Agenda for the board meeting of Oct 21 - finances - strategies for grex + staff members + board members and board size + town hall meeting + what we want to be - staff report - ?24 responses total.
Floor suggestion: newuser (Dan has some details I sent him - can be worked in quite well with the existing system).
looks like starting about ~70 neuusers ago the new shell is in use.
resp:1 A big chunk of the discussion in the Tuesday night board meeting was, in fact, newuser; I'd even go so far as to say that discussion about newuser comprised the majority of the meeting. As TS noted in resp:2, we are, in fact, using a new shell for newuser right now. This is somewhat different from the scheme that Lee proposed to me, but it was something I did as a stop-gap to stop ongoing attacks. In a nutshell: New users on Grex no longer get access to an "unrestricted" Unix shell. Instead, they get something very limited in scope that allows them to run only a few commands that, for better or worse, can be very tightly controlled. At the same time, I changed backtalk's authentication mechanism so that users running that new shell did not have write access to backtalk. The shell doesn't support running party, tel, write, fronttalk, or picospan, and thus, new users have essentially no access to party or the conferences. As I said, this was something of a stop-gap. Moving forward, I'd like to work up a somewhat more robust mechanism for not just issuing accounts, but granting higher levels of access to the system. We're working on it; I think pretty much everyone's on roughly the same sheet of music, both technically and politically. Lee sent in a pretty specific outline that jived well with the general ideas that I and others have been having, so I think we're all headed in pretty much the same direction. Now, it's just a small matter of programming.
> The shell doesn't support running party, tel, write, fronttalk, or picospan, > and thus, new users have essentially no access to party or the conferences. What *do* they have access to, then, that would be attractive or interesting to new users?
At present? Not a lot. You can play with it yourself by running "resh" at the shell prompt and typing "help." There are a number of easter eggs in it; see if you can find them. That said, bear in mind that I said that this is very much a work in progress; what's there now is not the end-all-be-all of new access for new users. The idea is to relax things a bit over time as we identify more stuff that people are interested in. For instance, adding a read-only interface to BBS and party, or perhaps adding some sort of throttled write access (e.g., a new user can only post $n$ many times in a day, or once every $m$ minutes, with some sort of exponential backoff if that's grossly exceeded). By the way: the list you quoted does not include the things that the vast, vast majority of grex *users* are interested in: those being the C compiler, various lanaguge interpreters, and general access to the Unix shell.
i thank cross for takinghte stop-gap measures he did. adn these changes are certainly a work in progress ... just as grex is a work in progress. ther was discussion of re-energizing someting called porters that (hope i hae this right) provides a sort of filter/approval mecdhanism not too diferent from the scaling-up of opportunities to use grex. cmcgee, attendee by phone, came up with this idea a whiloe ago and iirc, it almost made it into operatoin then. since ther is a move afoot to open conferenicing to readable status for grex new users, grexis making qualty progress on several fromts, imnsho.
If you're interested in the porters stuff, have a look at item 407 in coop13; that's the original proposal. Colleen took it and ran with it and did great things in taking a very rough proposal and transforming it into something useful and usable and getting it through the board. The results of her efforts are here in this coop. The basic idea is to separate access to Grex into three strata: the initial, very limited level of access which borders on almost no access at all. The next level up is a less-restricted-but-not-total kind of access that let's a (relatively) new user send and receive email, have a web page, etc. The final level is validated access, where you've no-kidding proven your identity to Grex and we basically give you complete access to the machine and all of the software. That level is the same as for all members (past and present). The porters (btw: the name is a Shakespeare reference; Macbeth Act 2 Scene 3) are a group of volunteers, themselves verified users, who volunteer to screen new users for movement from the lowest level of access to the next-highest level of access. At the board meeting, there was some talk of them also being able to bump people down in the case of an attack; I don't recall that this was part of the original proposal, and might be worthy of a bit more discussion. Btw: resh has a `porter' easter egg in it. See if you can find it. There, I've given you the clue.
PS: TS, do you have a list of everyone who was at the meeting? People were coming and going, and sometimes it's hard to hear who all is there. Could you post it or send it to me in email? Thanks.
denise (host), aruba, unicorn, STeve, mary, remmers, tsty, - in person cross, cmcgee - by phone and a good time was chad by all..... .
damn ... did it again ...
Nyuk nyuk nyuk....
theory says 15 mar 09 after 1800 hrs and open to all is next. maybe?
I'm down.
prolly not going to woirk this time ... i'm booked next sunday, but nto saturday, 21mar.
unicorn? how's yoru next saturday look this far in advance?
I'm working both the 21st and 28th. I think I'm off April 4th, though, as far as Saturdays go. I'll have to check tomorrow to be sure, though. That schedule was just put up, and I haven't written it down yet.
I'll be in Australia for a good chunk of April.
So it'd be nice if we could get the last weekend of March to work... Friday's tentatively out for me, though, due to another committment. Sunday would be best, though Saturday still could be a possibility.
re 17 ... pse to avoid a row w/a roo ....
I'll be working both Saturday and Sunday (the 28th and 29th), and won't be home until after at least 9:00, but if I have to miss this one, I'll just have to miss it. It may come down to a question of whether to have a meeting soon, or whether to have everyone present. Which is more important? Having everyone present may require planning farther ahead.
end ar march is ok by me ... 5 april is also ok.
as is 19 april.
which iseems to be it.
it was ...
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