Minutes of the 9/13 Staff Meeting

Sep 19 06:19 UTC 1995

 The meeting was held at Robh's apartment. Attendees were
 robh, popcorn, steve, scott, davel, srw
 
 * Progress on the Sun-4
 Information is kept up-to-date on the Sun-4 progress
 in coop. Rather than rehash that we discussed lists of software that is yet
 to be ported. In particular, STeve reported that Marcus has been recovering
 from the flu and hopes to begin porting some of the special software that he
 has changed the source code for. These are
 (Shadow, NewUser, Login, Passwd, Finger, Sendmail, and Picospan)
 
 STeve plans to produce a list of programs on grex that have not made their
 way to the new Grex yet. Some are just scripts and merely need to be moved.
 Compiled programs will need to be recompiled, of course.
 
 srw has ported httpd to the new Grex, but it doesn't have any source changes
 Marcus might have made to it. Since Marcus's source is not on Grex, we
 don't know if there is anything yet to be done.
 
 * More Roots
 The staff discussed the advantages and disadvantages of having more root
 staffers. davel, scott, and robh are all being considered for this,
 so that more people can either reboot the system, or clean up files
 after a reboot. More roots are a disadvantage from a security standpoint,
 but the consensus was that we needed the help.
 The staff will recommend that these staffers be added
 to the root list. This will be taken up at the next board meeting.
 
 * Problems with the GVC modems
 Recently there have been a number of reports of users connecting into 
 other users' sessions. Staff believes this is due to there being a 
 too-large value as the default for the S10 register. This controls the
 amount of time before the modem gives up trying to retrain, and drops
 the connection. The plan is for some staffer to take these modems
 out of dumb mode, set the value down to 300-500 ms, and put them back
 into dumb mode. 
 
 * Web issues
 Carl Miller (carl) has resigned as webmaster, and srw and robh concurred
 that our web site is in serious need of maintenance. This has been
 discussed in coop. Srw recommended that robh be added as a webmaster,
 and encouraged him begin the process of cleaning up the problem
 areas. Srw and Robh plan to coordinate to call a meeting of those
 interested in contributing time and effort to help make our site
 *excellent*. We already know of interest from a number of other
 users and staffers, in particular scg,kaplan,remmers,janc.
 
 Another area of great interest is CGI. We plan to turn on CGI scripting
 for staff-written scripts. this will be needed to implement some
 of the nicer ideas robh has for our user list, for srw's Webspan,
 and for JanC's web-newuser.
 
 *Gift to Grex
 Valerie had told us that a special gift to Grex would be presented at this
 staff meeting. At this point, she showed a package donated to Grex by 
 Rob Argy. We opened the package to find a brand-new Chase IOLan 16 terminal
 server! This is a most surprising and wonderful gift. This should permit us
 to use the full V.32bis (14.4k) speed of our GVC modem, which are currently
 running only at V.32 (9600). In addition we can begin the process of replacing
 our 2400 baud modems with 9600 baud modems as funds permit.  The entire staff
 of Grex that was present wished to thank Rob for this.
 
 *JCC
 The question of the JCC sale was asked once again. STeve cited the importance
 of this sale for the money it produces to help run Grex, and offered to
 supervise it. Valerie recommended that STeve get in touch with our contact
 at ITI who makes available much resellable hardware. 
 STeve agreed that he would do so. 
 
 *Kernel Mods
 We need to schedule a meeting to go over the specific technicalities for
 implementing the kernel mods that will meet the desires expressed by the
 membership vote last year. The primary interested staffers for this are
 srw, STeve, Marcus and possibly Valerie. This will be scheduled shortly.
 
 The meeting ended when we all walked over to the pile of boxes that Robh has
 been storing and began inspecting their contents. these are castoff machines
 that were sent to us by Steve Sarrica, for possible use by Grex, its staffers,
 or for sale at the JCC. I left before anything significant was uncovered,
 so I will let someone else describe what was present.

response 2 of 8:

Sep 19 07:19 UTC 1995

Staff scripts only, but there are security problems that weren't discussed
in the minutes, so CGI remains on hold.

response 4 of 8:

Sep 19 11:32 UTC 1995

It sounded like there was plenty of interest in having users able to run CGI
scripts, but plenty of security concerns have been raised.  I'd say it's
likely to happen *if* a strong consensus arises that security issues are in
hand, but that this is quite unlikely in the short run & maybe in the long
run.

response 6 of 8:

Sep 19 18:59 UTC 1995

        CGI = Comp Graphical Images?

response 8 of 8:

Sep 20 05:59 UTC 1995

CGI is a standard environment that http servers construct for programs
(usually scripts) to be executed on the server's side of an http transaction.
It is invoked by a URL.

A script (or program) designed to run in that environment is called a CGI 
script (or program).