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

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

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)

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)

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