-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Open Computing Facility Board of Directors Meeting 18 April 2000 Board of Directors members present: Jason Castello (castello) Eugene Chan (ceugene) Jeff Emrich (jeffe) Gabe Gonzalez (gmg) Devin Jones (jones) Bem Jones-Bey (ajani) Wayne Kao (kaow) Kenneth Ott (kenao) Akop Pogosian (akopps) Susie Tang (suztang) Others in attendance: Isaac Fong (isaacf) The meeting was opened at 5:45 pm. Reports I. General Manager Report Steve McCamant's not here so Akop led the meeting. Ken brought two computers to the new lab. He said all the IPX's want to talk to war or conquest so they can't boot until they have an external network connection. Ken said he found $1800 to buy cables to lock down workstations and to buy enough hubs to power the entire lab. Akop says he needs to lock down some machines in physics and will will ask the company that does this how much this would cost for OCF lab. Devin says he has asked about an Ultra 1, and Ken has tried talking to Tom Baker and others, but everyone Devin and Ken have talked to are on vacation. Ken said chairs cost only $83/chair, and said he hasn't heard from Gateway. Devin said he called the Desktop.com people, but they haven't told him much. It doesn't sound like they'll want much in exchange for donations which is awesome. Desktop.com wanted to talk about different levels of contributions. II. Site Manager Report Akop bought DDS3 tapes for backups and 64 megs of memory for "myballs". There was some debate about renaming myballs. Akop says the tapes fit 24 gigs per tape. We've started running daily backups. Mail will not be backed up daily though, just weekly, because if we do mail it would be a significant chunk of /var/mail. Akop says he found a hard drive, and Bem notice Steve Callahan wasn't at the meeting, so he suggested it be used for MP3's. The disk could be given to famine. Akop said he found another disk too, but it only has 2 gigs and didn't have cables, and he found a really old 1 gigabyte disk which could go to death. Akop says Luns arranged for a replacement APX donation and a IPX replacement for pestilence. Ken says pestilence is sending out weird mail messages now though; smcc@ocf has the details on that. III. Old Business ASUC & DeCal web sites All ASUC files are moved over to our server now. Ken asked whether they're mirroring. Devin said all their files are here. Akop says DeCal took down their old site before talking to us, and he said he's setup everything for them and just needs to talk to CSUA about DNS. Ken said the stupidity was that decal.org died/shut down/lost all their new website files, so we have nothing to put there unless the original webmaster saved it all and who knows? IV. New Business Web site ads Ken wants to just put them on the web cam page. Eugene doesn't see the point of just putting them on that page and not everywhere else on the OCF page. Devin says we get several hundred hits a day. Wayne said ads can't be on a reloading page. Bem and Gabe started a tangent about The Simpson's. Devin says the campus doesn't like people running ads under the berkeley.edu domain. We are on the ASUC network, not on IS&T networks, so we could have ads, but we still can't have ads unless we change our ad address, like to ocf.asuc.org. Devin said IS&T probably won't let us do ads if we asked them. vision@ocf alias / account registration Akop says anyone who's not on campus and whose account is sorried shouldn't have any right to OCF resources unless they were sorried for a good reason. Those who are not affiliated with university should have the least voice at OCF. Devin wants to discuss a squished and dormant account policy. Akop wants to run rereg next semester. Everyone agreed squished users should have no rights. Akop says it should be at the SM's discretion, and everyone changed his mind to that. Devin proposed saying we close accounts if an account's not being used. Akop says that's a bad idea because maybe their email's being forwarded or something, and that that's what rereg is for. Devin says it's ok with ASUC and maybe even the campus if we allow alumni accounts. Akop says we should discuss this longer since this is a big policy discussion. Devin and Ken say we should support a user community like the CSUA's. Devin and Bem said one reason we used to do rereg was we want access to sww, but we don't even need that anymore. Devin says the main reason we haven't done rereg in a while is because some staff don't like it, and we've been preoccupied with other stuff. Devin and Eugene say we should just not be worried about any of this until the university tells us to. Moving stuff Akop said we need to start moving from Eshleman into Heller, the TDA too. Ken asked why we don't move now, but Gabe says anyone could take anything from Heller if we moved stuff now. Devin and Ken said we don't have racks to hold the TDA yet. Ken didn't care but didn't think anyone would move to steal such heavy and obsolete equipment. Windows boxes Akop hasn't done anything on it. Bem hasn't done anything either. Bem said Paolo showed him an EECS machine running Windows 2000, but it was slow. We need to find a computer powerful enough before we try installing Windows NT on something. Akop's worried about the physical security of a Windows box too. Ken says we should use Easy Access instead of Samba. Ken made some noise about cellie being able to handle it, when Bem said the other stuff we have wouldn't. Ken said he would only do this if he could save the current drive contents though. Devin and Bem say Samba's not too bad but you need separate passwords. Akop says he emailed the Berkeley Sun Microsystems rep for more information. He has not heard back from them yet, however, it is listed at $1500 on SUN's web site. Considering we are .edu we might get it for less. Many people said this was a lot; Eugene suggested stealing it. Akop noted having Windows boxes would be neat for our users because we could allow useful things like letting people TDA Devin said three other student groups want part of the TDA: CSUA, XCF, and CalFROG. CalFROG wants to space so they can mirror more stuff such as FreeBSD. Devin says John from CalFROG could do that for us if we asked, but he needs like half a terrabyte. CSUA and XCF each have parts of the TDA already setup, and they're using FreeBSD. Mike would like 200-600 gigs for the CSUA (one rack). XCF probably only needs half a node. Akop says we can hold some files for local installs. Devin explained everything: The whole TDA is 7 racks = ~14 nodes. OCF capacity is 5 racks + ad-hoc shelving. We could conceivably fit the entire TDA, but we want to reserve some rack space for servers. Akop said we should save *at least* 5 nodes. Even with one node, we could give all our users like 100 GB (which is really spiffy), so we can give away a lot of the TDA. Bem said he can give away a good portion of the TDA now, but we should still keep a lot of it since we can always do stuff with disk space. Devin and Akop wrote down what we might need space for: - home - web - mail - /opt/local - /export CalFROG <- FreeBSD/Linux mirror XCF/CSUA <- projects Food Ken said Ivan couldn't fit his food in there when he tried eating lunch and had suggested that we should ban it in the new lab. Devin said Heller allows food and we've always allowed food in the OCF lab. Eshleman has gotten messy but people don't think it'll get messy in Heller since Eshleman's just asking to get messed up. The meeting was closed at 6:42 by Akop, seconded by Bem. Recorded by Wayne Kao (kaow).