response 26 of 65:

Aug 1 04:27 UTC 1999

John (Remmers),

It does sound reasonable, and I suspect that your are still polling, but 
it has been a while since the last response, so I thought I would remind 
you to post the tentative dates here, so that the public will have an 
ample opportunity to participate in the meeting (whenever it happens).

response 28 of 65:

Aug 9 20:45 UTC 1999

I think that GREX is not properly positioned to make such a risky step into
expansion.  Unless we had much more solid information on the basis of which
to believe that such an expansion would result in a greater than 50% growth
in the member base, it would be like blowing a balloon up to 50% larger than
its standard capacity, just to bounce it around for a minute before it pops.
We'd prefer to be able to bounce GREX around for a long time to come, at it's
present size or a carefully orchestrated growth rate, rather than go boom.

response 30 of 65:

Aug 10 03:23 UTC 1999

I guess that for now there is still no progress on a get-together to 
discuss future plans.

response 32 of 65:

Aug 10 11:21 UTC 1999

Didn't see srw's resp:26 when he posted it, since I was away for a week.
Thanks for the reminder; now that I'm home and settled in, I'll get back
to this. Mary's right; it looks like September is the earliest the
meeting can happen. We're trying for a weekend meeting, mostly likely
Sunday. I've polled board & staff about dates that would work, and will
post date info here when I've caught up on responses.

response 34 of 65:

Aug 10 23:42 UTC 1999

So what's the current block to the number of connections allowed? Is it
bandwidth or proccessing power? If I remember right, Grex has around $5K in
its coffers and around one to three hundred dollars of surplus each month
(this may have changed due to the phone credit running out, so correct me).
$5K could easily buy a few more processors and memory chips (and whatever else
is needed, such as faster disks for /usr and /var), and $100/month can buy
a dedicated dialup (though at pretty small speeds, something like 14.4 or 28.8
kbps); a little math shows that the bandwidth would support around 7-8 more
connections, and I have never seen all of the dialups in use so one of those
modems could be used (or could be bought).

To be a bit more clear from what I had said earlier, maybe we shouldn't
actively try to grow in terms of users; Grex has more users every day, and
grows at a healthy rate. Upgrading the proccessing power for the increased
connections would probably allow for more mail spooling and such. A bit of
retrospect makes me think that I should have said that we should be preparing
for the growth we have, by doing stuff like installing a few extra disks for
the home filesystem as needed (The Pumpkin inventory shows that there are a
bunch of spare 2-gig drives), and eventually (In the far future, probably
around the time the commies take over Russia and they invade and Grex gets
blown to bits and outlawed) Grex will need to get around the 65K user limit...
All of this will tie in well with the transitions to the newer OS's which
we'll need to do some time.

I do agree with Steve that adding more connections right now without doing
anything isn't going to hurt; even at max capacity, Grex generally isn't slow
(although there are some periods of lag), so it wouldn't do anything too bad.
Then again, I remember times when there was a 70-user queue, I went to get
the mail, found out that my login window had expired (Did I mention that my
driveway is a fifth of a mile long?), gotten back into the 70-user queue, and
goten on in 10 minutes.

response 36 of 65:

Aug 11 18:09 UTC 1999

I got a busy signal for five minutes this morning, first time in a month.
I don't see any problems with grex as it is right now.

response 38 of 65:

Aug 15 03:04 UTC 1999

Yetch.

I can think of at least 3 other possibilities to investigate.  (1) DSL
(or whatever the symmetric version of ADSL is called).  (2) fractional
T1.  (3) stuffing a bunch of ethernet cards into a couple of cheap
486's, & teaching them to talk to a bank of ascend pipelines; the idea
would be to send 50% of the packets down one ethernet card to one
pipeline, and 50% to the other pipeline.  We could probably even invest
in "cheap" pipelines with this approach (the pipelines that don't know
about multiple mac addresses and routing), because we can do packet
encapsulation and hide the actual ip address from the pipeline.

The T1 approach is perhaps the most scary financially speaking; but we
have started to collect cheap T1 hardware, so this may yet eventually
become feasible.  The basic approach here would be to wait for a used
cisco router to fall out of the sky on us (which is surely getting more
& more likely as time goes on), and then figure out how we can pay for
the telco expenses, plus delicate negotiations with our ISP regarding
bandwidth and hardware at his end.

response 40 of 65:

Aug 16 00:32 UTC 1999

Well, my coworker who was interested in multiple ISDN lines was interested
in this in part because he has 384k DSL that isn't reliable, at which
point, two ISDN lines would make sense if you could get sane routers
at a sane price.  So DSL was a decidedly disinteresting option to him.

If you can get an ISP that will give you free IP conectivity if you pay
for the local loop to them, the next question to investigate is whether
colocation at that ISP makes any sense.  And I don't know what the
situation in Ann Arbor is with that.  (I was talking to an ISP in
Boston recently who's quite happy to host some random IRC server
for someone, and I would be unsurprised if he would be equally happy
to host something like grex.)

Marcus, there's also something called `frame relay' that you neglected
to mention.

response 42 of 65:

Aug 16 05:59 UTC 1999

I also didn't mention fiber optic cable, although we do have a fddi
interface and could, in theory, run a fiber cable out to our ISP.  (If
someone rich died and left us a sufficiently large pile of money).
We've also considered using a radio link, or an open air infra-red link;
but these both have distance and weather limitations, and need expensive
equipment.

The major issue with colocation is having 24 hour access.  Most of the
time, grex runs quite happily unattended, but when there are problems,
we really *need* that access, and unfortunately, since all of our staff
are volunteers, that generally means late at night and on weekends, when
they have free time.  Another related possibility would be to try to be,
not quite "co-located", but "nearly" co-located, such that we can
basically toss an ethernet cable over the wall.  We investigated both of
these alternatives in the last go-around, and found a few almost-deals,
but there were the usual set of problems that prevented closure, so they
didn't happen (in one case, the ISP went out of business!)  Co-location
isn't really a viable alternative with our current ISP (I *think* the
other end of our ISDN line goes to the apartment of one of the owners,
and he understandably wasn't interested in giving us carte blance access
to his bedroom).

response 44 of 65:

Nov 9 14:43 UTC 1999

As mentioned in the minutes of the October board meeting, a "long-range
planning" meeting is scheduled - hopefully not tentatively, this time -
for Sunday November 21.  Mark (aruba) volunteered to host it.  Details
of time and place will be forthcoming.

It's to be a brainstorming session on Grex's long-term plan, open to the
public.  I'm hopeful that as many interested folks as possible can make
it.  I do suggest that people review the issues brought up in this item
and make further comments here.

I frankly don't know if any concensus for significant change in what
Grex does will come out of this meeting or not.  But the face of online
communications has changed radically since Grex opened for business in
1991, so I agree with others who feel that a look at what Grex can and
should be doing in today's online world is timely.

No "official" action can be taken at the meeting itself; as I say, it's
a brainstorming session.  Any proposals for significant changes that
come out of this meeting would of course be subject to thorough
discussion and review in Coop.

response 46 of 65:

Nov 12 04:40 UTC 1999

Well, so long as an exception is made for Arlo.  I'm not sure we can
convince him only to talk when he has the bottle, and I'm not sure
anyone else wants to handle the bottle after he's done with it.

One thing Grex might consider getting into:  allowing people to create
their own conferences or groups of conferences.  These wouldn't be "Grex
conferences" as such, and they wouldn't show up on the Grex list of
conferences.  Anyone could create one for any purpose, publicizing it
anyway they want.  You wouldn't have to talk to anyone about it, just
type a command and it appears.  We might or might not allow closed
conferences to be created - probably not.  These conferences would be
automatically deleted if they were idle for too long.

response 48 of 65:

Nov 17 03:41 UTC 1999

Ummm...Somebody ought to fix the MOTD so that it reads to look in item # 92,
not item #93 for the information on the FOG meeting....:)