remmers
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Staff meeting of Oct. 18 - Steve Weiss' notes
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Oct 21 22:15 UTC 1994 |
The following are informal notes of last Tuesday's (Oct. 18) face-to-face
staff meeting, entered by Steve Weiss in the staff conference. I'm
entering them here in Coop with his permission and with some slight
editing, mostly to remove some discussion of security issues.
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Minutes of the October 18 Staff Meeting
A meeting of Grex staffers took place Tuesday evening at popcorn's place.
The meeting began a little after 7 and ran until about 10.
The participants were Valerie, STeve, Marcus, Carl, and myself (srw).
No one acted as a scribe, so what I am about to post is mostly from
memory, and my short-term memory is notorious, so I expect there will be
corrections.
Remmers and Gregc were notably absent. It is too bad it had to work out
this way, but hopefully this item will help maintain good communication
among staffers nonetheless.
The topics we discussed were:
1 The new room
2 Security (against vandals)
3 The Disk problem
4 Replacement router
5 Modems and phone lines
6 ITI
7 A news server (and a mail server)
8 Sendmail vs. smail
9 Making /home hierarchical
10 Quotas
11 New internet policy
12 A separate phone line for news.
The New Room is coming along slowly. It still needs electrical work,
painting and probably something else I forgot. We decided that, as soon
as Ian's part is finished, to issue the OK to Danr to order the Centrex
Phone Lines.
The plan for the Disk bug is to make a level 0 backup of /home and
repartition to avoid using any part of the disk beyond 1GB. STeve
will be doing this soon. (tomorrow, Thurs.? I can't remember).
This may or may not cause the bug to stop occurring. It will be
informative either way. STeve also promised to describe our problem
on the net and look for others who have encountered or solved this problem.
STeve is still hunting for a 386 motherboard that is known to run NetBSD.
This will be the heart of the new router.
We have more modems than we are using. STeve ticked them off, but
I didn't write this down. As I recall there are the 6 currently on the hunt
group. 1 of those is malfunctioning and may be made to work again by
reprogramming. Then again, maybe not. STeve and Valerie were going to
try this as a first shot at resurrecting ttyh2. Beyond that we have
1 borrowed 2400 from meg, and 1 14400 Supra that used to be on the link.
Ameritech has an offer valid through part (or all?) of November in which
the installation fee ($42) is waived. We do not know if this would
apply to Centrex lines. If it would, we could save a bundle.
We also discussed adding more lines while at Ken's, because there would
be no startup cost. We decided against this because the move to the new
room is imminent. (don't laugh)
We could use another machine as a news server. We could also use a mail
machine, as smail is a major load on Grex. We discussed the pros/cons
of switching to sendmail. It would be a lot friendlier to the load average.
While we were talking about a news server, we also discussed that the plan
would be to add a line for News which is separate from the inet connection.
We discussed turning quotas on for /home. Marcus expressed a lack of
trust of the quota software for SunOS. This was not resolved.
It seems to me that if we are afraid to run quota software, we might
still get a number of users to trim their disk usage by nagging.
We briefly discussed the new internet policy. It was agreed that there
will be a table which controls the logic which decides whether to permit
a connect request. There was no agreement reached as to whether it will
be statically compiled data, or loaded at boot time from a file.
We also noted that the UseNet portion of the new internet policy is
a separate technical issue from the rest of it. It requires no patches
or anything, just someone willing to act as a verifier. I think this should
be discussed at the next board meeting.
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gregc
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response 4 of 7:
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Oct 24 12:48 UTC 1994 |
They will only waive the $42 installation charge on individual residential
phone lines. The offer does not apply to Centrex. So, if we wanted to have
2 more phone lines turned on at Ken's until we move, we could have the
turn on done for free, but it would not affect the cost of the Centrex
service we will be using at the new location.
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