srw
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Minutes of the Meeting of the Grex Staff - 10 May 1995
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May 13 07:13 UTC 1995 |
Minutes of the Meeting of the Grex Staff - 10 May 1995
Held at Valerie Mates's apartment.
The meeting began at 7:30, but it was 7:50 before we stopped chatting and
made an attempt to cover the agenda items. The participants were:
Valerie Mates <popcorn>, Steve Andre <steve>,
John Remmers <remmers>, Dave Lovelace <davel>, Carl Miller <carl>,
Steve Weiss <srw>, and Marcus Watts <mdw>.
1. Reap Policy - We discussed the case that occurred recently of a
user who lost his account through a routine reap, and had it taken by someone
else. While it is an unfortunate side-effect of reaping, we decided we
cannot afford to make our policy more liberal. We are now reaping on a regular
basis, and maintaining approximately 8300 accounts using the 90 day period.
We decided to explain our reap policy better in newuser. A note will be
added there for this purpose.
2. Jared Mauch made an offer to provide us access to his nntp server over the
net. We think this is a generous offer, but we are concerned that it
will prove no better than the service we had from the condor host at ICnet.
We decided to ask Rob Henderson <robh> to test this access for us to see
if it offers better behavior than condor. We are not optimistic, though,
as the netlink is almost certain to prove to be the limiting factor.
Because of this, the staff suspects that nothing short of a news server on our
own ethernet will prove to be a usable way to access news.
3. Michael O'Leary <nephi> has asked to be able to help the Grex staff
respond to requests on the staff mailing list. The staff members considered
this request favorably, and will recommend his appointment to staff at the
next board meeting. Access to the staff mailing list requires appointment
to staff, and board approval.
4. Meg Geddes <meg> was removed from the staff mailing list.
5. UIDs - These are being used up at a rapid rate. When we hit the maximum
value permitted for a UID in this operating system, it will be necessary to
reconfigure the newuser program to start assigning lower numbered UIDs
that have become free due to account deletion. We call this UID recycling.
The new users will have to be in a separate group (not "people"),
but this is not likely to matter in normal use. This reconfiguration
should not be difficult, nor should the recycling of UIDs pose any special
problems.
6. The postmaster mail alias has been redirected to the staff mailing
list, because neither of our postmasters have had the time to
perform that function. The software configuration responsibilities
have been largely handled by mdw, and the mail has mostly been
forwarded to staff anyway, so it could be handled properly.
7. Httpd - This is a complex issue. We are now up and running on a
new release of the CERN httpd. CGI scripting is not available, at
least for a while, possibly permanently. A sequence of changes will be
executed to make our usage more standard. First, mkhomepage will be
modified to create index.html. Then all users with home pages will be
asked to rename copy or link their home pages to index.html, so that
they can more conveniently use the ~user format of URL.
The Grex public html will be moved to a more appropriate location than
/user/local/lib/lynx, and they will also be updated/rewritten by Carl,
as they are showing their age.
The last stage of this process will remove some rules from the
httpd config (rules) file, which will then no longer be needed, and
to change the pointers to personal home pages to the httpd daemon instead
of local files. This latter step requires that the http protocol be
opened for non-members.
8. Automated backups - We debated the merits of leaving a tape
mounted and running incremental backups to it off of cron in the middle
of the night when the load is lighter. We decided against this for a
number of reasons. Automated backups were shelved for the time being.
9. The SPARC upgrade - STeve Andre' is planning to go to Greg Cronau's
place to work on cleaning up Grex's other Sun 260 box. We have a cpu
to install in it, some memory (32M), and a SCSI controller. We plan to
buy a disk that has been offered by Rob Argy <ajax>. Once this is
working, it can be moved to the dungeon where other staffers can more
conveniently work on it.
STeve also is in possession of Marcus's SPARC CPU card, and plans to
deliver it to Marcus right away, so that Marcus can work on getting his
machine fired up also. It will be in a better position to have software
installed on it, because of a better net connection.
The new SPARC Kernel will need new TCP and UDP blocks. We plan to implement
them to meet the limitations voted on by the members, so the new
machine will be more open to non-members. This should eliminate
some of the weirdness we experience now with talk and ntalk.
---
Respectfully Submitted,
-srw (Steve Weiss, unofficial staff secretary)
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