Grex Coop Conference

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Grex Coop Item 38: Board Meeting Minutes: August 5, 2007 [frozen]
Entered by janc on Mon Aug 6 15:34:04 UTC 2007:

Grex Board Meeting Minutes - August 5, 2007

  Present:  Mark Conger (aruba) - Board Member, Treasurer
            Jan Wolter (janc) - Board Member, Secretary - Staff
            Colleen McGee (cmcgee) - Board Member
            Larry Kestenbaum (polygon) - Board Member
            Mary Remmers (mary)
            John Remmers (remmers)
  Telepresent:
            Dan Cross (cross) - Board Member
  Absent:
            S. Lynne Fremont (slynne) - Board Member, President
            Bruce Howard (bhoward) - Board Member - Staff

Opening Gavel Tap:  8:09 pm

   The beginning of the meeting was delayed by lack of quorum.  Lynne
   had originally planned to phone in from Nova Scotia, but a power
   outage interfered with this plan.  Quorum was reached when Dan was
   able to call in.

   Since Grex's official president was unavailable, the treasurer,
   Mark Conger, presided in her place.  Since Grex's official gavel
   was unavailable, Mark's father's gavel was tapped in its place.

Treasurer's Report:

  Grex took in $206 in May and spent $158, leaving a balance of $6785
  in the bank account.  There are 57 members.

Staff Report:

  OS UPGRADE

  Grex needs to be upgraded to a newer version of OpenBSD.   Jan had
  promised to start this process at the last board meeting, but hadn't
  actually succeeded in doing anything, and didn't feel optimistic about
  being able to do much more in the upcoming months.

  Dan Cross has experience doing remote upgrades of OpenBSD systems,
  and is willing to do so.  He expects to shut Grex down for an upgrade
  starting next weekend (August 11-12).

  Before we can do an upgrade, we need to backup Grex.  Mark Conger will
  drive an external IDE drive that can be plugged into Grex's USB port
  and that is big enough to back up all of Grex.  We'll make the backup,
  and unplug the drive during the backup, to ensure that it is preserved.
  Possibly someone will take the drive home and burn it onto DVDs to
  make and additional backup.

  NEW HARDWARE

  We generally feel that the time has come to buy a new computer.
  We're hoping that we can get something designed to work as a remotely
  administrated server, perhaps with remote console capabilities.  We'd
  also like to go with a RAID disk system, error correcting memory, and
  it would be nice if it were rack mountable, giving us more flexiability
  with future ISP hosting options.

  Dan Cross will put together a suggested list of hardware and post it
  to coop.  Board would like to have something that can be approved by
  the next meeting.

Old Business:

  APPOINTMENT OF STAFF

  For some reason, the question of adding Chuck Martin (login ID unicorn)
  to staff was addressed as old business, perhaps because expanding
  staff has been a long standing goal.

  Larry Kestenbaum moved:

        To add Chuck Martin to staff with root access and with all the
        privileges pertaining there to.

  Colleen McGee seconded.  Five votes in favor, none opposed, none
  abstained.  Motion passed.

  ADDITIONAL SUBSTAFF ROLES

  Dan asked if we should be considering creating more non-root staff
  posts.  One idea suggested with creating a Webmaster post, with the
  power to update Grex's web pages.

  Discussion wandered into the subject of resetting lost passwords.
  Jan mentioned that he once wrote an password resetting system for
  Grex called repass, that was never actually put into use, but probably
  could be.

Schedule Next Meeting:

  The next board meeting will be on September 9, 2007 tentatively at
  Lynne's house (nobody actually asked Lynne if this was OK.  If not,
  we'll do it at Mark Conger's house.)  Gather at 7:00pm, gavel at 7:30pm.

New Business:

  There was further discussion of the proposal to create three user
  classes with respect to internet access, as discusssed in previous
  meetings.  Colleen will develop a proposal and post it to coop.

  There was some discussion of recent vandal attacks on Grex, which came
  to no particular conclusion.

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by kingjon on Mon Aug 6 16:04:52 2007:

Two apparent typos:
s/make and additional backup/make an additional backup/
s/pertaining there to/pertaining thereto/

#2 of 4 by remmers on Mon Aug 6 16:50:48 2007:

And in addition:

s/drive an external IDE drive/purchase an external IDE drive/

Nice minutes.  And I speak as someone who was present.

#3 of 4 by cross on Mon Aug 6 17:10:28 2007:

Since we're picking nits about typos....  And s/unplug the drive during the
backup/unplug the drive during the upgrade/.  It wouldn't do to unplug the
backup drive during the backup.  :-)

#4 of 4 by slynne on Fri Aug 17 04:02:41 2007:

my house is ok

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