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OCF Board of Directors' (BoD) Meeting

OCF Board of Directors' (BoD) Meeting

  • Date: 23 March 2006, 7PM
  • Place: Casa Zimbabwe (2422 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA)

  • Minutes by elliot@ocf

  • All words attributed to a speaker are paraphrased unless explicitly quoted.

Preliminaries

Attendance:

  • tdhock
  • yury
  • cardi
  • elliot
  • griffin
  • dima
  • ogle
  • geo
  • remlluf
  • jones
  • jkit
  • dwc
  • gordeon
  • janderso
  • cld

Introductions

  • Everyone introduced him/herself.

Announcements

  • remlluf: Eshleman/MLK network is going down briefly on Monday, March 26.

General Manager / Site Manager (GM/SM) Messages

  • No GM/SM messages in particular today. General discussion occurred.

Discussion Items

Toner

  • griffin: We still don't have toner. NewEgg sent us bad toner, which we returned, and now we are waiting for the new toner to arrive.

SUN Party Review

  • OCF held a party today in appreciation of SUN Microsystems, and their Chief Technology Officer in particular, John Fowler. SUN and Mr. Fowler, in conjunction with EECS and Big Ideas at Berkeley, arranged for the donation of a new SunFire v40z server to OCF.

  • tdhock: SUN Party could have gone better; we needed an organized publicity team.

  • for getting OCF more visibility

  • for improving relations with (in this case) SUN and EECS

  • jones: (On the other hand,) I think companies do these events more for viral marketing; if a SUN executive gets young people interested in SUN, then he's doing his job. OCF only provides basic IT services, so Fowler is probably not expecting anything really innovative; just the fact that we're still using SUN hardware is a victory for them.

If computational physics people want to do something with SUN hardware with 30 processors, that would be great (but it's different).

Cluster Computing?

Is there need or interest?

  • tdhock: People have computationally intensive projects, but it seems like the problem is already solved; departments have clusters. Besides that, it's a waste if there's no demand. OCF is about democratic computing, and clusters don't help a lot of people.

  • (Are there people outside of departments that need clusters?)

  • jkit: Using department clusters requires local insider knowledge and permission. If we offered similar services, it might encourage people to use a cluster.

  • tdhock: We could offer a class on cluster computing.

  • jones: All you need is a few people and a few hypothetical examples of uses. If people are interested besides me, we should just do it and then see what happens.

Feasibility

  • See also related topics in this week's minutes:
  • Funding section
  • Mission section

  • Productivity section

  • SUN seems to moving in the direction of clusters.

  • jones can help set up clusters. It is a good experience.
  • It takes a few days of full time work for one person to set up a cluster (example was for a 100 machine cluster).

Mission of OCF

  • (Following upon cluster computing...)

  • yury: This goes back to "what is the mission of OCF?" W&MF is superior for general computing.

  • jones: There's a really good statement in the constitution, basically that "OCF is about gathering resources and giving them away to people." Back in the day you basically had to be a CS student just to get e-mail. OCF was created just to give everyday people access to computers.

My personal feeling is that (today) OCF could offer more cool web services, Webspace is still the killer app. It's a good general thing. Personally I'd like to make it more web friendly, so people don't have to learn the command line. It would also be cool to gather more cutting edge services, like cluster computing.

The cool thing is that over time OCF has trained legions of really good IT people. Literally dozens of people have come out of OCF with really solid skills, and in the process (of that training) everybody else benefits (from utilizing the services).

Funding and Donations

  • (Related to cluster computing options...)

  • Do we have a problem with funding?

  • jones: (Funding) doesn't have to be a problem if we get donations. What are people interested in? Our past (serious) attempts have been successful. Don't be afraid to ask.

  • (Have we even been trying to get donations?)

  • remlluf: Or you can go in front of the and ask for a budget increase, as long as you can justify it.

  • jones: All basic necessities (e.g. backups) should be covered by ASUC.

  • dwc: We should try to have a demand for services or hardware before we start asking people for more resources.

Organization and Productivity

  • Do we have enough people-power? Are people lazy?

  • jones: Watching this organization over many years, OCF is not actually short on manpower. It's just whether people are motivated. It's more of whether the OCF provides something that seems more fun that (schoolwork). graduating. If people generate new projects, new hardware, people will either jump or it, or they won't, depending upon a lot of factors.

  • Some (many?) users would like to get involved but can't figure out how to.

  • yury: We shouldn't overreach; last year we advertised improvements we didn't actually give (e.g. disk quota increase).

Team Updates

Web Team Update

  • Web Team meeting attendance has been sporadic this week.

  • Staff Hours/Staff Profile:

  • Remaking staff hours/staff profiles page. Basic PHP is done. Two web team staffers said they were going to add onto it.

  • Event Scheduler:

  • No new work this week.
  • jkit plans to work on it over spring break.
  • What is the scheduler?
    • Joint venture with MCC; they don't have a calendar scheduler. Nobody knows their scheduling except them, and only because they have e-mail.
    • Based on PHPiCal, with add functionality, e.g.:
      • Apply for times/spaces
      • Administrators can log in and approve applications.

  • Only thing not done currently is authentication.

  • tdhock: Good job on SUN recognition paragraph on our main website.

LDAP/Kerberos Team Update

  • yury: sluo and I both had midterms. We are short on human resources.

Publicity/Flyering/Tabling Team Update

  • cld tried to figure out how to get t-shirts made. We need a logo.

  • remlluf suggests:

  • Picture of someone fishing into a window-shaped pond
  • Fishing with CAT 5 (ethernet) cable
  • Fishing for/hooking credit cards

  • Caption: "Gone phishing?"

  • cld suggets some sort of play on "The OC."

Server Team Update

  • dima and sle stayed up all night to set up the v40z. Still need to install/migrate Apache, Perl/PHP, MySQL. MySQL can possibly stay on death, though mysql might overload death if/when we move mail onto death as well.

  • We don't know if we can finish the migration by the end of the semester.

Windows Imaging Team

  • No one from the Windows imaging team was present.

  • Useful information:

  • Setting Firefox's global default cache size is now on the Staffwiki

  • Quota profile size is encoded into group policy.

Eshleman Team

  • BoD voted to put our systems back in the Eshleman lounge.

  • We had four, jkit is using one, now we have three.

  • The systems are still in the server room.

  • This team does not exist, though we need it.

  • novakyu is apparently assigned to the job, but does not appear to have been making progress on it.

    • yury: He has midterms.

  • remlluf: In the past, lounge officials only wanted web browsing enabled on the systems. Now they can be fully functional, with office, etc..

  • Network access

  • There is network access in Eshleman, just not to the 7th floor lounge itself.

  • Is VPN through AirBEARS an option?

  • (In reponse to dima's point-to-point networking proposal:)

    • remlluf: Any exposed external devices mounted on buildings must be passed through the campus aesthetics commitee.

More Discussion

Game Server?

  • jkit: SUN is working on gaming, backing Sony, etc.. [Mr. Fowler] said "we should give you a game server." If we're interested, we should contact him.

  • (People generally thought that) Fowler seemed able and willing to give rather liberally (relative to OCF's needs).

  • We have minimal support for a game server team, e.g. cardi, geo, elliot.

  • remlluf: The current ASUC president is behind a game cluster project, as are the gellateria people. This kind of proposal can't come from my office, but let me know if you want to do it.

Library Proxy

  • The library proxy does not appear to be working anymore.

  • remlluf: E-mail the library and tell them we have qualified administrators on (specified) IP range.

  • tdhock: Ideally we want everyone to be able to use the library sites with zero configuration on the part of the user.

Constitutional Review

  • The constitution covers procedure, rather than technical policies. Everyone on BoD should ideally be familiar with the constitution.

  • Constitution and policies are not always updated; we may have to go through all the minutes to make sure that our formal documents are revised to the current date. One can do this in chunks (rather than all at once) as long as one documents that "constitution is current up to date X."

  • cld informally volunteers to examine constitution and policies.

More Leadership/Organizational Positions?

  • tdhock proposes creation of additional management positions, especially a publicity manager.

  • jkit: Titles are nice, but what would they do?

  • dwc: You can make more positions, but don't make them constitutionally required. These positions can be "delegated by (GM/SM)."

ASUC Elections

Logistics

  • April 25, 26, 27 (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

  • Duties:

  • Set up 16 locations on campus (connect routers and laptops)

  • On call at ASUC headquarters

Why participate?

  • Individual Incentives

  • Hang out with OCF staff, LAN, eat

  • Can put it on your resume

  • Service and Professionalism

  • Good way to help the campus community.

  • jones: The cool thing is seeing a project with a really finite deadline get done, and get done well. OCF has always done a really good job.

  • Beneficial to OCF

  • Good opportunity for publicity.

  • OCF tends to get donations (not guaranteed).

  • ASUC decides OCF's funding. We make a good impression when we show that we are helpful, responsible and skilled.

OCF will participate.

  • tdhock: "I give it my thumbs up."

  • General consensus that OCF will help run ASUC elections

Closing

  • Meeting ends.