Attending Board Members: slynne, polygon, dpc, mary, bhoward (via video iChat from Japan and then speakerphone). Non-Attending Board Member: gelinas Attending Non-Board members: STeve, aruba, Janice Gutfreund The November 10, 2005 meeting of the Grex Board of Directors was called to order at 7:06 p.m. by President slynne at the home of remmers and mary, 19 Westbury Ct., Ann Arbor. Schedule Next Meeting: Since new Board members will have been elected prior to our next bimonthly meeting, the Board decided that this upcoming meeting would be scheduled by e-mail after the election. The results of the election will be available on December 16. New Business: As Board member vanloons has resigned, the Board discussed filling the vacancy created by his resignation. Dpc said we should stick exactly to the bylaws, or else someone could challenge the election. Article 4(c) says: "If an office is vacated before expiration of its term, an election to fill the vacancy shall take place within three months." Slynne said there was an interesting dilemma with both bhoward and tod running, who would be non-local Board members if both were elected. Dpc said that this situation should be handled by the normal political process. Polygon asked how we could distinguish a special election seat. He said we could run a separate vacancy-filling election at the same time as the regular December election. Remmers said that if the special election is held later, then voters would not have to choose which candidate they wanted for which term. Bhoward said that the election should be run separately; that it was simpler. The Board unanimously decided to have a separate vacancy-filling election. Staff report: STeve said he had downloaded 90 BSD files from 90 crashes. Remmers said a few months ago Grex started crashing once every 1-2 days. We needed to call Provide.Net to press the reset button, or he would have to reset it manually. There were 40 continuous days us, then 6, 8, 10, 4, and 2 days; then less than 1 days. There had been 110 reboots since August 22. He said it was odd that we did not have a problem for a long time. A memory test showed no problems. There is no evidence of disk problems. STeve said there were 4 reasons for the crashes, 3 due to running OpenBSD 3.5. Part of the problem is due to vandalism. The system was stable for quite a while. There are no hardware issues, only software. We should upgrade, and bring in a spare Intel Ethernet card. I want to do an upgrade this weekend, he said. "If it spills over to Monday, fuck work." John said that MiniGrex may help solve some upgrade issues. He said it is all documented. STeve said that watching the system corrode is just painful. With regard to the Weasel, STeve said it gives us telepresence. It's a video card. All the information that would go to the console goes to a second machine. But w need a second machine at Provide.Net. The Weasel would be in this second machine. That machine could reboot Grex. STeve said Grex has been used to attack other machines. M-Net is turning off mail because there were no many frauds that M-Net was afraid of losing its free connection. STeve said we need a second machine to run squid, which is a firewall. He said he had a spare 300 meg machine which we could use. Bhoward asked if we would have to pay for a second IP address. STeve said not necessarily. Provide.Net may or may not charge us. Doing this could actually reduce the bandwidth we use. No second phone line is needed. This gets rid of 99% of the non-hardware- disaster- related reasons to make a personal visit to Grex. Slynne said she could make personal visits, and was very good at following directions. Dpc said he would like to see the upgrade this weekend, then do another iteration for the Weasel. STeve said he would talk to John at Provide.Net. Slynne said we could authorize up to a certain amount on the Weasel project. Mary suggested $30 per month extra. Aruba said it might be nice for others to kick in on the Weasel. Mary moved that we will buy the Weasel, and that the anonymous donor will reimburse us; that we authorize up to $100 on hardware incidental to the second machine, plus an extra $30 per month maximum for Provide.Net. Dpc seconded. STeve said it would take 12 to 16 hours to do the weasel project, some time in December. Mary's motion was carried unanimously. Treasurer's Report: Assistant Treasurer aruba said that October was a good month. The report is posted online. He said that in the years 2000 and 2001, Grex could accept credit cards directly. It was a big boondoggle. They were crooks. We paid for 6 months of service we did not use. These people are being sued. The plaintiffs estimate that we will get $8 if we participate in the suit. Aruba may or may not fill in the papers. Aruba said he had sent in the old disk drive to Seagate, and he has the rebuilt drive on his desk. Returning to New Business: STeve said we need to be doing backups. He said he had an 8 mm tape drive. It is temperamental; we need a DVD writer. Aruba said we spent $700 on a tape drive. Apparently it was an imprudent decision: we used it once and it broke. STeve said there was more to the issue than that. What is the best way to back up Grex? Spend $45 for a DVD writer. Or, he could install the spare disk now and use it for backups. He said he wanted to make all user partitions 5 gigs in size to accommodate an exact size for the DVD. Late we can use a cheap DVD writer. Dpc said it should be a staff decision on partition size; let's take thee things in stages. Aruba said he would order the PC Weasel. STeve said he was amazed at the behavior of some sociopathic users. He said Grex was losing a lot of interesting people because of a few nutcases. What are the boundaries of free speech? we have to control these people, or all our efforts will come to naught. He asked what was the sense of the Board on blocking someone who is continuously emotionally abusive? He said it was possible to do intelligent blocking. All the social systems Grex has used have failed. Other systems, such as the Well in San Francisco, don't tolerate assholes. Users are paid and verified. This reminds him of the U of M's Confer in the 70s. Mary asked, how about splitting Grex into Grex 1, and Grex 2. Grex 2 would be verified, or read-only. Dpc said the Board should discuss this after the election. The meeting was adjourned at 8:24 p.m.35 responses total.
