srw
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Minutes of the 2/22 Staff Meeting (long)
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Feb 27 08:08 UTC 1995 |
Minutes of the Grex Staff meeting of Wednesday 2/22.
The Grex staff agreed to gather at popcorn's place at 7:30 om the evening of
Wednesday, February 22. The attendees were Valerie Mates, John Remmers,
Carl Miller, Steve Weiss, Marcus Watts, Greg Cronau, and STeve Andre'.
Less than an hour into the meeting, there was a general power failure in
the southeast portion of Ann Arbor. For the next hour and then some, the staff
meeting continued by candlelight, until power was restored. At 10:30 PM, I
left the meeting, but it continued (I'm told) for another 7 hours or so.
the following notes cover topics discussed between 7:30 and 10:30 PM.
While we had prepared a list of things to discuss, no one could agree on
the order in which to discuss them, so the discussion covered the items
in a somewhat unpredictable order. My notes presented here do not reflect
any order in particular, and no one should read anything significant into the
order.
* Gryps
This is our router which still suffers from several instabilities which should
be dealt with. The CPU sometimes hangs. We sometimes establish our PPP
connection to ICnet on a portmaster that is not programmed to route our full
subnet. This causes Grex to remain incvisible on the net even though the PPP
link is up. It can be fixed by using a dedicated line at ICnet, or by getting
them to add our subnet to the other portmaster's routing tables.
* Upgrade Grex to Sparc
A Sun 4/200 upgrade card will permit a Sun 3 such as Grex or the Marcus owns
to be upgraded to Sparc processor. These boards cost $500. We have access to
several other sun 3's. If a non-Grex Sun-3 were upgraded to a Sun-4, that
machine could be used to build a machine parallel to Grex but with almost no
users.
While being configured, the new Sun could possibly be kept on a site with a
faster internet connection, to aid the developers. (mdw in this case).
All of the programs needed to run Grex would need to be recompiled on the
Sun-4, so this could take a while to get set up. In the meantime, Grex would
continue to run on the Sun-3. When it is ready, the /home disk of Grex could
be moved over to the new Sun-4.
Another plan involved using a Sparc as a News machine, on the theory that a
Sun-3 can't keep up with News these days. Some staff members felt that doing
a Sparc news machine while Grex ran on a Sun-3 was getting the cart before the
horse. More on usenet later.
* Adding the last two modems
This is just a matter of programming them to "dumb mode" and building cables
to our spec. Commercial modem cables won't do. This is all pretty simple and
STeve is planning on getting to it rsn.
(After the meeting, greg told me that stock cables will work, so we
shouldn't ahve to build cables.)
While we were discussing modems, someone remembered a little-known
feature of the ALM board which permits the Sun to hang up the phone
line only on the first 4 lines. This means that ttyh4, ttyh5, and soon ttyh6
and ttyh7 cannot be hung up by Grex. This can only be solved by replacing
the ALM with a terminal server.
* Rebuild gnu "ls" to use the password database.
This was generaly agreed upon as a good thing. It will speed up ls -l
kind of like finger was sped up when we did the same to it.
* enhancement to finger
It was proposed to rebuild finger so that it uses -m by default to speed it
up. It was generally agreed that this would be a good idea. I don't remember
who volunteered to do it, though.
* kernel tuning
Gregc reported that when he was building the kernel, he was unable to set
the variable that controls numerous kernel table sizes as high as he would
have liked, because of the fact that obly 32NB was avaiable. Now that we
run on 64 MB, we might be able to build a kernel based on a higher setting
of that variable (MAXUSERS). This might cause the system to be more efficient.
* Changing the kernel patches
This means liberalizing the tcp policy as voted by the membership last
summer. the staff agrees that this needs to be done, but wants to wait until
the system is more stable. It is just that there are many things that have
higher priority.
* Usenet
We discussed the question of Intel versus Sun architecture for such a machine.
News has gotten so large that a substantial amount of bandwidth and processor
power is needed to keep up with it. A Sun-3 is inadequate, as is a 386.
A Sun-4 or 486 is needed.
We discussed dealing with the bandwidth limitation by looking into a "Stargate"
system which provides read-only access to news via satellite. We could use
such a system to augment ordinary news. Posting would still be done through an
ordinary newsfeed.
Other creative approaches to manufacturing bandwidth were discussed without
consensus.
* Disk Problems
There is really nothing new on this front. We need to spend a few days
of staff time rearranging things to do more tests, but we don't have the staff
time lined up at the moment. At least being at the dungeon will make this
easier.
* Terminal Server
The options are an 8 port or a 16 port device. We need to ask the board to
authorize some amount for the purchase of a used one, with the idea that we
will buy it if we can ever get a really good deal. Normally they are too
expensive, but occasionally a bargain can be had.
* Adding to staff
There is one condidate for staff who still needs to be interviewed. Marcus will
discuss further whether he is interested.
* Increasing the link bandwidth
We discussed various options for getting a faster link. We wondered whether
we could connect to Merit by paying their $83/mo packet charge if we paid
for the connection. We discussed connection options. We could lease a 56Kb
digital linem or we could get two ISDN phone lines. The capital costs are
higher with ISDN, but the current charges are less. STeve said he wanted to
talk to Jeff Ogden (Merit) about our options.
* Measure Power Consumption
STeve said he has an AC power meter and proper cord for the process. This needs
to be done so that we can budget for and pay the landlords for the power
used.
* Put a Flashlight in the dungeon
We need to do this.
We have the phone box keys in the dungeon, now, at least.
* Rebuild the OS
Once the disk is stable, we need to rebuild the kernel and make safe backups
with the Exabyte tape.
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gregc
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response 1 of 14:
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Feb 27 09:17 UTC 1995 |
Re: Put a flashlight in the dungeon.
Actually, we're going to spend a little money and put the following items
in the dungeon:
A flashlight,
a fire extinguisher,
a smoke detector,
a small first aid kit.
I anyone can think of any other (low-cost) odds and ends to add to that
list, let me know. I plan on buying the above items later this week and
would like to do all the shopping in one trip.
We're also still looking for a donation of a touch-tone phone and some
throw rugs for the dungeon.
We felt that for things like fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, etc, it was
better to buy new, known-functional units, that to seek out donations of
old, possibly defective/worn-out units.
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