Minutes from 6/13/10 Board Meeting

Present: kentn, unicorn, gelinas, tsty, mary, remmers, denise

Meeting called to order at 6:40 pm

Treasurer s Report:
-The change in signatures [adding tsty] has taken place
-Everything s paid/up to date [phone bill, provide.net, etc]
-The tax form for 2009 has been taken care of
-Tsty will be providing a full treasurer s report [with balance, 
expenses, membership status, etc]; after that, we can work on a 
membership drive

Staff Report:
-Need to look into getting a valid certificate to validate grex as a 
secure site; Cross has taken care of this in the past; can we get the 
account name and number so we can update it?
-The web newuser  needs fixing; remmers will be looking into this
-There have been a couple brief outages [several weeks ago, and a few 
weeks before that]. On both occasions, remmers went to provide.net. Both
 times the machine would not boot from the hard drive; had to be
rebooted  using the cd drive. Someone with technical background needs to
look into  this [STeve?] -USB doing daily backups; remmers has also been
doing backups, staff has  been notified how to access the backups he s
doing. -What users access grex through the web and who from command
lines?

Mission Statement: Even with the changes over the years, the mission 
statement still appears to be adequate for what we re doing. There is an
 item in co-op for disscusion.

Phone Lines, as per item discussion in co-op, we should be able to get 
rid of at least one, if not both, lines. Gelinas moved that we remove 1 
line, tsty seconded; motion passed. Tsty will be calling the phone 
company to cancel the second line [734-484-0513].  The MOTD should be 
updated with which line is still available for now [734-484-0512]

The email/spam discussion continues.  Spam is now 90% of incoming mail; 
there s nothing we can do to filter it before it gets to the disc.  We 
are currently using gmail for board and staff communications. We don t 
have resources to run email; email on grex is unreliable/not safe but 
some people still like to play around with what we have. Can we set up 
mail so only staff can be contacted?

The  what services do we want to offer  discussion also continues. 
Things we may want include conferencing, perhaps blogging [how?], shell 
access, script access, scp... What web services? Image storing/services?
Would we police this? Allow links instead?  What can we do to open up 
the system and still maintain decent conversations? Provide private 
conferences to gain control over trouble makers? Make it 
readable/writeable... What can we do through backtalk?  Do we want lynx 
to go away? Why NOT keep it?

Having a grex  Town Meeting  has been discussed several times to 
publicly talk about what we want to do/provide. But scheduling something
 local would limit participation. So an item in coop will be entered as 
the public place to discuss these issues and it could be linked to each 
agora.

Next meeting is scheduled for 8/1/10 from 6:30-8:30 pm at Denise s 
house.

9:13 Motion to adjourn was made and seconded and passed

69 responses total.

  
fast and good ... ur hired!   tnx.

Excellent, Denise.  Thank you!

Note that I put a Grex Town Hall item here in coop (#278).  I've
sent e-mail to Katie and Walter to see if we can get it linked first
and then set up to roll with each new agora.  In the meantime, it's
available here in coop.

When can we expect a financial report?  Also, when will the 2009
state corporation update be sent in (one page) so that we do not
lose our status as a non-profit? After that, we'll need to send
in the 2010 update, too. 

The State form is due in September or October; Mark probably sent it in
this past Fall.

Not from what I've heard from him directly.  If he has sent in the 2009
form since then, that's great.  If not, we need to do that soon.

Correction: I see the MI Annual Report for 2009 (that was due in Oct
2009) has been received by the state on Jan. 20, 2010 and filed on Feb
26, 2010.  Mark is, however, our resident agent still (unless we've
filed a change of agent form), so will continue to get the notices from
the state about this annual update.  This is not an issue as long as he
is willing to serve in that role (it does not need to be a Board member
as far as I know).

Here is the rather long URL to the image of the filed form:
http://www.dleg.state.mi.us/bcs_corp/image.asp?FILE_TYPE=MAO&FILE_NAME=D201
003\2010067\GSI00045283.TIF

This was one of the issues that was outstanding when we began the
transfer from previous treasurer to new treasurer.  I'm glad it's no
longer a problem.

The resident agent can be anyone (but should be a reliable person).

As I said, not an issue...

Well, having a reliable person can be an issue...

True.  I've brought this up before with the Treasurer.  It's not been
on the top of his list, understandably since we have a few more months
before the next one is due.  However, if we need to make a change of
agent, it would be good to know now rather than later.  I don't have a
good sense of whether aruba is willing to continue to do this task or
not.

resp:0: if someone can get me the godaddy login/password, I can handle
the ssl certificate renewal.  As well, as I've offered before, I'd be
happy to setup Grex on my mail server and offer it as I do with m-net's
email.  The previous interest seemed low, so perhaps there is no
interest in doing this.

I'll be seeing Mark on Saturday and will ask him about this.  

Re 12: sounds good to me.  Will other staff help Tony out on this so
we can get this fixed?  I don't recall the details of our in-meeting
investigation into who the current SSL cert is registered with.  I
assume it would be good to just renew the current one rather than have
expired certs all over creation.

resp:14: It's a godaddy certificate, I've already verified that (and
noted in resp:12).  If we have the username/password for the godaddy
account, renewing is simple.  Pay the fee, and get the new certificate,
then install it.  It also appears to be a multi-domain certificate, so
we should modify it to also work for grex.cyberspace.org so that
backtalk is also encrypted since it also runs over ssl.

This is one of those items that the Board said they could handle in
e-mail for the purposes of authorizing a payment.  Do you have a
cost for this renewal?
 
Also, we noted some issues with some aliased domains so having it
work with multiple domains sounds good (staff were going to look
into the setup).

all I can say is..if tony is willing to do all this stuff he has talked 
about then give him root and reigns

resp:16: I believe it's about $90 for the 5 domain ssl certificate.  The
current certificate expires on the 29th.

resp:17: I've already got root, but thanks for the support. :)

Okay, that sounds reasonable for 5 domains.  The Board was hoping it
would be less than $100.  Now it sounds like the username/password
may be the tie-up.  Is there anyone one staff, who knows, who can
tell you?  You might need to e-mail Dan.

I'll email staff (of which dan is a member) and see if I can kick up any
dirt.

Great, thanks!

The Board voted in e-mail to authorize up to $100 for the purpose of
purchasing renewed SSL certificates. The vote was 6 in favor, 1 not
voting.  Approval was granted on June 24, 2010.

Has there been any word from Dan on the login credentials?

not yet. :(  I'm unsure what email address would have even been used to
create it.

OK, well, hopefully we'll hear from Dan and he can enlighten us.
Thanks.

Does it cost more money to start from scratch as opposed to renewing a 
license?

No.  The cost will not be different.

But probably if we already have an account they'll see that we're 
trying to get certs for the same domains and question what we're
doing.  Would it make sense to call them, explain the situation,
and ask what evidence they need to see to let us do the renewal?

Someone in position of authority for the corporation could probably give
them a call and explain that we have no idea what our login is and see
what is necessary to retrieve it.  I'd expect the President or VP should
be able to get the process started.  If we had the login, we might be
able to then get the password reset.

I can try to do that Tony.  Can you email me the particulars I need
to know, such as the domains we want to renew.  A phone number would
be good, too.

There are no domains that need renewal, to my knowledge.  All of the
email contacts on the domain appear to be treasurer@cyberspace.org, so
perhaps that's our login.

The following is what I see as the domains on the certificate though:

www.grex.org
grex.org
www.cyberspace.org
cyberspace.org

Thanks Tony.  (Sorry, I meant domains for which we want certs). I'll try
to give them a call.  We'll see what they say.  The worst that could
happen is they won't talk to me ;)

OK, I gave them a call and it took a while for them to find our account,
but they did.  Unfortunately, I'm in the same boat as staff in terms of
getting even what the account name is (it's not treasurer@).  I got into
the web page there and had it send an e-mail to the registered e-mail
about resetting the password.  But I don't know what that e-mail address
is other than it is something at gmail.com.  It could be Dan's or it
could be grex-staff (wouldn't that be nice) or it could be something
else entirely.  They are looking for the 4-digit PIN before they'll even
discuss resetting a password.

What they did say was that after these certs expire, you can set up a
new account and get new certs.  So that seems to be the way out if we
can't find the PIN and the account name.

Well, I haven't seen the grex-staff email, so I'm guessing that it was
probably cross' personal email or something.  We'll go the route of
setting up a new account if it expires.  At that point, if I'm the one
renewing (and I haven't seen anyone object to that), then I'll need some
cooperation from whoever owns treasurer@ now, since it'll send email
requesting authorization to the contact listed in the domain name
registration.  It won't be too painful though.

Good deal.  With any luck Dan will pop in briefly and let staff know
the details.  Otherwise, with a new account, I wonder if we can have
the e-mail be grex-staff@gmail.com so that if this happens again
more than one person will in theory get the e-mail?
 
TS is the treasurer now.  Since the Board approved of the expenditure,
there shouldn't be a problem with TS helping out in terms of payment
and/or authorization.

Sounds good.  I'd support making the account grex-staff@gmail.com.

Making the account in grex-staff's name is a good idea...

(It's not that hard to add yourself to the treasurer address, Tony. ;)

resp:37: there is that, but I'm generally opposed to just attaching
myself to various mailing lists just because I can. :)

Grex has never before paid for a certificate, and the treasurer was
never involved in this process.  If any money changed hands, Dan must
have paid for it himself.

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