7:39 Board Called to Order
In attendance: dang, remmers, mary, bmoran, steve, aruba, tsty, jared,
janc, kaplan, senna, scg, mta
Treasurers Report:
Membership has been constant over the last several years. We might
start to consider marketing GREX with eye toward new membership
revenues not just new users.
Possible ideas:
Newspaper articles
Increase membership by $1
Publicity push at the next major upgrade
Focus efforts on locals (who tend to make up most of membership)
Merchandising push
Publicity push by individuals
Publicity Report:
Rob and Misti are supposed to get together to work on the t-shirt
order.
Technical Committee Report:
GREX's reliability had been so-so lately. Jan and Klaus Wolter have
pulled GREX apart, installed memory cards to load GREX to it's
capacity. Everything was up to speed. Klaus tweeked a power supply
to improve the amount of available power. GREX speeded up at that
point and hasn't crashed since.
Modems and phone lines are having some serious trouble. It may be
related to power problems. This hasn't been resolved yet.
The terminal server is now stable and working for a week and a half.
A new version of the operating system doesn't seem to want to talk
to anything off the subnet.
We've had an endless stream of eggdroppers. FTP now has a wrapper
reminding people that eggdrop won't work on GREX. It seems to be
working well.
670 - not much new progress to report. The 670 is having trouble
talking sensibly to the disks. Marcus is concerned about the
physical health of one of the SCSI cables. It's been folded and
bent. The staff will be replacing it.
We still need to get our power consumption verified. We need to
balance our power bills and we may very well have been paying too
much.
It looks like modems with physical dumb modes may be on the market
again.
SSH seems to be having problems. Staff will move it temporarily to
Griffis and make it unavailable to non-staffers while they plug a
security hole.
The phone list needs updating.
The ISDN Report
An ISDN line is now available through Dorian's T1 -- which is better
connectivity that the UM has! We need to put in the lines, Jared
will pay for most of the installation costs. Steve will verify that
CENTRX and ISDN aren't going to be incompatible.
Money fro an ISDN is a major concern, but many present feel that
history shows that when GREX makes a major improvment, the money to
maintain it has always followed.
Question:
- Should we keep the 28.8k line when we get ISDN?
The concensus is that "yes", we should, but that it needs to be
discussed in coop before the board votes on it.
jan moves and valerie seconds:
I move the board authorize the following:
(1) The expenditure of up to $200 for the installation of two
ISDN phone lines.
(2) The expenditure of up to $60 per month for the same lines
(3) Contingent on a fund raiser raising at least $800, the
expenditure of up to $1400 for two ISDN routers.
Motion passes 3-0-0
Auction Report:
The auction made somewhat less than it did last year. You can run
the !auction command from within the auction conference to check on
the status of the auctioned items.
New Business:
501c3 - work is underway. Jan still needs help to assemble some
financial data.
Grexstock - only two people have reserved sites and lots of people
seem to plan to drop by for a day or an evening.
10 responses total.
Sorry it took so long folks.
Thanks for posting that. I think your vote total is wrong on the ISDN motion that passed. The previous ISDN motion, made by me and seconded by dang, which failed, isn't mentioned in the minutes.
Hello << Telephone lines problem related to Power problems >> Do you need a big UPS? Or just a giant Stabilizer? I have several APC 1250 Watts Stabilizer. Is this useful. Best regarsds (AW)
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Hello Valerie, sorry about voltage and socket (DIN EURO). But IMO we can get one for 110 V & standard American plug. Regards AW.
Yow, I knew I should have made time while my cryptic notes still made some sense. Sorry, Valerie and Dan and Steve.
Power problems won't cause phone line problems. Phone lines get their power from a comletely different source.
Power conditioners are resonant devices. i.e. frequency is as important, if not more important, than voltage. Changing taps on the transformer inside the conditioner will solve the the voltage problem. However, changing a 50 Hz unit (Europe) to 60 Hz (USA) requires changing out expensive capacitors. Be warned!
Actually, noisy power lines *can* cause problems with modems. The analog coponents in the power supply definitely need clean DC, and if the AC power is too wild (or if the modem maker has been a bit too cheap in the power supply section), reliable modem operation will definitely be compromised.
The command to check on the auction status is "query", and it can be run from any UNIX prompt, not just within the auction conference. I also reported some numbers in the Treasurer's report; they can be found in the July and June Treasurer's reports. I also circulated a summary of our finances for the first 6 months of this year, comnpared with the first 6 months of last year. I guess I should post that online, when I get back home.
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