Meeting Minutes/2016-04-12

Boring part

Spring 2016 Talk Series — Wednesdays 20:00, WeH 5421
- Tomorrow, 13 Apr – achai with Apple 1985-1997: The Jobless Years
Treasurer's report
- FY2017 budget appeals
  - Appeals meeting was Sun 10 Apr -- fseidel, ezh, jocelynh attended
  - Fixed negative allocation
  - JFC had to spend a majority of their budget on replacement locks
  - Suggested waiting for emergency funding, special allocations
  - Not enough time to go over line items in 10 minutes, told us to email them
  - Will try for second-round appeals
- As of last week, just over $600 in JFC org account available for use in remainder of FY2016
elee's machines
- 8 units, likely Dell PowerEdge R710s (roughly 6 years old)
- grantwu will probably be doing a road trip to Boston (F2016)
mjrosenb's hardware (parts)
- Showing up this Saturday
- An X8SIL and an X8SIL-F
- 48 GB of ECC RAM and two Xeon X3450s
- Cost: $75
Purchasing
- Second new rack, to replace Rack 2 (~$400)
Retrocomputing Committee report
- Retro Gaming Night wrap-up
  - Budget shenanigans
    - We were told to double the food order, but somehow it came to $75 over what StuAct expected
    - If this was at StuAct's direction, StuAct placed the order, processed payment, and authorized it, then we should not be on the hook for the difference
    - Will double-check budgeting to see what exactly happened
  - Prize distribution
    - tparenti got prize preferences from winners, forwarded results to officers@
      - Confirm that StuAct will be notifying winners to pick up prizes
    - Apparently StuAct bought a Raspberry Pi 1 instead of a Raspberry Pi 3
      - tparenti can check with winner to see if this matters to him
  - StuAct liked the event, wants to see if we want to do it again next year
- Demosplash planning meeting times
  - when2meet went out last week
    - Should start these meetings right after Carnival
  - First items:
    - Finalizing date preferences for 2016 (likely 4–6 Nov vs 18–20 Nov)
    - Whether to switch to a "Saturday and half-Sunday" format
    - egarbade will initiate contact with ABTech
Focus of Tuesday meetings
- Stay more topic-focused to stick more closely to time constraints
- Possible solutions/drawbacks:
  - Better separation of ops and non-ops topics
    - This is the explicit purpose of the "boring part" admin meeting at 17:00 and the "interesting part" general body meeting at ~17:30
  - Hold mini ops meetings on Saturdays during OHH instead
    - Midweek checkins to coordinate next steps of longer-term projects are helpful in keeping things moving
    - Lack of a common arrival time makes such meetings less feasible
  - Conduct more business over email
    - operations@ list can often be noisy when less-involved alumni offer strong opinions

Interesting part

Open Hacking Hours
- Sat 30 Apr – Brainstorming for Fall 2016 OHH programming
  - Show-and-tell every few weeks? One ops + one retro each month?
  - Text adventure/puzzlehunt
Future events
- Tue 3 May, 21:00, Rashid – Movie night: Mystery Science Theater 3000 Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
- We have the room
Operations
- engine01 – Build status update from grantwu?
  - Been swamped with work. Nothing.
- transit-2 (and the former kvm04) – Build status update from aliruu?
  - Tried to set up, crashed with "CPU1 Fail: Error"
  - More testing needed
- Cockpit plugin for libvirt – Status update from blx, sbaugh?
  - Looks good, working. Thanks blx!
  - Looking for something functionally equivalent to kbare's list-xen for new kvm engines
- storage-4
  - Is it serving anything yet?
    - Yes, according to stroucki
    - Migrated from storage-2
- Switch fan installations
  - gadolinium and tungsten are on the Rack 2 switch, which needs fans
    - But they are critical infrastructure
    - Do this after Carnival, perhaps 23 or 30 Apr
  - Might as well move them back to Rack 0 while we're taking the (short) downtime
    - Announce the Wednesday before
  - kbare out-of-town 16 and 23 Apr
sbaugh: "We should combine with ScottyLabs and ACM to do a booth next year"