This may be drift, but what is the behavior of some users that is characterized as "sociopathic"? Are we talking about system vandals here, or merely things written in bbs or party (or even via e-mail)?
Perhaps grex should request mental health certifications along with IDs. Or maybe it should require academic credentials from those making sociopathic diagnoses.
> STeve said we need a second machine to run squid, which is a firewall. This peaked my curiousity as I have worked with squid for about 5 years now, including writing a mysql authentication module for it. Squid is a proxy program that does caching and logging. Its not really a firewall. So, can we get some clarification on (1) why we would need to run squid, and (2) why a second machine would be needed to run squid? > STeve said he was amazed at the behavior of some sociopathic users. I agree with Kevin here, specific examples are needed for a better understanding about what is meant. > Other systems, such as the Well in San Francisco, don't tolerate > assholes. WTF? The Well is part of Salon.com...and is not a charitable non-profit organization like Cyberspace Communications is.
Cafe Utne is a nonprofit BBS, I'm pretty sure, and they ban people there.
If we expect staff to have a thick skin, perhaps we should require the same of our members.
I'm late for a meetiing so I have to make this short. A second machine is the right way to go, in that it isn't something that is attackable directly as Grex itself is. Squid was working on stopping some of the web exploits that vandals ran here against other sites. An error caused us to reformat the machine with a newer OS without saving the previous configuration.
Maybe this could be discussed better in Garage?
How powerful a machine is needed to run the Weasle card? From what I read of the card, the interface seems to be normal COM ports (RS232). Would an HP100LX palmtop (DOS machine, 16 MHz) with 2400 baud PCMCIA modem serve? (I think I also have a 14400 baud PCMCIA modem.)
Whats the point in publically opening up the agenda item, if the board selectively decides what topics they want to cover during the meeting? Did you guys not think I was serious? Does the board think they aren't accountable to the members? What kind of good ol' boy system are you people running? I'd like to hear, from each of the current board members, why they chose to ignore my request.
I apologize for that eprom. I dont have any excuse other than it was a busy week for me so rather than updating the minutes, I just printed out #0 from the agenda item and used that to run the meeting.
oh...ok.
Was John Remmers the only person present, and not listed in "Attending Non-Board members"?
Miss Sarah (Larry and Janice's daughter) was also there.
I may be going out on a limb that has at least a 50% chance of breaking under my weight, here, but I would like to suggest that the only user Steve' thinks is 'sociopathic', a condition he clearly doesn't understand, is... me! At the very least, I'm sure I serve as at least one example of what Steve' was talking about.
It doesn't matter scholar. As far as I know, you do not do anything that would not be considered free speech. And I am not going to be a member of an organization that wants to censor what you say because they think its childish, twit-like, sociopathic, trollish, or whatever other label of the day they want to apply. And just to be honest, that applies to the shit you say about me, the shit naftee says about me, and the shit people say about you two being dead. All of it is free speech, and if people don't like it, they can get the fuck out... in my most humble opinion of course.
(Also, it should be noted that what I suspect Steve' objects to most happened not on Grex but on... M-Net!)
wow ! nharmon ! resp:15 was great !
But Nate, you sort of already do....
sort of already do what?
Support a system that's, well, less than exemplary in its support of free speech.
Yeah, and it does bother me. But I suppose there exists a breaking point that hasn't been reached yet.
Okay.
mmmkay
let me get this right: steve wants to ban users but he himself along with slynne can't control the amount of food they intake? steve is at the point of having strokes because this and yet he wants to start to ban users!!!!!!!!!!!! smart!
Triludaa doesn't know it, but Grex is just the Fat Man's conspiracy to keep him down.
It's the man, ma, he's keeping me down!
whoa!
whoa !
whoa !
woe
whoae !!!
whom!
WHOA NELLY
big guy
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: