Attending Board Members: slynne, gelinas, mary, dpc, vanloons, bhoward (by speakerphone), polygon Attending Non-Board Members: STeve, aruba, remmers, jdeigert, keesan, Sarah Kestenbaum The Board meeting was called to order by President slynne on January 14, 2005 at 7:15 p.m. at dpc's house, 1418 Broadway, Ann Arbor. Board members slynne, gelinas, mary, dpc, and vanloons were present. Election of Officers: Dpc volunteered to be secretary. He was elected unanimously. Bhoward joined. Two candidates for president were nominated: slynne and mary. The Board voted by paper ballot, and slynne was elected by a vote of 4 to 2. Gelinas volunteered to be treasurer. He was elected unanimously. The Board thanked Treasurer Emeritus aruba for his outstanding work. Treasurer's Report: Aruba reported that in December we took in $421 and spent $430. The details are in his report, which is posted online. So far in January we have taken in $66. Aruba said that there were several tasks remaining for him to do, including filing the personal property tax return and IRS form 990. Aruba said that presently four people are authorized to sign checks: slynne, janc, aruba, and gelinas. The Board discussed the pros and cons of changing these signers. Treasurer gelinas said that he would prefer for us to leave the signers alone because he does not like TCF bank. He said he would have a recommendation at the next meeting for a possible change in banks. The Board next discussed the problem of someone who wanted to become an individual member, but only provided a business name through PayPal. Dpc moved that if a membership comes through PayPal, we will require a name and address for an individual membership. Mary suggested that we make an informal contact first and ask for a name and address. The Board reviewed the present identification policy and decided that it covered this situation. Dpc withdrew his motion. Aruba will follow up with the potential individual member. Grex Update: Slynne said the new system was very fast. Dpc said that spam was a real problem. STeve said that we are now running exim, and that we lost all of mdw's sendmail custom spam filters. Dpc said that his professional mail was bouncing, since because of all the spam, his mail quota was being exceeded. STeve said we could couple Spam Assassin to exim. If so, what did we want to do about mail tagged as spam? We could set the threshold high, and throw obvious spam away, such as foreign character sets. We could create a secondary mailbox for each account. Ideally we want the spam filter to be user-configurable. He said that we would automatically become one of the larger user-configurable systems on the planet. Keesan said that she got a lot of e-mail with foreign character sets. STeve said that there were standard ways of dealing with foreign character sets that would not discard all such mail. Gelinas said that spam was a staff problem, not a Board problem. He said we might use DeSpam. He said we may have to build another AMD machine to handle spam, and that spam is eating people alive. Mary asked for a time frame on doing *something.* Gelinas said we should have a staff meeting to build consensus. He said this might be on Wednesday night, January 19, and that some time thereafter we would see progress. Dpc said that quotas need to be increased to prevent bouncing. STeve said he agreed, and we have more disk space available now. Gelinas said raising quotas tonight (January 14) should not be a problem. Backups: There are errors when we try to use the tape drive. STeve said he would use his precious hoard of Freon to fix the drive. If this does not work, then the tape drive will have to be repaired. Keesan suggested a backup to a hard drive. Gelinas said any backup should be off-site. Continuing the staff report, STeve said that the I/O out of Grex right now is very jerky, and that the problem may be in the network card. He will put in a spare $30 Intel card. He said that although janc did a hell of a job, he did not bring Grex up to Open BSD 3.6, just 3.5. Gelinas said that janc had decided we don't need the changes that 3.6 makes. STeve said this was wrong; there were about 1500 changes, and we needed many of them. Aruba asked if vandals were using up a lot of space. STeve said that if so, they would have to be making denial-of-service attacks, and that looking at the system's behavior he did not think this was happening. Gelinas said he thought a second Ethernet card would be useful, anyway. Moving Grex to Co-lo: STeve said that with Grex moving to a remote location, we will not have guaranteed physical access at all hours, only when Provide.Net is open, from 10 to 10. He said a PC Weasel card let you remotely control everything but turning the machine on and off. It costs $350 for this card. We would not have to go to Provide.Net. If there is another disk disaster, Provide.Net hours will not be adequate, and we will have to remove the machine. Mary asked what is our priority on expenses, between fixing the backup tape drive and the Weasel card. STeve said that since we are leaving the Pumpkin, Weasel is the priority. He said that with regard to backups, half of our disk disasters were on system disks. He said he had 99% of Grex at work, and that janc is mirroring the 1a and 1c partitions. Mary said we may not have enough money, considering the projected February and March low point in cash because of the move. Gelinas said he was not convinced we needed the Weasel card. Slynne said we should move to Provide.Net first, and then assess our needs. Dpc said he personally supported the purchase of the Weasel card, but would not get ahead of the rest of the Board. STeve said that Weasel was turning into the de facto standard to manage a system remotely. Mary said that according to her rough figures, the move was going to cost $840, then double rent for February (at the Pumpkin and Provide.Net). We plan to move February 1. In mid-February we will move the phone lines over. On March 1 we give our landlord the remaining rent under our lease (March, April, and May), paying the lease off. Then there is 5 months of DSL service at 75% of $135 per month, which we are locked into paying. STeve suggested delaying the move by a month. He said we are now using Grex under real-world conditions, and that any hardware failure would likely happen soon. It would be easier to deal with hardware problems at the Pumpkin than at Provide.Net. Mary said that we may have flaky phone lines or a modem at the Pumpkin, and that the move may improve stability. STeve said he did not think this would happen. He said there is a lack of staff time. Dpc suggested that that staff recommend a different move date if they meet on January 19, and that otherwise we keep the February 1 date. STeve said he will bet that if the hardware works perfectly on March 1, it will continue to work until summer, 2007. Mary said we will consider any staff recommendation in mail. Gelinas said he had not been in recent contact with John at Provide.Net, and we need the new IP addresses. Mary asked what about not paying the extra $50 per month to Provide.Net for more gigabytes? We will have the use of 50 gigabytes of traffic per month under our basic agreement with Provide.Net, and if we go over that, then we have to pay the extra $50. STeve said we may crash through the lower bandwidth because of graphic downloads. Slynne said this issue was best discussed online. STeve said we may be without dialin lines for a couple of days during the move. Gelinas said he would deal with the phone company. Aruba said that once we are out of the Pumpkin, we will have immediate savings of $140 per month. The moving costs (4 months' rent, 4 months of 75% of our DSL cost, and two phone lines) should come to $928. Slynne will call about the DSL fairly quickly, and see if we can get a break on cancellation of the service. Terminating the Pumpkin Lease: Gelinas moved to notify the Pumpkin landlord that we will not be renewing our lease, and will be out March 1. Mary suggested an amendment, to just say we will not be renewing. Her amendment was friendly. Dpc seconded. Dpc said we should not just hand the landlord a bunch of money to pay off the 3 months of the lease when we will not be in the space. When we leave the space, the landlord has a duty to try to rent the space. We, of course, guarantee that we will make up any shortfall on May 31. The rental rate is $84 per month. Mary said she would feel out the landlord on a possible deal. Gelinas' amended motion carried unanimously. Schedule Next Meeting: The next meeting will be Friday, February 18, at 7:00 p.m. at slynne's house. New Business: Dpc wanted to know how to find out about trends in system use. He asked if we keep any records. STeve said no, we don't. He said there were about 12,000 entries in the password file recently, and it had been steady for the past year. Vanloons brought up the suggestion that we allow blogs on Grex. Dpc and slynne said this was a great idea. STeve said that blogs are a type of conference. He felt the Board did not need to do anything to make this happen. Polygon and Sarah Kestenbaum arrived. Mary said blogs allow censorship, and were like private conferences. Remmers said that under Grex policies, all conferences except the staff conference shall be open. A blog is like a conference with an owner. The Board decided that the staff will discuss blogs, the discussion will continue on line in Coop, and the Board will decide on Blogs at its February meeting. Mary said she thought blogs were a cool departure. Vanloons raised the matter of longer loginids being allowed by the new system. The Board felt this was a staff issue. Gelinas said they could be a good thing because they eliminated the need for abbreviations. There being no further business, Gelinas moved to adjourn, slynne seconded, and the motion passed unanimously. The meeting was adjourned at 9:07 p.m.27 responses total.
I *really* don't think a Weasel card should be our number one priority; the hardware problems we've been having recently have been mostly due to connectivity. I think moving out of the pumpkin and onto a reliable ISP-provided backbone should be a priority, not waiting to see if something breaks. The ISP's hours are perfectly adequate; I'm not sure we've done a lot of work outside of those hours when there's been a problem, anyway. At anyrate, certainly getting a reliable backup mechanism going should be higher on the list of priorities than geting a remote maintenence card.
What should be our #1+ priority is to figure out what to do when vanloons (User Steve Vanloons) moves to India. He's already having truoble commuting from Detroit. what're you folks going to do when TWO board members aren't local? Huh? Didn't know that Steve was moving to India, huh? Tough luck for you, I guess, huh? Guess you should have paid more attention to what was happening, huh?
A correction: I did NOT volunteer to be treasurer; ; mary nominated me. Also, the vote was not unanimous: I abstained.
Wow, those are very extensive minutes! A correction: Grex does not file form 990 with the IRS, because we are under the threshhold of $25,000/year in income. I've filled one out anyway over the last few years, in case anyone asks for it. (We needed it twice for other reasons.) I'm planning to do that again.
I had meant to attend the meeting, but forgot. I do not think we need a Weasel card. If someone donates one to us, sure, but I think it would be an unnecessary expense. Getting some kind of working backup system seems much more important to me. I think we should move Grex at the earliest possible opportunity. Grex's performance problems are certainly do to a lot of packet loss over the network connection, but I do think it has anything to do with the network card. We were seeing similar, though less severe lagginess with both the old and new systems before the change-over. I think it is more severe with the new system because the new system is faster and tries to push a lot data over the connection much faster, aggravating whatever the problem in the connection is. I note no similar problems between gryps and grex. I haven't heard of dial-in users having the same problem. This all suggests the DSL modem or the ISP, not the new Grex system. If I'm right (and I may not be) then moving Grex to the new location will fix the problem. I think it should be done at the earliest possible date.
Mark, I thought the Form 990 was required. Because we make so little money, not much information is required: name, address, a checkbox certifying that we are below the threshold, and a signature.
If they send you one in the mail, you are required to do that. But not if they don't.
I am dialed in and things are going at full speed but I have no new mail. The hard drive backup we proposed involves a couple of boxes that you put into computers, with more boxes (three) that go into those, and then you insert IDE drives into the three boxes. You can have two of these in the grex computer at one time and alternate doing backups to them remotely, and the third one offsite that can be switched with an onsite one when convenient. What happened with the idea of burning all the system part of grex to backup CD? CD burners are cheaper than tape backup drives, as are hard drives, and will probably last longer too. We are offering to donate the boxes, which were given to us by a grexer to recycle. The minutes were as usual even better than being there.
Whoa, are we *forcing* Monsieur LeRouge Joseph LeCamarade Gelinas de la Salle to be our next treasurer?! Also, if the landlord of the pumpkin is named Peter and has an Italian last name, shouldn't we have second thoughts about moving ?!
A couple of comments on staff issues vs. non-staff issues, prompted by things that came up at the meeting: (1) The board was correct to postpone authorization of the Weasel card purchase until more staff had been heard from. It's a technical issue, and one of the roles of staff is to discuss technical issues and make recommendations. (2) Somebody mentioned that the question of hosting blogs on Grex is a staff issue. I disagree, assuming that I interpreted the remark correctly. The technical implementation would be done by a staff volunteer, but the question of whether we should do them is an issue for discussion by everyone.
Putting a weasel card in front of backups as a priority is ridiculous. Cyberspace's main asset is the intellectual property of Grex. Remote reboots wouldn't mean much if you have nothing to restore.
FWIW, those at the staff meeting agreed it wasn't a high priority. After the staff meeting, STeve volunteered to contact the PC Weasel people to ask for a donation.
Right on What's the status of backups?
Waiting for STeve to visit the tape drive.
Is staff still considering backup up BSD (non-user part) to CD?
We don't really need to back up the OS. When I built the new system, I wrote documentation and usually scripts to perform every step of the task of turning a standard OpenBSD distribution into a Grex. This, together with the source code of all custom software on Grex, and all config files for Grex, is checked into a CVS archive that is hosted on a different machine. Copies of this are checked out to various other staff machines, including my home machine. So we'd have to lose at least three machines before it was lost. Given this, it should be possible to reconstruct a Grex from a blank machine in 24 hours. It does not, however, include the contents of the conferences, the password file, or user home directories. We need other backup strategies for these. We do currently keep an extra copy of the entire system on the IDE drive, in the /mirror partition. This is updated daily for most partitions. (I think twice daily for bbs and four times for /etc). There are, however, many reasons why this is not a adequate backup strategy on it's own. I could help you in some circumstances, but not in many others.
We offered (and Joe may have picked up) two cases that hold removable IDE drives which could be used for backups, alternating backing up to two different drives in case one failed, with a third drive offsite in case of some bizarre lightning strike at provide.net. Why not also keep system files on a CD to save the 24 hours backup time? What is a CVS archive?
In the name of the Lord, when will someone refer Ms. Keesan to a good text on UNIX, or even the jellyware conference, or even google ?!
Or all three. I agree that archiving Grex, even just once, would save mucho time.
http://www.archivinggrexforjesus.org/
re 19 Yes, or all three! Alas, it is not possible for me to do this.
I have no objection to saving Grex to CD's. Apparantly the CD drive is a CD-R/RW drive, so it is probably possible. Might take a lot of CDs. The advantages of rebuilding from Grexdoc, however, is that you get new versions of everything.
I thought grex got a CD burner for this purpose, in case of disk crashes and the need to get back online faster. Is there some chance of getting the most recent version of Lynx this year?
a DVD-+R/W would hold 4.3G..that would be 7 CDs worth of data..
Well, we don't have a DVD drive. We could certainly get one.
I think it's a good investment for the purpose.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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