Grex's costs went up quite a bit when we got our ISDN line, and when the phone rates increased at the beginning of the year. It would, of course, be best if our income increased to match our improved connectivity, but so far that has not happened. It may still, of course, and I hope it does. But I think it would be prudent to consider cutting our costs as well. Mostly, we have been very careful (read *slow*) about increasing Grex's level of operation, so improvements have been anticipated and well received. This has helped us to avoid any white elephants. But we all saw the nosedive that M-Net's finances took when they found themselves with huge expenses and a shrinking membership. While we are *not* in that kind of trouble, we also should remember that example, and not think that we will always be able to find the money to cover as much service as we'd like to provide. So post suggestions for cutting Grex's costs here.83 responses total.
The first thing that comes to mind is dropping a phone line or two. According to scott, the last phone line in our hunt group only gets used for about 15 minutes a day. If we dropped it, that would save us $18.46 a month (if I did my calculations correctly), or about $220 per year. It costs $42 to install a new line, so we would have to drop it for at least 3 months in order to save money. After that, if we decide we need it again, we could have it re-installed and still be ahead.
I would also suggest dropping the ICNet connection, which we aren't using at all. We're paying for two phone lines it uses. There are also some longer term things we might want to look at, such as switching to non-Centrex ISDN lines, which are cheaper.
I need to work on stats, but it looks like we aren't even using the last line.
It sounds then, like we could drop 3 line swithout much impact on anyone. I think that would be the best place to start.
Would antone like to make a case for keeping the ICNET connection?
At the time we got the ISDN connection, I can recall two reasons being given for keeping the IC-NET connection: (1) For backup if the ISDN went down, and (2) for offloading certain kinds of internet traffic, such as mail. I don't have a case to make one way or the other, but maybe those are issues to bear in mind in discussing whether or not to keep the connection.
Wasn't there a thought that we would route mail through it?
Yes, as I just said.
I think the fact that we didn't use the ICNet connection for backup during our recent ISDN line troubles suggests that it isn't anyone's first choice. That leaves the mail question --
I think we were expecting the ISDN to be more saturated than it is. At this point, there wouldn't really be a gain by offloading mail to another link, because our main one isn't full. I say get rid of it.
Ditch the ICNet connection and one phone line *per month* until we get
complaints about busy signals.
I'm quite surprised that our huge increase in speed hasn't caused
a big influx of bux. But since it hasn't, aruba is right to emphasize
cutting costs.
The speed increase is pretty recent. I think that it will pay off eventually in the form of more membership income, but I'm not surprised that the effect is delayed. New users seem to be popping up in the conferences at a greater rate, probably because more people are sticking around rather than being turned off immediately by Grex's sluggishness the way they used to be. Eventually, some of these users will turn into paying members.
Just forget about killing one phone line per month. If there are some metrics that indicate that one or two lines are totally unutilized, then maybe cut back if finances require it. But I'll oppose any move to make grex a telnet-access-only system.
Certainly, I agree. No one is proposing that, and I think all of us would rather see the dial-ins full than cut them. But if we're paying for them and they're not being used, we're wasting money.
one or two lines would be easy; the average use is in the neighborhood of 4 lines at any time, with peaks up to 10 and rarely is it over ten. I'm still waiting to accumulate certain stats befor I make a recommendation.
(I thought the idea was to cut back one line per month and STOP when we started seeing a significant busy signal problem at peak dial-in load.)
If we cut back lines until we see a problem, we've cut too far, and we'll have to pay an installation fee to bring the 'one too many' line back. Telco will brobably charge us a generic service change fee even to cut each line off. Better to study the stats, and then cut what we must in one change order. As for how many is enough? I'd like to see our last modem line occupied between 1 and 5 percent of the time. That would mean between 15 and 75 minutes per day. I would also like to see each instance of 'all lines occupied' last no more than five minutes. If both conditions are satisfied, I would say we have exactly enough lines.
This response has been erased.
Valerie, does the fixwait log data cover *all* connections, or just those present when the log data is collected (every minute?)?
I think it doesn't make financial sense to keep more lines than we need indefinitely. We'd all like to see more local users, and hopefully we'll get them. I think that if scott's data confirms that the last line or two is never used, it makes sense to eliminate them and bring them back if and when we get more dialers-in. Remember that we only have to take them down for 3 months in order to save money. Perhaps before we act, though, we should agree to what we think is a reasonable usage. Then we can decide how many lines to take down and when to put them back. Now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense to decide that, and then figure out how many lines we need.
I get the impression that many locals now get free access to something at work that lets them telnet to grex, and that this may be an accelerating trend. I dial in, but hardly anyone else seems to.
I telnet in from work, but from home I dial direct. I'd dial direct from work, too, if it were local. >8)
Re #21: Well it's clearly not true that "hardly anyone" dials in. If it were, then the modem data would show that.
I have access to telnet from work, but for some reason Grex always terminates the connection as soon as it's established. mdw looked for, and identified one such occasion, but found (if I recall) that as far as the logs showed it was just a normal, albeit brief connection. Nonetheless, I really have no telnet access. (I wonder if there are others out there with this problem, who lack dialup access & so never come back.)
Some of us ardent Grex supporters have always use dial-in. The only telnet access I have is if I'm at the library, and telnet in from their Internet connection.
I understand that we have to be fiscally responsible, but consider this: Grex is on the verge of applying for 501(c)3 status as a charitable organization. It seems to me that the dialin modem pool service is one of the strongest claims to charitability that we have. We are offering -- for FREE, to anyone in the local dialing area who has a minimal computer and modem setup -- access to various online services, including discussion forums, internet mail, and the world wide web. And at its current level, this service in nearly busy-signal free. This is a service available to most people only if they pay a fee to an ISP, and we are truly performing a charitable service to the community in making it available for free. So I'm uncomfortable with the sentiments I've seen expressed that the dialins are a "luxury" that's too expensive to support. On the contrary, they're at the heart of the kind of organization Grex is trying to be, and is about to represent itself to the federal government as being. I'm with Valerie on this one. I'd prefer to see us focus on looking for better funding for our current level of services, with a view to increasing those services eventually, rather than getting into a "cut services" mode of thinking.
I don't think the phone lines are a luxury, but perhaps having phone lines that go unused is. I would like nothing more than to fill up those lines, but we simply haven't increased our membership significantly in a long time, while our costs *have* increased. I hate being a broken record, but there it is. I am uncomfortable living this close to the edge of our means. I certainly don't advocate removing phone lines permanently; I think we should make adjustments, as time goes by, to keep the number of lines in synch with the demand. Right now it looks like we have more lines than there is demand for. If anyone wants to argue that we are (for some reason) on the verge of increasing demand for dial-ins, then that would be a good reason to keep extra lines.
Well, I need to get with Mike (nephi) about tweaking our Centrex trunk hunting to make things a bit clearer from the Groupie stats. Until we get that straigtened out, I'd say that we could definitely cut one line immediately with no loss of service beyond maybe a couple times a week. The stats from fixwait log indicate we aren't even using 11 of our 13 lines.
Re #27: we haven't really *tried* to increase our membership significantly - also in a long time. The neglect of our dialin lines could be attributed to the lack of our local membership efforts. I agree with remmers - it is a public resource - and WE have to make that resource more widely known.
I will submit, again, that dial-up lines are rapily becoming obsolete. Yes, there are still some people without Internet access, and it is good to have some dial-up lines for them, but to expect our dial-up usage to grow rather than shrink would be foolish. Dial-up lines are a very expensive way of providing access. If people are choosing other ways of connecting, that's something we should be happy about. If dial-up lines aren't being used, we should cut down to the number that are.
Re #29: Rane, we're always *trying* to increase our membership rates.
Dialup lines may be an expensive way of providing access, but I too think it's an important part of our public service to provide them. Having said that, if two of them are not being used, then I'd feel perfectly comfortable getting rid of one of them. It's not as though we can't add more later should the demand be there. Are there any other ways, besides deleting phone lines, to save money?
Re #30: I'm not expecting to the dialup usage to grow. But the dialups are still a ways from being obsolete. I would oppose any cuts that make it significantly more difficult for people to access the system via that route, unless it is *truly* a matter of financial exigency for us. Dialups are certainly an expensive way of providing access. Expensive for Grex. But cheaper for the people who use them, since it doesn't involve their paying an ISP charge on top of their phone bill. If we are really a charitable organization, it's the issue of expense to the user that we should be focusing on. We should be looking for ways to keep it as cheap as possible for people to access our service, and serve those who cannot afford more expensive means of access. If we're not a charitable organization, we shouldn't be asking the IRS to subsidize us as one.
(Dan's #32 slipped in.)
Re #31: OK, Mark, what are the significant membership efforts now underway in Ann Arbor? What advertising is occurring currently in newspapers or on TV? What direct mail to likely constituencies is in the mail now? Where are we offering our services to the public in public venues? I could go on....
Rane, you sound like the perfect person to be membership chair. I hereby
volunteer Rane to implement some of his good ideas! I saw something go by
on a TV we were fixing at Kiwanis yesterday that appeared to be about Grex,
it may have been mid-afternoon.
As a dial-in member, I would have no objection to paying a bit extra
for the privilege, maybe a dollar a month. But as people keep saying, it is
hardly ever busy enough on thelines tha I have to wait. Maybe once in
two months? I don't imagine an extra five minute wait will be all that
discouraging to anyone, it has not been to me. What is the total number of
paying members who use dial-in lines? What is the total monthly cost of all
the dial-in lines?
Re #35: Ah, you mean we haven't "spent money to try to increase the number of local users on Grex". I agree that we haven't done much of that. (The free ad Misti got us on cable channel 11 is great, however.) We did spend a little on advertising last year. We haven't done more because we can't seem to agree on which advertising is worth doing (though at the budget meeting in February we agreed that advertising was third on our list of priorities). If you think some of those ideas you mentioned are worth spending money on, how about pushing for them in the item about getting more members? Or, as keesan said, become our membership chair? I think that would be great. But getting more people to log on is only the first stage of the process - you also have to convince more users to become members. I took affront at your saying that we haven't tried to get more members, because I try to do that all the time - every time someone sends me a query about it. It hasn't seemed to do a whole lot of good - most such people seem to think of Grex as a cheap ISP, and don't have the concept of contributing to a charity. But maybe not doing it would make things worse, I don't know. We did agree at the last board meeting that we will try sending out mail to nonmembers on their 3-month, 6-month, etc. anniversaries. However doing that requires some programming on Jan and Valerie's part, and I'm not sure how soon it'll happen. Perhaps what you meant, Rane, is that we are not reaching enough people with our appeals to log in to Grex and to become members. And perhaps you meant that we haven't tried *enough*. With those statements I agree.
Re #36: Sindi, you are quite welcome to include an extra donation with your dues, it will be appreciated. But I don't think we want to get into the pattern of charging different dues according to what services people use; that amounts to selling service, and I don't want us to go down that road. When I last calculated it, the cost of our phone lines was $18.46 per line per month. So the total cost of our dialins is 13 X $18.46 = $239.98.
How many paying members (and how many total users) would you estimate use the dial in lines regularly? If you divide $240 by that number, I would consider it fair to pay the result as an extra donation, per year. Perhaps some nonmembers who dial in regularly would also be willing to pay something towards the phone cost, you could at least ask them to consider it.
BTW I agree with remmers' argument that providing dialups is consistent with our charitable mission. We are not in business to make money, so I don't believe we should be trying to push our users into doing what we want (as scg said), but rather we should adapt to what they need. I also agree that I don't want to cut dialin service to the point where it is "significantly harder to dial in". I'd like to see us decide what "significantly harder" means, numerically. Then we'd have a basis for deciding how many lines we need.
(keesan slipped in at #39) 69 of our current members live within a local call of Grex. But everytime imply that being local and dialing in are related, scg takes me to task, since it's certain that some locals telnet in. I think remmers is right, and we should think of providing dialins as a charitable service. If we start asking people to pay according to what they use, then we are selling service, plain and simple. Let's not go there.
I dial in when the internet link is down. Haven't gotten a busy signal even then, for a long time. I am already "maxed out" on volunteer activities - indeed some tend to languish already. But surely there is someone with time and interest and they are free to use any ideas that go their way - from me or anyone else. OK, Mark - we haven't tried *enough*.
Misti seems to be doing a lot towards recruiting new members. I wonder if she would like an official title. Or simply thanks for a good job. I don't think anyone would object to stating how many dollars per year it costs, per dial-in user, to pay for the dial in lines, and suggesting that users might want to contribute a bit extra.
*I* object to that. It amounts to guilt-tripping the people who are already being very generous in supporting Grex. It's not like our financial situation is hidden from anyone. I post it every month. (Not that anyone notices, mind you. ;))
Re #43,44: I assumed in #44 that keesan meant stating the costs of dial-ins in the reminders I send to people when their memberships are due. Now that I reread her response, I'm not sure that's what she meant.
I'm not quite sure what I meant, either, but would it be possible to ask those people who are not paying members, but who dial in, to contribute at least a bit towards maintaining the phone lines, if not $60/year? Presumably it is not just paying members who benefit from the phone lines, and those who use the phone lines infrequently may appreciate being able to help in this way, without paying for full membership.
I agree with remmers et al. about dialins being an essential part of what Grex is.
Actually, I wonder if C. Keesan would make a good membership chairman?
Thank you for your interest, but we will concentrate for the meantime on getting our Kiwanis electronics department, where we have been volunteering 20 or more hours/week, under control, and then attempt to sell computers set up to access grex, 'for dummies'. Misti was in today, and suggested handing out a grex brochure to everyone who bought a computer, but nobody has been buying any recently because they are not organized yet. When Jim gets his one-key disk perfected, we will run ads in the Freebies.
It seems that everyone wants to volunteer someone else to be membership chair...
Maybe we don't need a 'membership chair', just various people working in various ways to encourage or help other people to join, such as by posting ideas in coop that other people feel they can follow up on.
I agree with Remmers and Valerie about this. While I support saving $40 by dropping the ICnet link, I do not support dropping the count on the local dialups yet. I expect usage to grow there, not shrink. Furthermore, we may be adding limited IP service by dialup in the near future. This would induce higher dialup usage. If we can really anticipate continued non-use of some dialup lines for multiple months, I would certainly acquiesce, but I am not yet convinced.
i am a frequent grexer, and i use dialup access at least 75% of the time. I have never been informed of all lines being full. Given Grex's stated purpose of providing access for the 'have-nots,' eliminating dialup access would be completely counterproductive. Assuming that potential users will already have net access by which to telnet here would be unrealistically optimistic. I used Grex on and off for about four years before having any other net access i could use from home.
Once again, no one is proposing eliminating dial-up usage. I just think we should have the right number of modems to fit the demand for them, and that means we should be willing to adjust downward as well as upward. It's not the end of the world, folks, to drop a few lines. It's not as if we were laying people off or anything. :) Steve, are we really going to add PPP dialup service in the next 3 months? If so, that's the best reason I've heard so far for keeping extra lines.
I'll put PPP-dialup service on the (imaginary) agenda for Wednesday's Grex staff meeting. I'll report back after that meeting on how long it will take us to bring up PPP-service and what the obstacles are. My un-informed guess is that it can be done quickly and easily. If this is true, then maybe we should be keeping all the dial-ins. If not, I agree that dropping a phone line that isn't being used DOES NOT mean that Grex isn't dedicated to maintaining good quality dial-up access in the Ann Arbor area. I absolutely believe that dialup access should be a high priority here, but I don't think that means we need to make charitable donations to Ameritech.
If we drop a few lines that aren't being used, it will save money that can then be spent on things that will be used.
$240 per year per phone line requires 4 paying members per line. Did you say there were 15 lines? That would be over half the membership dues just for phone lines, not a negligible expense. Must be a lot of extra donations in addition to membership dues keeping grex afloat.
There is 13 dialin lines. We have lines into the Pumpkin also for the ICnet link and for a staff line.
Would it help at all to put something in the motd (or somewhere that only dialin users would see it) explaining how much it costs to keep all the phone lines in service, and that we would appreciate donations, especially from dial-in users who are not members, toward the phone costs? How many nonpaying users use the dialin lines?
There's no way of knowing, especially now that we are on the terminal server. Hey Mark, re way up there, I notice that you post the expenses. I even read it, after I link it co coop. :)
We can still tell who is coming in on dial-up lines, because we can tell who connects to Grex from the terminal server. I really hope we don't get into raising money by guilt tripping people. Doing things to reduce the quality of service aren't good either. But, if we have dial-up lines that aren't being used, it doesn't make sense to keep paying for them while complaining about not having enough money for stuff we are going to use.
I don't think anyone said the need was critical -- just that we should start lloking at options -- unused "stuff" is the obvious first step. If I could see a possibility of a sudden influx of new dialins, I'd be against cutting lines right now -- but we don't have any plans that I know of that are likely toresult in a sudden influx of new dialins...
I'm going to enter a separate item about PPP connections on dial ups. Mostly this seems very feasible to do in the short range.
I remember hearing somewhere that 8 users per dialup line is a ratio that the commercial services consider excellent service. A few responses ago, I read a figure of four paying members for each of our lines. How can we determine how many local non-member users there are as well? Since our purpose is to serve all the users, not just the members, we need to know how many locals we need to plan for. I'm not adept at unix utilities, but is there someone more skilled who can do something like this?: 1) grep the logfiles (a month or more) for the IP address(es) of the terminal server 2) parse out the userid. 3) sort. 4) eliminate duplicate lines 5) count lines. Do this for each individual month for the past year. Project the trend out 3 months, 6 months. Divide the 3 month projection by 8. If less than 13, we might save money without apparently reducing service by suspending some phone lines. If we will need those lines within three months, we'd be better off keeping them. If we won't need those lines for 6, or even 9 months, we'll save some real dollars to spend on outreach, so we can build our user base and bring the lines back sooner!
Re #57: Sindi, you're a little off on your numbers. Type "only 1;only 38" at the next prompt to see the ones I calculated. No, the phone lines are definitely *not* a negligible expense. If you want more information on the level of Grex's donations, see the recent treasurer's reports. They're all collected in ~aruba/reports, and there's also a file called 501c3 there which summarizes our financial activity over the past 3.25 years.
I wrote a program that generated stats on how many dialup lines are being
used. This works with Grex's wtmp log, so in theory it should be exactly
accurate, unlike statistics based on polling. In practice, there are possible
problems due to glitches in the log files and perhaps bugs in the program.
of the four months I collected data on, I think the first two are accurate.
There are fourteen modems, so the number of dial-in users is always between
zero and fourteen. The following tables show, for each possible number of
users, what percentage of the time exactly that number of users was logged
on to Grex.
