Grex Board Meeting, 2/7/10
Present: gelinas*, aruba, kentn*, keesan, jim, steve*, tsty*, unicorn
[by phone]*, denise*
[* = board members; board member cross missing]
7:58 pm, meeting called to order.
-- Officer election results:
Chair [president]: kentn
Treasurer: tsty
Secretary: denise
--Staff report:
STeve summarized the hardware problems we had [he posted a summary
in, I believe, item 4 in agora].
Backups were discussed, doing remote backups for now, then in a
month or so, try doing a usb backup.
Discussed adding members to staff. gelinas moved to add tsty and
remmers to staff [with root access], denise seconded, motion passed.
Staff would like to meet with tonster to get more info before adding him
to staff.
--Next Meeting: Sunday, March 7, 6pm at Zingerman s
--Grex status and future:
What is/should be our policy of disseminating info from taped
meetings? Should discuss in co-op. tsty moved and gelinas seconded: All
grex meetings recorded for board members to use and to provide mp3
files to be available if needed for other use/dissemination, subject to
board approval. Motion passed.
What has happened to the old grex equipment? Steve and mdw have most
of it; keesan has recycled some of the old equipment. Current Inventory
includes:
-I386 Box
-external usb disk
-spare motherboard
-2 modems
-gavel? [Slynne, do you still have this?]
-speaker phone
-treasurer s records
-domain name
The board has received email from srw [steve weiss] stating that veek
has been in touch to see about using srw s photos he has to use in a
wikipedia article about grex. Does the board agree with this? There were
no objections; go for it!
Where to communicate when Grex is down? Possibilities:
-Posterous [sp?]
-M-net: people can post info on mnet but mnet will not be the
[only] place for staff to discuss info.
-twitter/facebook/myspace: looking into setting up accounts on one
or more of these.
-HVCN -doesn t work
-Check google page
Email question/item in coop posted by veek about the possibility of
using postfix/
white listing. Will be discussed in veek s item as well as with staff.
What about having personalized web domains? Will look into this, can
also discuss online. What can we do without having to involve
provide.net?
9:45 pm, gelinas moved to adjourn meeting, Steve seconded; motion
carried.
66 responses total.
w0w .. fasssssssssst and good! tnx
Could someone please clarify the bit about opening up board meetings by both simulcasting and keeping those audio/video recordings available for folks to listen/watch at their convenience? The coop discussion seemed to support doing this. Yet the minutes are fuzzy as to what came down. What's up?
Could someone please clarify the staff issues? My understanding was that Remmers and TS do Not have root access.
Re #0: so SRW didn't forget :) Regarding the personalized web URL thing.. it could be done by creating a subdomain called xyz.cyberspace.org and delegating authority for the subdomain to a nameserver run on grex.cyberspace.org, so any further changes would be local BUT this would require that staff do the initial one-time delegation on Provide. BUT, I'm thinking that perhaps this could wait till later - the actual benefits being, rather marginal.. Anyway, so could we decide something for sure (even migrating to tonster's box is okay with me) regarding Mail, MySQL and Ping/ Traceroute/NMap (i'll open a thread on this). All are very useful for ppl using the shell.
one amplificatoin about he hardware inventory ... apparently the board-at-the-time was wholly disinteresdsted in keeping arond (or offering to return) anyhtiikg that was not activly in-use. keesan said she recycled a lot of it ... mdw & steve captured some that was going to head to teh shredder .. and some hit the shredder. i think i have that right .. at least close. re 3 ... dunno about remmers but i don;t ahve root at this second, but it should be coming along some time soon. re 4 .. teh xyz.cyberspace.org was brought up sted *.org/~xyz for persoanl sites and the board (between meeings) is considering how to best effect the idea whilst -also- benefiting grex, i.e., some $$$.
I'm of the opinion that root access should be parceled out conserva- tively on an as-needed basis. In particular, since I don't know exactly what I'll be doing as staff yet, I don't know if I need it. Certain kinds of administrative tasks can be carried out without root - for example, I didn't need it to run the recent board vote; just needed privileged access to certain directories and files. If I'm going to be authorized to go to Provide and hit reset, I don't need root for that either. On the other hand, if I'm going to fight fires such as runaway processes and the like, then I'd need root. I think staff needs to get together, either in person or online, and figure out who's going to do what. Then I'll know if I actually need root. At the December board meeting, a staff meeting was scheduled for early January. It didn't happen because Grex was still down with disk problems. I think it's time to schedule another one. If it's an in-person meeting, I'm out of town at the moment but will be available from February 21 on.
I'm surprised the root password isn't sealed by the board in a tamper-evident envelope with staff just given least privileges via sudo, with a couple of staffers having root-level sudo.
It's more likely in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar under Funk and Wagnalls' porch.
*snort*
resp:7: that's how ford used to keep their root passwords sealed.
It's also the recommended safe practice for financial institutions.
That doesn't sound like all that bad an idea, actually.
The board approved root access for both tsty and remmers. When either will get that access is, I guess, up to the staff. Most of the stuff is done by sudo now, I think. Note that sudo just makes more passwords lucrative targets. There is still some disagreement on broadcasting the board meetings. Thus the limits on recording and disseminating the recordings. We are probably going to have to take membership-level action to get it 'right.'
resp:13 Sudo does *not* "just make(s) more passwords lucrative targets." Sudo is a very, very useful tool and is the preferred mechanism for doing things as the superuser these days. I have given root access to both Remmers and TS via adding them to the 'wheel' group. Both should use sudo to access things as root. I don't even know what the root password is, but it would probably be a good idea if someone changed it to something that they know, write it down, and store it somewhere securely. I should state publicly that I have serious objections to adding remmers to staff. When I lobbied to get re-added to staff some years ago, remmers objected strongly. When I got re-added to staff and elected to the board, remmers resigned from both. I find that timeline suspicious and have found him difficult to work with. He created what I felt to be a very divisive forum to discuss Grex being down during the recent outage, which fragmented the discussion, *despite* being asked not to do so, by me, as a baord and staff member. In the past, he was not responsive to email; I recall asking him multiple times to create me an account on the machine that housed Grex's CVS server and he did not respond until after I'd resigned from staff. I feel like John is the type of guy who likes to "take control." I feel like he doesn't work particularly well with others, and I'm concerned about him having root access. A lot of John's technical ideas are not well thought out and tend to rely on things he's heard, rather than things that he's done. He lobbied strongly to put in a complicated content-management system on Grex, without having even used it. I find that problematic, and I'm worried that, with root access, John will do things that are not easily supportable by the rest of us. Similarly with his ideas about virtualization. I see his no-staff-stamp addition to staff as something of a coup by the Grex old-guard. I would have been happy to have him do webmaster things, but full-on root access is an entirely other matter.
you'd suppose Grex was an attractive female with all this plotting going on *grumble* anyway, umm.. 1. Surprisingly, though I find the concept of old and new guards to be weird (what is their to guard even?), I kind of agree that Cross is right about Remmers appearing to be very sneaky <g> I have been pondering his sneakiness, myself, the last few days, and making speculative assumptions - mostly because, not sure if you remember but.. like the time ppl were grumbling about staff and asking for volunteers or some such thing, and I volunteered and then remmers volunteered and well.. *sigh* and after that all was forgotten.. anyway, the impression I got was that he volunteered simply to squelch me - I'm acutely aware that it's logically unsound but read on without flaming me and thou shall see, what it's to bee, to be mee.. :p 2. If Remmers is being a sneaky ol' coot, that's okay - the matter is irrelevant because.. at the end of the day, what counts is work done for Grex by staff and that is a very measurable quantity! So.. *miaow* wouldn't it make sense for the board to give emm a task list, or Cross and Remmers to duke it out by doing stuff for us.. like E-Mail (which we don't have) or My-SQL stuff etc etc.. Basically, the whole sneaky Remmers AND old-guard thing, becomes a non- issue see.. if a guy is laboring on your behalf, why bother with the color of the cat so long as it catches mice. 3. I mean, we should clearly demarcate tasks.. both are competent, both know Unix, BOTH have CONTRIBUTED in the past.. give emm whole projects and see who *does* what to determine the future. Would this work??
Re #15: mind you, I'm NOT saying Remmers IS sneaky and it's not my intention to even hint or cast doubt on his reputation! I don't know remmers at all! I've always found him polite and reasonably helpful. What I am saying, is that: divining intent is a waste of time when you can use work done as a measure of competence. Not work done 10 years ago.. The reason I mentioned my own remmers thingy was because I meant to illustrate how my perception of some random guy on the net could influence my thought process. Not that Cross is mad or that Remmers is innocent.. we have simply no way of knowing for sure what their motives are.. so use measurable evidence.. in any case work gets done.
BTW, SRW got back :) all is well.. he's waiting for his Grex passwd to be reset so he can make changes. See now.. that's another case to point.. I was a bit worried about that - thinking that he was being nasty and Oo! what a scum-bag! In fact, if ye had asked me for my opinion on SRW just 10 secs ago, I'd have slayed the man! In fact, and I hate to admit this, I was wondering if board had done some nasty evVil thing by telling me one thing and had snuck behind my back and told SRW to silently discard my request.. and I was in the process of listing all my sins and pondering which particular stunning discourse with Chad had been the last straw. Then the whole remmers thing, for a moment I contemplated a remmers sneakily calling SRW and telling him to you know.. put my request in the dustbin. *sigh* It's all very embaressing and it's not meant to detract from what Cross is saying (because Cross is a different person and probably does not react the way I do).. my point is Resp 16: makes a lot of sense and avoids this complicated debate. Remmers can suggest something and work on his project - even if Cross thinks it's crap and Cross can do the same. It doesn't have to be perfect, or the most beauteous, or the most elegant piece of work (RT).. it's just a stupid shell with hardly any users.. so we should be able to do what we want and have a lot of fun.
so long as Steve can reset the box<g>
Since the matter of 'staff stamp' has been raised: The matter was discussed in e-mail. No formal vote was taken, but the discussion made clear that the majority of staff were in favour of adding tsty and remmers. So the board acted.
a) If it's the discussion I'm thinking of, the stipulation was that both be added without root access. b) It seems that the majority also wanted tonster added.
wel, i did wnat tonster added. and i will lobby for tonster in the futre.
I did, too. Who wanted more in the way of an interview or whatever?
I do find it rather odd that there's some question and need for an interview, like I'm asking for a job and grex is some top secret weapon or something. I've been around m-net and grex for 17 years, and I've been a root/sysop for m-net for over 10. I'm not some new person no one knows.
If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
"Why should we hire you?"
"Are you a people person?"
Maybe I'm just asking for too high a salary, but damnit I'm worth every penny.
Can I see your manager?
Hahaha. That reminds me. How come we arent talking about LOST online here any where?
because I haven't started watching this season and you don't want to ruin it for me!
I'm a bit disappointed in the boards previous decisions vis-a-vis staff. It's the old-guard re-asserting themselves. Oh well.
re #14 in what way was Remmers' Posterus forum for Grex divisive? All it did was provide a place to have an open discussion. Is Cross saying he does not want an open discussion. Also Cross shouldn't be lambasting Remmers 'bad ideas' since the ideas he's had, at least the one to start validating new users, is killing Grex. Was any discussion made at the board meeting about removing the validation patch from new user? I am concerned by Cross's statement that Remmers returning to staff is, in his opinion, "something of a coup by the Grex old-guard." This makes it seem like he sees a power struggle going on. What power struggle? If Cross, or any of the other staff members, are seeing themselves as in 'control' around here and worry about 'coups' and 'losing control', that is not only paranoia but goes against grex's very principles. I don't even know why Cross wants to continue on staff this year since he is deployed overseas. Seems like it would hardly be a priority and if he is staying on staff under such circumstances, is it because he sees some power struggle and wants to prevent the return of the 'old guard' here?
It was divisive, Richard, because most the traditional place for such discussions has been M-Net. John created a forum that he controlled, where the creation of new 'items' had to be done, basically, by him. That's the antithesis of an open discussion, Richard. It also fragmented the discussion. When that was pointed out to John his response was, "Well, I think I'll leave things the way they are." Not exactly in the spirit of working with others, is it? John's retained sole control of Grex resources before (like the CVS server). And he's been asked several times to do things for Grex in the last few years, but has always declined; why the change of heart now? But tell you what. Richard, why don't you just ask John what his motivation is for joining staff? And further, why does John get the green light when Tonster doesn't? And as for user validation, well, how do YOU propose to counter Chad and mickeyd crashing Grex all the time, Richard? And how is it killing Grex? Perhaps you forgot when Grex was constantly down because Chad and Mickey were crashing it all the time? Tell you what Richard. If you value open discussion so much, why are you so eager to put someone who has a history of closing things up in a position to do it again?
M-net might be the traditional place for reporting on grex being down. It is in no way the traditional place for discussing "What should we do with Grex, in the vision thing?" because there has been no other place. Dan, your inability to see that the abusive outpouring from M-netters, and the refusal of substantial portions of the Grex community to have anything to do with M-net, are simply astonishing to me.
resp:34 So Ken, after complaining about not having access to validate new users, have many have you validated? You throw a lot of stones, but live in just as much of a glass house as anyone else. I'm not opposed to a place that isn't M-Net, but I don't want it controlled by a single person.
Dan #35: Cool, a totally unrelated ad hominiem attack! Those are the best. Yup, in the interval between the time I volunteered to do user validation, and the time I got set up to do it, all the motivation dribbled away. (Four months? Six months?) (Most of that was due to other social events on Grex having nothing to do with any participants in this discussion.)
resp:37 Ad hominem? After you find my substantial inabilities astonishing? If Grex is so horrible, Ken, why do you keep showing up? And substantial proportions of the Grex community refuse to have anything to do with M-Net? How, exactly, do you define that? I think that most grexers dual hat.
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a point in favor of M-Net.. most of their cruft is restricted to #general and they generally leave #grex alone. It really is the most elegant solution in terms of interface and stuff AND a LOT of Grexers hang out there anyway.. in fact who doesn't?? (rane, sindi, bellstar anyone else??) Anyway, why don't we meet on SDF (sdf.lonestar.org) when Grex goes down. 'bboard' = fronttalk and 'com' = party. They had no inhibitions, and stuck up a notice on their site inviting Grex users to migrate to their server when Grex was down so.. it would make sense for us to take their advice <g> 'ANONYMOUS' and 'GENERAL' would fit the bill.. you can, it seems, even create a new board 'M' just like that.. so.. if ppl are interested, let me know and I shall investigate further (by creating a 'GREX' board on SDF and checking to see if it's workable/or someone else can take this over and act as master of ceremonies..) Their 'bboard' interface is very similar to fronttalk and they seem to have some sort of php interface to bboard so web access may work. I suppose the polite thing would be to mail emm and ask if it's okay.. so.. if everyone is okay with this.. or we just use Posterus or M-Net. I'm NOT keen on splitting this 3 ways :)
Re resp:32 - Thanks for the support, Richard. The steps taken to restrict access to the system were probably necessary, alas. One of the challenges facing Grex right now is how to get back on a growth path without incurring collateral damage from twits. My thinking was that resp:14 was a bit of pot-stirring that was best ignored, but maybe I should set the record straight on a few things. I never "lobbied vigorously" for a CMS. My recollection of the CVS server business is different from Dan's. And although Dan is a board member who believes that M-Net is the best place to hold Grex discussions when Grex is offline, Dan wasn't speaking for the board on this issue - there are two board members who are on record as believing the opposite. As to why I volunteered to return to staff in December? Well, because it appeared that Grex was in danger of sinking into oblivion. In particular, Dan was calling for a permanent shutdown. I wasn't ready to see it happen, and neither were a lot of other people, to judge from the turnout at the December board meeting and the discussion that took place there. I'm here to help out, not "take control" as resp:14 suggests. Like other people, I throw out ideas from time to time as to directions the system might take, some of which are probably ok and some of which are probably lousy, but I'm a team player who doesn't make changes without concensus. I was a root staff member on Grex for about 15 years starting in 1991, and that's the way I played it.
I find it curiouser and curiouser that I've offered a number of ideas and specific options I'd be willing to help out with for places to meet, and have been pretty much ignored. I've also offered to help out on staff, and pretty much been ignored there too. I guess I don't know who all is on the board and staff, but the only people I've really seen respond to my offers are remmers, mary, jep, and cross. Should I take that as a hint?
It's how Grex works. Think slow. Real slow. It has nothing to do with you, Tony, it's the process. People come up with things that need to be done, even agreeing to do them, but then the ball gets dropped. I don't have a solution. The people dropping the balls are nice people. But the effect is a leadership void. I hope you get added to staff real soon. Please don't be discouraged.
Re 43: I agree.
re #42 Give it another ten years, Tony. They still haven't decided if you're part of the "collateral damage from twits" mainstream. I don't think anyone was seriously calling for a permanent shutdown of Grex but I do believe many were postulating options for its hosting. Too bad opinions require a prePosterous vetting - especially Tonster's.
RE #43 - I don't come around here much anymore, so my opinions may carry little weight and that's fine with me however Mary's comment about slowness made me sit up and take notice. I think part of the slow decline of Grex can be blamed on this slowness. I agree that some decisions should be pondered and discussed at great length. But some decsions need to be made in a faster fashion and I'm of the opinion that the snails pace of decision making by the board/staff/etc over the last <gasp> nearly 20 years (OMG, it has been that long hasn't it?) have created a stagnation in what the "community" could be. I may be wrong, but years ago I felt that Grex and sister community M-Net/Arbornet were way ahead of the curve in terms of, for lack of a better term, Social Networking. And the measured pace, especially here on Grex, made for a situation where the whole world sped by. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. But I think that anything decided could ultimately be undone if after a little reflection the decision was agreed to be bad/wrong/etc., but instead we wait. Wait for features to be added, wait while discussion is prlonged to the point of the dead horse being a fossil, wait until a userbase is reduced to a handful of what it was in it's heyday. I'm not nostalgic for the M-Net that I enjoyed back in the late eighties/early nineties or the Grex that sprung up from the chaos that M-Net became, but I do find it a little sad that a lot of potential was wasted. I don't blame anyone in particular, and I'll take some blame, I wasn't standing up to volunteer (mostly because I was already seeing a broken system I suppose, or maybe that's hindsight). So, now thatI've complained, I need to figure out what constructive criticism I can offer. Though I guess I'll remain part of the problem since I've no time to offer being staff or board or volunteer. I have to remain one of the members of the peanut gallery.
w/b goose ... your thoughts are always wleome.
I don't see why Grex shouldn't *immediately* take up Tonster's offer to host Grex at his house. Put him on staff asap and tell him to go over to Provide.net and get everything out of there. Clearly a third party co-lo no longer works for Grex because there aren't enough people on staff to get anyone over to where the box is to re-boot it or service it and thus you get this down time that kills casual user interest in coming here. Why should there be any delay in taking up Tonster's offer? Is the intent for the board to wait to make any decision until provide.net locks its doors and throws the box outside on the sidewalk?
I agree with Richard. Tony has proven himself with years of service to M- Net. His offer is generous. He appears to be a respected and talented team player. Provide is no longer a good option for Grex. I have a few questions and concerns but I always seem to find something to worry about. I'm trying to stay realistic here and I'm hoping we get Tony on-board ASAP.
FWIW, I think grex should take Tony up on his offer too. I doubt anyone has any objections based on his character or anything like that.
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resp:49: feel free to ask any questions or show any concerns here. it's not like anyone besides you, remmers, or cross is going to.
Do any of the ESX hosts run V-replicator?
I'm rebuilding the host that grex would run on soon. I can put pretty much any vmware on it at this point. I haven't decided which version I'll put on though.
i support (and supported) tonster for satff a whiel back ... it;s in tehere.
re 48 ... simply because yo are not runing -nor directing- grex, that;s why
My goodness, run Grex on a virtual machine? What an absurd idea;
why is anybody even considering it? ;-) (That's an in-joke; feel
free to ignore it.)
Okay, re resp:49, I have a few questions about how the virtual
hosting would work, how the resources would compare with what we
have now. Maybe some of them have already been answered somewhere,
but it'd be nice to get the info collected in one spot.
Disk space:
How much can we have?
Currently, Grex has a capacity of about 128G on wd0, roughly
26G of which is actually in use. That seems pretty modest and
easy to accommodate. I don't know how much was on the SCSI
disk that died, though. (By the way, the entire 19 years worth
of conferences uses less than 700M of space. Hey, I could fit
that on a corner of my laptop.)
Processor capacity:
Would multiple processor-intensive activities (like, various
users doing compiles at the same time) be handled gracefully?
Network connectivity:
What ISP would Grex be using? Cable, DSL, or something else?
How would speed and capacity compare with what we have currently?
Would users notice slowdowns in shell interaction, upload/download,
web page loads, etc? Would there be a cap on how much Grex
could use? Would Grex continue to have its own unique IP
address?
Operating system:
Can we run OpenBSD? That would certainly simplify the process
of moving stuff over from the current machine. Would it be
preferable to run something else, e.g. FreeBSD, in a VM
environment, though?
I'm fairly familiar with VMWare, by the way, and run it on both
Windows Vista and OS X machines. I know that it's perfectly
possible to install OpenBSD in a VMWare image, having done so
myself, but haven't played around with it enough to know if
there are any gotchas that might impact us.
Remote console:
Is there a virtual console that staff can access providing
facilities such as power on/off, shutdowns, and single user
mode? I have a small FreeBSD VM (XEN technology) hosted at
RootBSD (http://rootbsd.net) that uses a Java applet for
that purpose. Would you provide something similar?
Remote console access would be a huge plus for Grex.
Currently, console work requires physical access to the
hardware, which only happens when a local staff member is
available to visit our colo during their business hours.
I'd love to see that troublesome bottleneck removed.
resp:57: I think I've adequately outlined my position on virtual machines at commercial facilities in prior posts. I agree with you that it can work very well, but I don't think any commercial company will be able to offer what Grex needs to run well at a reasonable cost. I don't know what you're paying to colo the box now, but I think you could only get a fraction of the memory/disk/cpu at a vm hosting provider for the same cost. As far as what I can offer, I'm currently planning to install the new box that Grex would go on with 2x500GB mirrored drives, so I would give Grex a fraction of that space. I think it's not unreasonable to say 200GB would be no problem. If Grex actually wants more space, I could reconsider and get different drives, but I already have this hardware. The physical box is an HP server, has 2 CPU's, and 1GB of ram (though I'm adding a lot more RAM once I finally get around to ordering it). The box ultimately won't be dedicated to Grex, but the other VM's that will be running or installed on it are not used often and only used in testing configurations for work. I wouldn't anticipate them often conflicting with grex in any way. I've compiled multiple things at once and installed multiple applications on multiple machines at the same time before (I use it to test the zimbra mail software, which is a fairly intensive app at times, so it's stress tested) and usually theres no real negative affect on the other VM's. My ISP is AT&T UVerse, so I've got pretty good bandwidth. OpenBSD would depend on whether it could run on VMware, which as you've said, I believe it can. I've offered before, and if anyone wants to play around and test it, I'd be happy to assign the VM, give it some space, and give some people access to install the OS and play. The Virtual Console would be through VMware Infrastructure Client, although if I install vSphere instead, it may be a slightly different client. Either way, I can assign all rights to whoever wants/needs them so they can do whatever is needed anytime they need to. The only real obvious hurdle would be if I lost power or internet access, obviously the server would go down.
Your ISP's terms and conditions of use would be okay with you hosting Grex?
Still haven't found out what happened to the Grex Gavel. I mean how is Grex to continue with board meetings when it has no gavel. I think slynne must have let her dogs use the gavel as a chew toy :)
I'm not aware of anything in the uverse terms and conditions that would prevent me from hosting grex. additionally, I wouldn't be using at&t IP's as I have my own tunneled IP addresses that I host my things on, so it's unlikely they'd know anything about it, and any complaints or anything would end up going to that ISP in the form of complaints or anything, and that absolutely allows me to host whatever I want to.
resp:60 It is in my desk drawer at work because I keep meaning to give it back but then I keep forgetting.
See coop:248 for a recap of the discussion of running Grex under a virtual hosting solution. To summarize, I see Tony's solution as sounding a lot more like running Grex under a virtualization soltuion on our own hardware than running Grex under a commercial virtual provider, which was my objection.
Re resp:62 - I think this has been reported elsewhere, but the Grex Gavel has been rescued from slynne's desk drawer and will be transferred to the new president at tonight's board meeting.
Re: #63 And I see different potential problems running on a friend's computer rather than on an commercial ISP with a contract for service. But Tony's offer is generous and we should give it a try. All the while keeping backups elsewhere.
Given we don't have a lot of money coming in right now (something we need to fix), solutions that reduce our cost of operation are attractive.
You have several choices: