Grex Board of Directors Meeting Minutes. February 26, 2006 Board members in attendance: Mark Conger, Lynne Fremont, Larry Kestenbaum, John Remmers, Jan Wolter Others in attendance: Mary Remmers. Opening gavel tap. 7:06pm Treasurers Report. Grex took in $665 last month. So far in Feb, we have taken in $90. Our monthly expenses are around $150-$175. We had four new members in January. We have two new members so far this month. Currently, we are at about 60 members with around 40 paid up. Provide.net double billed us. They seem to be rearranging their bookkeeping. Aruba will call on Monday to straiten that out. Staff Report The idle daemon has been turned off and so far there have been no significant problems. The load on the system used to be too high if we had too many users but now we have different hardware and different internet, etc. No one has heard from Steve about the memory. He was going to send it back. Jan said that Jeff Kaplen lives about two blocks from Provide.net. He said that he would be willing to go over and do reboots. Remmers moves to add Kaplan to staff pending staff approval. Aruba seconds. Passed unanimously. Schedule the next meeting: Sunday March 19th 7:00. At Aruba s Old Business: Email. The status of email is that it is turned off for newusers. We were going to go to a system where we limit the amount of mail per login. That hasnt happened yet so mail is currently turned off. Aruba had a person call him and ask him if they could use Grex for email but mail was turned off for newuser so Aruba had bhoward allow mail to that user. Janc thinks that some program could be written to tell us about how many emails users send so we could effectively set an outgoing email limit that wont impact regular users too much. All users can receive email. Janc said that he would be happy if we set up email separately from newuser. Maybe we should focus less on mail. Grex might not be the best service for mail. It might not be a good use of our bandwidth. Not so much discontinue it but don t give it to all newsuers as the default. We will make sure that people who use Grex as their primary email will not be cut off. New Business: updated board and staff email lists. Aruba helped a newuser set up an account on grex. He said that he got some feedback that grex might be too hard for some of our less tech savvy newusers. Aruba said that over the past 10 years he has always kind of felt that this is a charitable organization and he feels that we should support people like that. He wrote a document about connecting to grex with hyperterminal. It isnt hard to set up. He said that it could be expanded to include basic stuff like how to connect a modem to a phone line and also some instructions on how to use grex. This would be a little booklet or pamphlet that we could put in the library or something. There is a grex handbook but it hasnt been updated since 1998. Aruba is going to enter an item in coop. Janc says that we might not be able to meet the needs of people who don t know anything about computers but we might be better able to offer services to people who need things like C compilers and shell accounts. This might be an area where we can make a real contribution. Larry says that this might be something were we could leave a booklet or a pamphlet in local computer labs. Also perhaps a web version. Dialins - we only have two lines and we should make a commitment to keeping them. Newuser says we have four lines when we have two. Closing Gavel Tap = 7:5315 responses total.
Newuser should source the phones command so the information doesn't need to be updated in multiple places.
Newuser should be rewritten. I got about halfway there, and had to put it aside to do some other things. My idea was to write most of it in Perl, with a small setuid wrapper around the system ``useradd'' command. As it is now, newuser is something like 12,000 lines of poorly written C code, all of which runs as root. A few hundred (or perhaps a little over a thousand, but say, less than 2k) of Perl could replace that and be significantly more secure. I got sort of bogged down trying to do something like `gate' in it to replace the nasty and inflexible input mechanisms. If I could find a package that does what would be the equivalent of a multiline readline, I'd probably just finish knocking it out.
Could you please add to newuser the option to use spamassassin with some defaults? A score of three has not yet in half a year caught a false positive for me, and it catches 90% of the real spams that way. Grex mail is rather unusable without some spam filtering. Is ANYONE still working on antispam measures for grex? A systemwide block on mail to happypup and about 10 others who don't exist (To: or CC: to them is always spam) would help a lot, as would getting rid of a few common spams that come five times a day with the same subject lines every time.
why not just change newuser so it prompts "do you want email on this login?" Then have it state that grex only offers free email for the first thirty days without user verification. If said user wants to keep free email after that, he must provide verification.
Im thinking a fair number of newusers will simply answer "no" when asked if they want email, because they don't need it and they won't want to verify after thirty days.
Also couldn't newuser be modified so it doesn't allow the same password to be used on more than one login. This would thwart mail spammers having bots running newuser and generating dozens of logins
I don't think that would slow down spammers at all, and the 30 day rule you suggest would allow them to do what they do best.
I'd also like to see a web interface for new user, as I think grex can attract users who otherwise would never join because they don't kow or run telnet.
We *have* a web interface for newuser! The link on the home page is called "Get a free account".
yeah but when you click on that link you are telnetted in to grex. I'm talking about a full newuser web interface, where you get your login on the web page and NEVER have to telnet in
It is *not* a telnet:// link. It is a web form with text boxes for the relevant fields (and one big one for the plan file). Try it yourself.
(Jonathan's right, Richard.)
unlucky!
whoa !
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
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