Apr 1998
USERS HOURS PERCENT
0: 46.20 6.42%
1: 90.69 12.61%
2: 124.13 17.26%
3: 118.71 16.51%
4: 105.02 14.60%
5: 78.97 10.98%
6: 59.68 8.30%
7: 41.99 5.84%
8: 26.79 3.72%
9: 12.99 1.80%
10: 7.35 1.02%
11: 3.41 .47%
12: 1.94 .26%
13: 1.06 .14%
14: 0.00 .00%
TOTAL: 718.93 100.00%
May 1998
USERS HOURS PERCENT
0: 49.47 6.64%
1: 104.21 14.00%
2: 134.36 18.05%
3: 132.46 17.80%
4: 107.02 14.38%
5: 76.91 10.33%
6: 57.19 7.68%
7: 35.92 4.82%
8: 21.02 2.82%
9: 13.69 1.84%
10: 6.09 .81%
11: 2.32 .31%
12: 1.90 .25%
13: 1.24 .16%
14: 0.19 .02%
TOTAL: 743.99 100.00%
Note that users would only get a busy tone when dialing Grex if there are
14 users already dialed into Grex. This data suggests that that happened
for a total of 12 minutes over the two months of April and May.
There is a glitch in the log file sometime in the middle of June, including
some null entries and some other bad stuff. It causes my program to complain
bitterly, but it manages to recover and run onward. However, I believe that
it loses a log-out record somewhere in there, or more likely picks up a
bogus login, so it thinks a user has been dialed in continuously from sometime
in the middle of June to the present. That's why the period of time with
zero users is low in the June report, and zero in the July report:
June 1998
USERS HOURS PERCENT
0: 29.61 4.11%
1: 98.83 13.72%
2: 124.26 17.25%
3: 117.72 16.35%
4: 103.58 14.38%
5: 87.68 12.17%
6: 70.20 9.75%
7: 41.35 5.74%
8: 22.72 3.15%
9: 12.19 1.69%
10: 6.36 .88%
11: 3.45 .47%
12: 1.33 .18%
13: 0.62 .08%
14: 0.06 .00%
TOTAL 719.96 100.00%
July 1998 through Sat Jul 18 15:06:47 EDT 1998
USERS HOURS PERCENT
0: 0.00 .00%
1: 33.48 7.91%
2: 57.31 13.54%
3: 56.05 13.24%
4: 53.06 12.54%
5: 52.33 12.36%
6: 51.68 12.21%
7: 42.44 10.03%
8: 32.01 7.56%
9: 21.92 5.18%
10: 12.41 2.93%
11: 5.66 1.33%
12: 2.75 .64%
13: 1.41 .33%
14: 0.58 .13%
TOTAL: 423.09 100.00%
If my theory about what messed these up is rignt, then we can fix the July
report by shifting it up one row:
Corrected? July 1998 through Sat Jul 18 15:06:47 EDT 1998
USERS HOURS PERCENT
0: 33.48 7.91%
1: 57.31 13.54%
2: 56.05 13.24%
3: 53.06 12.54%
4: 52.33 12.36%
5: 51.68 12.21%
6: 42.44 10.03%
7: 32.01 7.56%
8: 21.92 5.18%
9: 12.41 2.93%
10: 5.66 1.33%
11: 2.75 .64%
12: 1.41 .33%
13: 0.58 .13%
14: 0.00 .00%
TOTAL: 423.09 100.00%
My conclusion from this is that one phone line would never be missed, even if dial-up usage increases significantly.
Thanks, Jan! It looks like we might even be able to go up to 3 lines without significant impact if we had to...
Thanks, Jan. This supports my own feel for the situation, for which hard stats were lacking.
Thanks, Jan.
Thanks, Jan. There's something wrong, though, because unless I'm behind the times we only have 13 dial-in modems, not 14. (We have 15 total: the dial-ins plus the staff line (7541) and the link modem (8228) which until recently dialed out to ICNET.) Could it be that you're counting logins on the console as if they were people dialed in?
Or am I perhaps the 14th dial-in user, since I usually come in from Gryps?
Could be the staff line. I do know that STeve Andre' uses it a fair amount.
It is looking for telnet connections from the terminal server, so gryps and the console wouldn't count, but the staff line would. Hmmm...It's hard to check this code, because there is just so *much* data. I'll try a few more things. I should be able to make it printout out a snap shot of who is on each time the load goes above, say, 12.
OK, I did a little more checking. Here's two snapshots from March showing
14 dialin users on Grex:
--USER-- --LINE-- ------HOST------ ---------SINCE----------
monamoor ttyrf 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:26:50 1998
cmcgee ttypc 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 20:59:50 1998
orinoco ttyt3 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:10:58 1998
snow ttyt4 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:07:00 1998
illogic ttyrc 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:26:15 1998
bye ttyt0 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:27:12 1998
sprice ttyqc 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:10:34 1998
tpryan ttyq6 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 20:36:11 1998
sixx ttyq3 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:27:18 1998
steve ttys9 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 20:59:54 1998
n8rxs ttyp1 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 20:14:35 1998
gibson ttypb 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 21:18:08 1998
noreturn ttyp7 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 21:26:52 1998
mjg ttyr2 204.212.46.131 Mon Mar 23 22:16:58 1998
--USER-- --LINE-- ------HOST------ --------SINCE-----------
omni ttys6 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:41:53 1998
mcnally ttyte 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:40:02 1998
robh ttysd 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:23:29 1998
deigert ttyr7 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 22:06:50 1998
sekari ttyq9 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 22:10:34 1998
n8rxs ttytd 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:09:21 1998
cmcgee ttyr3 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:43:24 1998
kami ttys5 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:23:55 1998
beamer ttys0 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:49:17 1998
gibson ttyre 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 22:13:50 1998
steve ttyrf 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 22:14:08 1998
orinoco ttyr1 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:47:13 1998
n8nxf ttypa 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 21:43:37 1998
raven ttyq5 204.212.46.131 Thu Mar 26 20:43:25 1998
Every 14-user snapshot I've seen has "steve" in it, who is, I believe, the
most frequent user of the staff dial-in line. I don't know of any way to
factor the staff line out of this data. It isn't distinguishable from
anything in the wtmp log.
So basically we should consider Grex full at 13 lines, not 14 as I said before.
It's possible that at 13 lines, the staff line is in use, so there still is
one free public dial-in, but it's also possible that all lines are in use.
So it looks like Grex's lines fill up for something a bit under an hour a month, around a tenth of a percent of the time.
Hmmm - I'd be tempted to suggest eliminating the staff line - except it also doubles as a voice line for the pumpkin, something we do kind of need.
i would not eliminate the staff line. if it can be used for remote rebooting, or other service to grex then kkeping it outweighs its cost.
The staff line isn't hardwired into Grex, either. It's possible to connect to Gryps, too.
Ah, I didn't even know the staff line had a modem on it - I thought it was just for voice calls. But now that you mention it, I do remember the debate about how the staff needs to be able to dial in when the internet connection is hosed.
If steve always uses the staff line, and nobody else does at all regularly, could the stats just be run in a way that wouldn't count steve?
Any way your slice this *very* nice data, we could cut 3 lines and rarely cause any busy signals.
that would depend on your definition of 'rarely'. Jan, I hate to be the one to keep asking for a few more lines of code, but would it be possible to list incidents of high utilization in detail? As the count increases from 11 to 12, note the timestamp. As the count decreases from 12 to 11, output a record showing begin, end times and duration. This, IMO, will show us a better picture of the impact of an 11-line configuration: The maximum time a user would be waiting (or attack-dialing) to get in during the peak usage. Is that three hours/month in one peak? (unacceptable, in my opinion to ever have to wait that long for a connection) or 6 minutes, once a day (probably manageable)? Realize also, that we want to serve all the users, so that we won't simply clip the peaks off the curve. Instead, we will extend the duration a/o frequency of peaks at 11 so that the area under the curve is constant. This means that the times a user will get a busy with 11 lines available is greater than the amount of time we see '11 or more' lines in use today.
You have several choices: