Grex Board Meeting Minutes - February 27, 2007
Present: S. Lynne Fremont (slynne) - Board Member, President
Jan Wolter (janc) - Board Member, Secretary
Mark Conger (aruba) - Board Member, Treasurer
Collen McGee (cmcgee) - Board Member
Larry Kestenbaum (polygon) - Board Member
Telepresent:
Dan Cross (cross) - Board Member
Opening Gavel Tap:
A quorum was present before the official starting time of the meeting, only
the call-in members, Bruce Howard (bhoward) and Dan Cross, being absent.
Giddy with this unfamiliar situation, the board dispatched its president
out into the sleet and snow to retrieve the official Grex Gavel from her
car and bring the meeting officially to order exactly on time at 8:30pm.
Board member Bruce Howard (bhoward) was unable to phone in due to a
family emergency. Dan did not get this message and was slightly late
because he was waiting for Bruce to call him so they both could conference
in, and probably didn't expect the board's unprecedented experiment with
punctuality. Dan joined the meeting after the Treasurer's report.
Treasurer's Report:
The treasurer gave the board an overview of Grex's recent income and
expenditures. Given the existence and ready availability of detailed
Treasurer's report, the secretary does not feel inclined to repeat them
here.
Oh, what the heck.
In January income was $186, expenditures were $195, the latter being high
than usual due to PO Box renewal fees. Income to date in February was
$186 also. There had been 1 renewing member in January, leaving Grex with
58 members.
Mark had been corresponding with IRS. They had asked why we hadn't filed
a 990 form (a corporate tax return) in the last few years and wondered if
we still existed, and Mark had told them that since our income in each of
those years had been far below the minimum for which filing is required
($25,000) we had not done so. All is presumably fine.
Mark had also completed the annual paperwork for Grex sales tax license,
which was fairly simple as we hadn't sold anything.
Staff Report:
Jan realized belatedly that he was now the only staff member on the board,
and the staff report largely rested on his unprepared shoulders. A great
deal was found to talk about anyway, though the secretary did not always
take terrifically good notes, being too busy talking.
Staff had recently held it's first face-to-face meeting in years. A
report has been posted.
John Remmers has shut down the CVS server machine. This was his personal
machine whose services he has for many years kindly donated to Grex. Lots
of warning was given. Apparently a tar file of the CVS directory exists,
though nobody at the meeting actually knew who had it. STeve Andre has
said he will set up a new CVS server on a machine in his office. Dan Cross
advocated have the CVS server be on Grex. This would certainly be simpler
to set up and maintain. Jan thought this might be OK, but isn't terribly
fond of it. Need to make sure up to date copies are kept on other machines.
Perhaps staff people can set up software to automatically check out
copies onto personal machines periodically.
Board member Dan Cross has volunteered to rejoin staff. This was awkward
to discuss, since Dan was, of course, present and most of the staff was
not. Discussion of staff organizational issues was plentiful and
interleaved with all discussion of technical issues. For the sake of
sanity, I will postpone it to the end of this report.
Jan repaired and rebuilt the reap tools. Abandoned accounts have apparently
not been reaped from Grex since before the move to OpenBSD, and the tools
for performing one had not been in operational order.
Joe Gelinas actually performed the reap, removing something like 48,000
abandoned accounts. (I didn't mention it at the meeting, but the fact that
the reap was not done by the tool author has to do that the fact that use
of the reap tools has been adequately documented in the staff conference,
so we are probably now in a situation where any staff member has the
information and tools available to be able to do a reap.) Apparently only
two users have complained that their accounts were inappropriately reaped.
That's about par for the course in a big reap.
The fact that the number of active users has fallen to around 5,000 is a
bit surprising. Dan Cross felt that the period when newuser was shut down
may have contributed to this, and that now that newuser is on again, the
user count may rise a bit.
STeve Andre had detected signs of impending failure of one of Grex's
SCSI disks. We had a spare disk on had that was a factory reconditioned
drive that was sent to us as a replacement after a previous disk failed.
STeve attempted to install that drive, but was getting errors from it,
and decided it too was bad. Instead STeve acted on a suggestion by
Dan Cross to redistribute the data from the dieing drive onto the spare
partitions of the two existing drives. This leaves is in a perfectly
functional condition for now. It's not urgent to get a new disk drive.
There is active discussion about getting a hardware RAID system, with
new disks, and migrating Grex onto that. Staff and interested users
are still actively discussing options. Board was very positive on the
idea, but decided not to do an authorizing motion until a specific
proposal was made.
At the staff meeting, staff had discussed combining the installation
of the RAID disks with an upgrade to the new version of OpenBSD which
will be released in May. Board was unenthusiastic about combining the
tasks, but now that I think of it, there's another reason to consider
doing this. The spare partitions that we used to store the data from
the dead disk, are the ones we normally use to build new versions of
the operating system on. They are no longer available. So we should
either do it simultaneously, or do the RAID first.
Jan has implemented a tool that would allow people to be added to the
list of accounts authorized for sending outgoing mail from Grex. This
still needs to be set up. A problem is that it is hard to send mail
to request to be added to the list when you can't send outgoing mail.
There was some discussion of getting some kind of web-based trouble ticket
reporting system set up on Grex. Dan Cross mentioned "rt" as a candidate.
The feeling is that mail to staff is not being much read, and is hopeless
jammed with spam. Such a mechanism could also be used for people making
requests to be added to the outgoing mail list and such. This needs
investigation.
There was some discussion of who is currently on staff. Of particular
interest is Kip DeGraaf, who never resigned from staff but has pretty
thoroughly disappeared from sight. It was felt that having this idle
account still be in the 'wheel' group was a security risk. So Collen
moved that:
Kip DeGraaf's login (kip) be removed from the 'wheel' group.
This was seconded by a flurry of voices and unanimously approved by the
board (and I just now went in and did it).
Staff had recommended the purchase of a DVD-Read/Write drive for Grex,
to simplify backing up data on Grex. Dan advocated getting a good
quality drive since the data is valuable. Jan argued for a cheap
drive since it's likely only going to be lightly used. Mark Conger
moved that:
The staff be authorized to spend up to $200 for a DVD-read/write
drive.
This was seconded by Larry and unanimously approved by the board.
There was a great deal of discussion about the general shortage of
staff time, the failure to get things done in a timely manner, and
the need to bring in new staff. The one clear outcome of this
discussion is that we want to hold a joint staff/board meeting.
It is scheduled at:
Sunday, March 25, 8pm - at the home of Mark Conger.
The intent is to discuss how we can get back to having a fully
functional staff.
I don't have detailed notes of everything that was said, but I
personally came away with the feeling that staff needs to resume
meeting regularly. In theory staff decision-making has always been
a consensual process. But on difficult questions, that consensus
has always been reached in face-to-face meetings, not in conference
discussions or emails. Two problems have developed in recent years.
First, since non-local staff have not been in those meetings, they
have been largely shut out of the decision-making process. Second,
those meetings have pretty much stopped happening, so there was no
decision-making process. This situation need to be repaired.
Either a new decision-making process needs to be invented, or the
old one has to be brought back into operation. Staff has fallen
apart and needs to be put back together again. Perhaps the March
meeting can help with that.
Old Business:
Surplus:
Grex ran a $2700 surplus last year. We'd generally like to
re-invest this in the system. The idea of going to RAID disks
was discussed during the staff report, and seems like a good
idea, substantially improving Grex's reliability.
Changing to a motherboard that would be support a remote console
would be another attractive idea, that needs more study.
E-Mail and Spam:
Cindi has offered users help with spam. Level of response to that
might be interesting to note. Staff has expressed an interest in
experimenting with system-wide spam filtering, but has little confidence
in the effectiveness.
Schedule Next Meeting:
The next meeting will take place immediately before the joint board
staff meeting announced above:
Sunday, March 25, 7pm - at Mark Conger's home
New Business:
We need to appoint a new vote administrator. Mark Conger moved that:
Joe Gelinas be appointed as voteadm.
This was seconded by Collen and approved unanimously by the board.
The board congratulated Mark Conger on the completion of his PhD in
mathematics.
Closing Gavel Tap:
The meeting was brought to a close at a time I forgot to write down, but
which was probably around 10pm.
16 responses total.
Why do you need outgoing mail from grex to write grexers to request outgoing mail? Sindi can donate a DVD-writer that is known to write CDs but not tested for DVDs, but writes CDs slowly. And would appreciate a working DVD reader from someone on grex to replace it. Two grexers already wrote for help with spam filtering. I asked them a few questions (dump spam or save to a folder, etc.). If it hits ten I will ask for help automating this. Sindi used third-person to show how the name is currently spelled. Thanks for an amusing report.
We need a working, somewhat speedy DVD burner, not a slow CD burner. I, for one, do not want to spend all day switching out and waiting for a slow CD burner to do backups when a current, up-to-date DVD burner can do the same job in about an hour.
This is a DVD burner. I have not tested it. A friend thought the CD burner part seemed slow but he was not sure. It came out of a 3-year-old computer that we tried to fix (fried) and were given. How often has grex been doing backups?
Thanks for the minutes, Jan! They are very complete.
Yeah Jan. Your minutes are wonderful. We should have hoopsnaggled you into being Secretary a long time ago ;)\
Re the reap: I did it because I've been doing it. I took over disk-scrubbing and reaping from Valerie when I first joined staff. I hadn't done one since the migration because the tools didn't work. Once they got fixed, I went back to work. ;)
Thanks, all.
Might I gripe a bit just randomly logging in here.. Looking at grex, it appears there are 4 drives attached to the system, 3 being scsi at one ata. (I may be missing some, but if you don't mind, just stick with me..) The scsi storage appears to be 2x18G and 1x36G, and ~40G of some IDE disk. For backups and data storage, a 250g disk can be had for around $63 or so (including shipping). Find some old PC to put it in with an ethernet card (i can donate one) and you can set up a cron job to rsync several full copies/snapshots of grex a day based on the current utilization. this would give a possible 'live image' that could be brought up in the case of a major disaster. Finding an old(er) PC to put the disk(s) in as well as getting it up and running would be cheaper in the long term than a dvd writer plus media. I'm not sure what quantity of space we have at provide.net, but such a machine could be connected with a cross over cable or similar dedicated backup media. I've found that having something like this that can be automated (and reduce the need for what appears to be a resource/time constrained staff) will also provide fairly predictable results over the long term. While this does mean using a "cheap" ata disk that is also "slow" and has all sorts of other possibly undesirable effects, I firmly believe that the positives from this type of a setup are significant and will represent an efficent use of the resources that grex has over time. Using a pair of GE cards for this would allow a speed of about 125MB/s, much faster than the 100MB/s a cheap ata-100 disk will allow. This will also be much faster than the speed typically seen from a DVD drive which is much slower, typically around 16MB/s for a 12-speed dvd reader. for comparison sake, dvd-rw gives ~3MB/s write at 2x, and dvd-r gives about 5.5MB/s for a 4x writer. I think automation and the reduction in requiring a dedicated staff member to 'change discs' is well worth the minor additional investment over the $200 that was approved for the dvd burner.
One more item, it appears that wd0 is slow because it's not in UDMA mode, it's in a PIO mode that will make it quite slow. This likely explains why folks may have a poor opinion of it. Note: wd0(pciide1:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 This could be an OS setting or someting in the bios.
I think the DVD-RW could work if we took a moment to think about what we should and should not back up. I don't think user home directories need to be backed up. Those should be the user's responsibility. Further, I don't think we need to make backups of non-customized software that we simply installed from the ports system. The question becomes "what is left over", and is it more than 4.7GB?
Why not spend $126 for (2) two 250g mirrored drives and call it good? As long as there's a controller card with mirror firmware then that should solve it, right? By the way, nice to see you Jared.
re #10 I'm not saying that a dvd-rw won't work, it'll just be slow and require physical interaction with the system. setting up something where you can automate it and is also "cheap" I think is an ideal solution. re #11 nice to see you around too. btw if there are space constraints at provide.net, an incremental rsync across the network to someplace else may also be valuable. there's creative ways to make something like that work.. a rsync or similar could be set up to go to some staffers home that housed a machine that was dedicated for backups.
yunlucky unluck@I jared munch
True, I rsync backup some client machines at my home. It doesn't bother my network connection or theirs. I suspect it would be a problem at Provide.Net, but if it wasn't, we could get a good newish system located there that could be a SPAM clearinghouse, and also rsync backup. Even with Grex's supposedly *huge* mail load I'm sure this could be made to work. I'm doing this on some truly pathetic old hardware for myself. Stats for this are here: http://mynet.whitehat-inc.com/spam.php
Re resp:4, resp:5 I'm glad you liked the minutes. Actually, this is not my first time as secretary. I was secretary in 1999. The March 1999 Grex board meeting began as follows: > AGENDA ITEM 8: Gavel Banging > > - John Remmers reminded Jan Wolter that he was secretary, and loaned him > pen and paper. > > - John Remmers confessed to having forgotten to bring a gavel. > > - Various people speculated on the agenda item numbering scheme, but > illumination did not strike. Oh, isn't it so very Grex?
Is that the meeting numbered by Sun patches?
You have several choices: