In general, you need 2 people to make a lemonpepper VM. rgabriel: On a more general note, SIPB does need to put more thoughts into codified policies and record-keeping. For example, this was discussed in the meeting and the only record is in the minutes. guoj1112: I support having a policy. scj643: We may start needing a netbox. psvenk: A netbot? A constituent of a botnet? scj643: No, a netbox turino14: I definitely agree on record keeping. I am thinking of making a new website for HWOPS with this purpose on mind. rgabriel: What do we want the future of lemonpepper to be in general? It grew ad hoc out of the necessity of having middle ground between XVM and physical servers, but I know there is also a proxmox server now. turino14: I think the success of Lemonpepper hints at the demand of VMs. I think the stuff there should stay and the newer one can be in proxmox and Hyades. psvenk: Any other project reports or thoughts? scj643: I do think we should set up a netbox, it is general documentation of what hardware we have. Inventory management and hardware config. It doesn't implement anything, but you can check if the documentation matches what is in the real world. It is made by DigitalOcean. psvenk: Is it open source? scj643: Yes, but they have a paid version. psvenk: What matters is that it is open source. turino14: That looks interesting, I'll look into it. psvenk: Indeed. dsisson: What makes the premium version better? Generative AI that no one wants? psvenk: Probably support. But I would consider not having generative AI to be a feature that I would be willing to pay for. scj643: Also single-sign on, which is the case of other "Enterprise" editions. rgabriel: Like Mattermost! Mattermost also paywalls SSO. dsisson: Some people here have experience implementing SSO. scj643: It's Python so implementing it as a plugin shouldn't be that hard. dtemkin [in chat]: hydrant continues, uac things have been happening rgabriel: What UAC things? dtemkin [in chat]: @psvenk can talk about it ❤️ psvenk: We had a meeting with the Undergraduate Advising Center (UAC). Stellic is going to be the official MIT audit tool which will most likely supplant Courseroad and Hydrant, and the websis audit and the eecs checklist and [another one??] all of the department-specific systems, but that won't be fully operational for another 5 years (the horizon we were given). The purpose of this meeting was not to discuss that directly, but to help department advisors familiarize themselves with Hydrant and Courseroad so they can assist students with "here is my Courseroad", especially in departments where their auditing tools aren't that great. What if students want to propose various scenarios, so that they don't have to do it manually or extend it to someone or fiddle with some bespoke software but rather they should be able to understand how Courseroad works. And the way that we market Courseroad and Hydrant often to the extent we have documentation it's all just student-facing. The way people find out about it and how to use it is through word of mouth and these things don't apply to faculty who have never been users of these applications. So we are hopefully going to run some sort of training to support students using Courseroad and Hydrant. rgabriel: I think it is good to raise awareness of them! Although I think a lot of faculty do know about Courseroad and Hydrant. dtemkin [in chat]: in case anyone is interested, https://www.stellic.com/progress dtemkin [in chat]: (although mit has bought the progress and care thingy, the more relevant one is the former) guoj1112: Is Stellic being developed right now? dtemkin [in chat]: implementation is ongoing. rgabriel: I think it is an external, contracted-out thing. psvenk: Yes, it's an outside vendor. guoj1112: So MIT is buying this SaaS software which will supplant Hydrant? scj643: Hopefully this is not as bad as another university one I have seen (Blackboard). dtemkin [in chat]: oh god not blackboard dtemkin [in chat]: jump scare dsisson: And it will only cost them 50 times the price! rgabriel: The other thing is that CourseRoad is not always up to date. If we're communicating with departments about this, they should be able to have a way of updating requirements and whatnot. It might be a good idea to have a "department admin view" or "advisor view" dtemkin: yeah the idea is that departments would keep it updated centrally through the registrar [more conversation] dtemkin [in chat]: i will say that of the ones mit was considering, stellic was certainly the least bad and the most willing to make changes based on what mit wanted dtemkin [in chat]: eg. an alternative option was salesforce 🤡 Kshitij [in chat]: ain't no way they considered SALESFORCE [more conversation] scj643: Ah, data warehousing. I miss my days at DELL. guoj1112: Where does the registrar office really get their data? psvenk: It's called MITSIS. dtemkin [in chat]: https://news.mit.edu/1994/mitsis-1102 guoj1112: So they have a secret database somewhere with a 100% official list, and that gets used to generate the catalog and we scrape that and make Hydrant. psvenk: That is correct, and that is also used to populate the data warehouse, which is the way most people at MIT (usually non-students) interface with MIT data. dsisson: I wonder, what is MITSIS running on? rgabriel: Oracle! scj643: Is this software cheaper than the oracle database licenses? dsisson: How hard would it be to just dump everything in Oracle into a big file? scj643: Flashbacks to having to connect to Oracle databases on Linux. rgabriel: A security flaw was fixed in OpenGrades recently, and the person reporting it also had concerns about maintainers having access to their grades, even though this access is needed for the service to function. I think SIPB should work on our procedures and giving support to all our projects, such as security reviews to ensure they are safe, don't store unnecessary data, and to ensure people can be reassured that any sensitive data projects store is protected if this data is necessary. psvenk: I agree with the sentiment but don't have much to add. Other: rgabriel: This release of macOS finally lets you snap windows to the side, but if you try resizing them, only one of them gets resized. psvenk: So it has reached windows 7 level of functionality, but not yet windows 10. scj643: You skipped windows 8!! [discussion of "law of alternating windows releases"] scj643: If you set the language to "English (World)" it has less spyware/bs psvenk: I have a windows machine I use rarely, and I was insistent on not connecting it to the internet so the setup is complete so I didn't accidentally click on "do this" or "do that", and also the Microsoft account, fortunately I don't have one so I won't sign into one. rgabriel: One of the cheaper editions of windows forces you to connect to a network to log into a Microsoft account to be able to successfully setup. The only way to get out of it is to press a function key to open the command prompt and type "cd c:\windows\system32" or something and then calling some .bat file. scj643: Yes, that is home edition. scj643: You can join a domain. rgabriel: I remember needing to click "domain join instead" and this is misleadingly named because it is the "I don't want a Microsoft account" button and lets you make a local account. Kshitij: I remember a registry editing hack to force a local account. psevnk: Most things can be ameliorated by regedit [the windows "registry" editor]. scj643: Or join a domain! psvenk: [Google Pixel and GrapheneOS and Google accounts] [discussion about iPhones and Apple IDs and the app store being the only way to install apps or needing to be a EU resident or owning a Mac and developer account] rgabriel: I love saying I am a EU resident or California resident when given the chance, because you get better terms of service, but I have never stepped foot on either. psvenk: In short, we are cooked, as a society. Other Other: scj643: Ozzy Osbourne is dead. psvenk: Who is this? scj643: [shows screen] psvenk: Oh that person! guoj1112: August is sooner than you think. And so is September. The meeting was adjourned at 20:37. Minutes taken by innaavo, guoj1112, ilyag, rgabriel, psvenk and submitted by rgabriel.