response 22 of 88:

Nov 9 23:00 UTC 2005

Wow, that was an intelligent and thoughtful response, Mary.

/me awards mary a gold star

Way to treat the staff members.

response 24 of 88:

Nov 9 23:15 UTC 2005

You have to be handsome and charismatic, like me!

response 26 of 88:

Nov 10 00:02 UTC 2005

#21 of 25: by Mary Remmers (mary) on Wed, Nov  9, 2005 (17:34):
 Remind me again, Dan, what you've done for Grex?
Roughly translated: I don't know what OpenBSD even looks like but I can at
least bite Dan's ankles for bringing it up.

I think tech decisions should be brought up by CONCENSUS of all staff
volunteers.  That means..just like a jury vote, all yay and nay should be
presented when major decisions are made.  Someone(krj?) said that tech staff
is represented at Cyberspace Board meetings.  I don't think it is represented
"truthfully" i.e. not that there is malice or lying..but just that our full
capacity for skilled and intelligent minds are not being fully presented
unless all opinions are represented.

I'm not going to bash STeve anymore than stating that I'd watched him argue
for an hour over SIMMs chips on M-Net about 13 years ago at an Arbornet Board
meeting.  Nobody wanted to participate in the debate because his tact was "I'm
the loudest and rudest."  Maybe he's changed since then.  I dunno.  I don't
care either way, actually.  I think Dan and many others have valid
contributions aond won't make kindergarden quips when they do.  I'd expected
better from Mary.

response 28 of 88:

Nov 10 00:09 UTC 2005

Yeah, that comment from Mary was totally uncalled for. She should save her
irrelevant and mean-spirited comments for m-net.

response 30 of 88:

Nov 10 01:03 UTC 2005

Regarding #21; Well, when you get down to it, not that much.  And obviously,
my contributions (such as they were) weren't enough to merit much attention,
since you aren't even aware of them, you being like on the grex board and
all that.  However, some include:

 1) Rewriting the watch program for OpenBSD.  That is, basically totally
    gutting and rewriting it.
 2) Writing the perl script that renumbered user ID's for the move to
    OpenBSD.
 3) Doing the same for group ID's.
 4) Writing the script to change the permissions on users' files when the
    system moved (and the UID's and GID's changed).
 5) Writing the login_grexpass program that allows users to login using
    grex's funky password hashing algorithm.  Actually, that was a straight-
    forward modification of an existing OpenBSD program, so perhaps it's
    not fair to say that I really wrote it.
 6) Rewriting and cleaning up a lot of the home-grown programs used here
    on grex.  That includes mostly cleaning up and modernizing various
    C programs and shell scripts (in which, by the way, a bunch of bugs
    were fixed, and old cruft accumulated from years on SunOS was removed).
    I tried to do this under the rubric of a ``grexsoft'' effort where I
    tried to get other members of the community to contribute to our
    software, but no one else really pitched in.  Eventually, I more or
    less gave up.  But I did check in a bugfix the other day.
 7) I had something to do with figuring out how pf worked when we moved
    to OpenBSD and figuring out how to do grex's funky ``you're not a
    member and you can't access the Internet...'' stuff.  But Joe Gelinas
    really spearheaded that and I think my contribution amounted to reading
    a man page and commenting or something of the like.
 8) I'd like to think that a lot of my comments and advocating when we
    moved to nextgrex were helpful.  I thought a lot about how big to make
    partitions, what to put on them, what services (read: daemons) to run,
    and stuff like that.  Ultimately, very little of that actually got
    adopted, I guess.
 9) I fixed the group file when we moved to OpenBSD (by getting rid of
    continuation lines).
10) On oldgrex, I wrote a program that automatically and continuously
    walked over the filesystem and looked for files that were known to be
    part of things like eggdrop, psybnc, etc  (by means of looking at file
    sizes and computing MD5 checksums of the contents of files and comparing
    them with a database of sorts; if a file matched, it was automatically
    deleted.  This helped cut down on some of the disk space problems).
11) I donated an UltraSPARC 2 and an UltraSPARC 1/something to grex when
    we first started thinking about nextgrex, plus a 9GB disk.  That was
    a few hundred dollars worth of hardware.  I don't know whatever
    happened to that hardware; I think Marcus Watts took it for his
    personal use.
12) General staff type stuff: cleaning up disk space when necessary,
    cleaning out the mail queue when spammers clogged it up, locking
    accounts that were mailbombing and running hacker tools and driving
    up the load average and things like that.
13) Installed various programs out of the OpenBSD ports collection.
    Mindnight Commander, GPG, common lisp, doc++, all of that was me.
14) Worked on the exim setup a bit to try and cut down on the size of
    the mail queue.  I cleaned up a lot of stuff that was problematic
    in the nightly security report (which, undoubtedly, no one actually
    reads).
15) I installed RT for tracking bugs in grexsoft and, I had hoped, for
    managing email to help@cyberspace.org, but no one else used it.

Maybe other things, but that's some of the bigger stuff.  I did a lot of
various small things during the move to nextgrex, though Jan and Joe
really did most of the work.  Obviously, like I said, it wasn't enough to
warrant much attention.

response 32 of 88:

Nov 10 01:27 UTC 2005

 We don't *KNOW* that that's why Grex is crashing, but even if you are
 correct the PC weasel card (boy, what a stupid name!) is worth discussing
 unless you assume that Grex will never ever crash again or that someone
 will always be available in Ann Arbor to reset it.

response 34 of 88:

Nov 10 03:50 UTC 2005

I'm not sure I see the conflict here.  We know we need to upgrade
the OS and in fact, most of the work for that has already been
completed and will be rolled out soon.  There have been a lot of
fixes between 3.5 and 3.8 and there is some reason to believe that
the bug or exploit causing the crashes will have been addressed.
If it is not, at least we are on a recent revision and back in a
position to take our debugging data and get some assistance from
the OpenBSD community.

Having (hopefully) reduced the number of crashes, there remains a
separate issue of system access when it does crash.

Adding remote console is a great way to reduce or possibly eliminate
the need to visit provide.net in person when grex does crash.  It
allows recovery outside of provide.net's business hours and increases
the pool of staff who can help recover the system when this occurs.

Had this been in place already, any one of us could have jumped in
remotely to recover the system after the recent crashes and with
the global distribution of current staff members, we have pretty
good timezone coverage.  Locally based staff otherwise lacking the
time to hike out to provide.net might still have time to fix it if
they could connect to the console from home.

response 36 of 88:

Nov 10 04:55 UTC 2005

I'd just like to see more energy devoted to solving the root problem of
the present instability, rather than adding hardware to sort of cover it
up.

response 38 of 88:

Nov 10 12:03 UTC 2005

Don't take that personally, Dan. I have a feeling Mary's that rude with
everyone.

response 40 of 88:

Nov 10 13:07 UTC 2005

Regarding #38; Yes, I think you're right, but that's hardly the point.  Mary
has systematically gone out of her way to be confrontational and rude to me
for a few years now, and I'm frankly just sick of it.  If my contributions
around here aren't valued, then why should I continue making them?

response 42 of 88:

Nov 10 13:17 UTC 2005

I think the thing is, grex is simply not interested in my help.  Oh well.
To be honest, I *don't* have time for it anymore, anyway.  But, I tried to
give what I thought were well-reasoned and rational arguments for my
views, and all I got back was vitriol.

response 44 of 88:

Nov 10 15:37 UTC 2005

I'm going to try to keep this away from personal comments while still 
sharing how I see this issue.

STeve is highly qualified and a dedicated volunteer.  Grex wouldn't be 
here if it wasnt' for STeve and Marcus.  If he is no longer able to give 
as much, so be it.  I miss him and wish him well.  Did he make some 
decisions that now look like the wrong choices?  Probably.  But I was 
there for at least some of the discussion regarding which operating 
system to use.  If anyone felt this was a huge mistake, they sure kept 
that quiet.  Preferences, maybe, but not a mistake.  And it's the nature 
of the beast that the more involved you are, the more decisions you 
make, the greater your chances for a misstep or two.  I'm very greatful 
to STeve that he's done so much for Grex that he's made some mistakes.

Some staff have been doing a lot of work in the background here, not 
asking for applause or recognition.  I don't blame folks for not knowing 
about this.  But it's happening.  Anyone considered staff should be 
aware of the problems and ongoing efforts.

Is volunteer staff a precious commodity at the moment?  You betcha.  I 
think the emotional and social payoffs of volunteering time for Grex 
have been tanking for the last few years.  Lots of reasons.  No idea of 
how to turn that around.  But I'm pretty sure having your reputation 
described as "overblown" by another staff member, in a public forum, 
isn't what makes you want to give up yet another Saturday, installing 
software.  I'd love to see better team spirit among a small group of 
staff who are supportive of each other.   

I agree with Dan that it's time we left Pico behind.  I think there is 
general agreement that FreeBSD would be a better fit for Grex.  I agree 
with him that in the past a few people tended to have more sway in our 
important decisions, but that's not their fault.  Not really.  

response 46 of 88:

Nov 10 17:02 UTC 2005

Gee, that's ironic.  Mary, you do realize that I *was* on grex staff and
am now *not*, because of the way that *I've* been treated?  I'm no slouch
at this computer stuff myself, but to have my good advice continually
ignored and not even have my ideas given any sort of discussion, and then
to be insulted for it to boot, is just too much to take.  Grex isn't worth
it, because you and others like you haven't made it worth it.  You have
failed.

Way to preserve that precious volunteer staff commodity!  I think you're
the one who hasn't a clue, personally.