Meeting Minutes Oct 17 2011

Understudy

 * Start with some sort of diagnostics test difficult enough to determine the upper knowledge bounds of most/all of the understudies
 * Prior to the test, provide a brief intro to man pages
 * Google use allowed during test
 * Need them to sign up for the understudy mailing list
 * Two groups of understudies
 * More proficient understudies will start working with Anish on getting the Itanium cluster operational
 * Less proficient understudies will work with John on learning the basics of Linux systems. Topics include command line usage, installing linux in a VM at home, and remote access to CSL resources

Workstations

 * Current imaging process is not ideal; meson pushes images to haimageserver which are then pulled down by clients
 * Easy to break all of the workstations and then very hard to fix them
 * No easy way to roll back to an unbroken image
 * Inadequate testing of images prior to deployment
 * John is working on building a new image based on archlinux
 * Precompiled binaries will help reduce the risk of bad packages
 * Images will be built weekly and pushed to a test of testing workstations
 * After a week of testing (and assuming it is stable), that image will be pushed to the rest of the workstations and a new testing image will be built

Itanium Cluster

 * Understudies will be working under Anish to get this operational
 * EFI firmware needs to be updated
 * New image to be built based on the current Gentoo workstation image (obviously recompiled for IA64)

Intranet

 * All news postings now need to go through a faculty sponsor for approval
 * Does someone want to write documentation for the 8th period module? Or any part of iodine?
 * Interest in working on Intranet? Talk to Zach
 * Rewrite Iodine codebase?? Perhaps if there is enough interest?
 * Alternatively, rewrite portions for readability, maintainability, and future expansion? (particularly 8th period)

AFS

 * research alternatives? (alternatives need to be compatible with all systems in the lab)