Minutes of CRC Meeting

 

Location: 607 McBryde

Time: 10-11:45 am

Date: 12.09.1999

 

Attendees: Marc Abrams (CRC), Chris Arnold, Dwight Barnette (CRC), Sandy Birch, Jamie Evans, Daniel Hagan, Gay Meredith, Hussein Suleman (CRC), Srinidhi Varadarajan (CRC), Sandy Birch, Layne Watson, Cliff Shaffer

 

Topic 1:  GTA Room Space Availability

The meeting began with a discussion on GTA room space availability. It was noted that the current space was only sufficient for 4 GTA offices and it was used mainly during lunch hours causing it to become crowded.

 

It was decided to limit the number of GTAs to 4 at any given time. GTA would have to stagger their office hours to avoid congestion.

 

Topic 2: Upgrade existing Alphas to Sun platform

Invited members: Cliff Shaffer, Layne Watson

With the current Alpha platforms at the end of their useful life and given the relatively high cost of new Alpha platforms, several members suggested switching to the Sun Ultra workstations. The meeting deliberated on both the number of machines needed (original request is for 6 Alphas) and their platform. The following points were noted at the discussion.

  1. The main concern is that the current grading platform for courses in numerical computing and CS1206 is based on Alpha. Students need access to Alphas to ensure correctness of their code. Code developed in the course is not portable across platforms.
  2. Layne Watson noted that Alpha workstations have a correct implementation of the Fortran 90 compiler. The compiler is broken on the Sun platforms. Additionally, Alphas support a numerical computation environment.
  3. Switching from Alphas to Suns poses an additional workload on the systems administration staff.
  4. Are 6 Alphas needed? When last observed only 2-3 of the current Alphas were running. Given that 116 will shortly get 21 machines running the UNIX platform, do we need 6 Alpha workstations?
  5. Is console access needed for the Alphas? It was decided that remote access was sufficient.
  6. Alpha platforms are far behind current JVM implementations. Cliff Shaffer mentioned that courses that need access to the JVM and the automatic grader both need newer JVM implementations.

 

The meeting decided to continue using Alpha workstations. To reduce the cost of the workstations, the committee decided to go for slower Alpha platforms and scale the request to 5 workstations instead of 6. Jamie Evans was charged with deciding the configuration of the Alpha workstations. Courses and the automatic grader that require newer versions of the JVM will use the new Sun Multiprocessor machine.

 

 

Topic 3:  Recommendation of UNIX platform for incoming freshmen

The choice of the UNIX platform for use by incoming freshmen was narrowed to Linux and FreeBSD. The following points were noted.

  1. Linux is the more popular choice in terms of usage. Secondly, Linux is seeing greater development in device support, particularly commercial support for new devices.
  2. From experience, FreeBSD is considered more secure since it is based on the original BSD code.
  3. Campus security will degrade as users move to Linux.

 

It was decided that the decision lay under the Undergraduate Program Committee. CRC would make machine recommendations based on the UPC decision. The following guidelines were noted as prerequisites for both UNIX platforms.

  1. Users should not buy Windows specific hardware devices such as Winprinters, and Winmodems. These devices rely on Windows for operation.
  2. Users should set aside 1-2GB of hard disk space for future installation of Linux/FreeBSD.
  3. UPC should identify and communicate the timeframe for deployment of the new platform.

 

Topic 4: Blacklisting of mail from known email spammers

It was proposed by Daniel Hagan to blacklist known email spam sites that flood junk email. Email spamming can be prevented by setting up a configuration blacklist file that lists known spammers, which will be set based on Internet sites that track them. The proposed scheme has low risk since senders in the blacklist receives a rejection message indicating non-availability of the receiver. However, it was noted that the scheme has a flaw in that legitimate senders who are erroneously listed in the blacklist will not be able to send mail to CS users.

 

Daniel Hagan was charged with intimating faculty and staff about the proposed change and its implications with a view to getting their opinion on the issue. Hussein Suleman was charged with sending a note to graduate students to get their view on this issue.