This is a special year-end report on Grex's finances for 2006.
Beginning Balance $3,735.11
Average Total
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Credits $330.00 $3,960.00 Membership dues
$33.33 $400.00 Sale of old Sun equipment to mdw
$20.00 $240.00 Miscellaneous donations
$1.14 $13.62 Interest
$0.20 $2.38 Silly Hat Fund
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$384.67 $4,616.00
Debits $100.00 $1,200.00 Colocation fees
$48.33 $579.98 Phone bills
$6.93 $83.17 Paypal discounts
$3.33 $40.00 Rental of P.O. Box
$2.49 $29.90 Fees to maintain our domain names
$1.67 $20.00 Fees to maintain our corporate status
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$162.75 $1,953.05
Ending Balance $6,398.06
We added 24 people to the membership rolls in 2006:
beebot, c3067692, charcat, cross, easlern, firewizz, glenda, jadecat,
kaf28, kingjon, koppula, lapdragon, llama, lutefisk, matasw, mudlark,
muthu, nharmon, pmakinen, ringbark, scholar, stefburn, steve, and walkman.
Of those, 15 were still paid-up members at the end of the year.
At the beginning of 2006 we had 48 paid-up members. At the end of 2006 we
had 53 paid-up members. We had an average of 49 paid-up members during the
year.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to Grex in 2006:
ajax, arabella, arthurp, aruba, atticus, beebot, c3067692, chanur, charcat,
coyote, cross, easlern, eskarina, firewizz, fitz, garrigan, gelinas,
glenda, gorg, i, jadecat, janc, jason, jep, kaf28, kaplan, kedar, keesan,
khamsun, kingjon, koppula, krj, lapdragon, llama, lutefisk, matasw,
mbroggy, mbusse, mdw, mnac, mrtuna, muthu, naftee, nharmon, pengo,
pmakinen, polygon, rcurl, remmers, ringbark, robfitz, scholar, scott,
slynne, srw, stefburn, steve, trh, vortayne, walkman, wh, witling, wlevak,
and a few more people who asked to remain anonymous. Thanks all!
47 responses total.
It seems pretty clear that Grex had a pretty good year, financially. In fact, a very good year. We had twice as many new members as in 2005, and we took in a lot more than we spent. Thank you to everyone who supported Grex in 2006!
But this is the people's money! If we have a surplus, we should give it back and stimulate the economy.
Zing!
What is grex gonna do with that net gain of ~$2,500?
Contract a sysadmin outsourcing firm in Bangladesh.
Burn!
First, we should all take a deep breath, and feel good for a moment that Grex did so well over the past year. It hasn't always been the case, so we deserve to enjoy it. But absolutely, if there are problems we can solve by throwing a little money at them, now is a good time to do that. People have been talking about a RAID array. How much staff time will be required to install a RAID array if we buy one?
It would be a fairly significant investment; essentially, the system would have to be reinstalled onto it. That might not be a bad thing, as grex is due for an operating system upgrade anyway (it is now two OpenBSD releases behind).
Are there any system upgrades which require money but not significant time, and after which the users will see an immediate improvement?
Very important technical purchase: send chocolate to all of the active participants in the technical conferences
Yes!! Feed them chocolate. Improve their sense of well being!
re #9: > Are there any system upgrades which require money but not significant > time, and after which the users will see an immediate improvement? /var/mail needs more disk space -- needs it badly. setting everything up on a high-performance RAID array would be nice but I guarantee we'll find uses for a spare disk if we wanted to buy one now and start using it for /var/mail until a more permanent solution comes along.
Regarding #9; McNally points out the need for additional mail spool space. Actually, I'd say that the spool space isn't the problem so much as spam is; if the spam problem could be brought under control, then space probably wouldn't be such an issue. To reiterate my ideas for controlling spam: 1) Make SpamAssassin (and the rest of the `standard' spam scanning tools) default for all users. Users who wish to turn off spam scanning may do so by editing SpamAssassin configuration files. 2) Make *incoming* email `opt-in' for new users, with the *default* to be forwarding off-site. 3) Make outgoing email require some sort of automated verification process, or `sponsorship' by an existing member. My suspicion is that the vast majority of legitimate users don't care about email, and would not notice if their incoming email were simply turned off. For those that do care, this would give sufficient coverage that they'd still be able to do whatever they needed to do with a minimum of hassle and user intervention. I suspect that this scheme would more or less eliminate the majority of the spam problem. As for the RAID controller, I think I should clarify. The incremental cost of installing such a thing would Not add significantly to the overall cost of doing a standard system upgrade. I do, however, find it a bit disturbing that the major consideration for not going with this improvement seems to be staff availability. It speaks to our lack of staff resources and our need to address that issue. Of course, the benefit to the users would be elimination of sources of downtime and increased space/performance.
At a recent board meeting it was suggested that everyone have incoming mail for mail sent from grex, but not from the rest of the world, by default.
Yes, definetely keep local mail on by default. How else would new members request mail access? :)
Right, that goes unsaid.
I got my annual notice from aruba that it's time to renew my membership. Well, I'm not sending in any money at this time. When there's a need, I'll send a contribution, but Grex has enough now to meet it's expenses for years.
Low-life.
And you know what? If Grex was in need Jep would be there, as he said. That sounds like a nice deal, to me. Thanks, John.
re #17 DITTO re #19 Do I get a pat on the back, too? ;)
If grex ever stops existing, would the savings account be donated some place or split among current members?
http://cyberspace.org/local/grex/bylaws.html ARTICLE 8: DISSOLVEMENT In the event the membership is unable to support Cyberspace Communications, all property belonging to the club shall be sold. The remaining cash assets, after paying final bills, shall be donated to a charitable organization, as determined by the BOD. All elected officers shall then be released from their obligations and the corporation dissolved.
There's still hope, Sindi- maybe Grex can take out a very big life insurance policy and something unfortunate could happen to him. . . (I know a guy.)
What I will miss is John's being able to participate in our voting process. That's one good reason for being a member and paying dues.
Maybe the board could consider lowering the dues for a while? It might encourage more people to become voting members. The more people involved in the process, the better, imho. And, fwiw, I would also John being a participant in the voting process.
How can we find out how long we've been paying members? Is that online?
Since when have we been paying members?! I haven't gotten one red cent. :(
If the dues were lowered, I bet more people *would* become members. I know I would if I could. :-)
I'd pay a nominal fee such as $5/year to be able to vote. I guess I can become a member for a month if I want to vote oni anything, though, right? I don't get anything from my membership; I pay it to support Grex. But Grex doesn't need any support. It's piling up money. I just don't find it support-worthy to help Grex have a bigger pile. I'll re-join when Grex has used some of it's money for something and has any use at all for more money.
The bylaws state:
ARTICLE 2: MEMBERSHIP
b. To be eligible to vote, an individual must be a current member and
have paid a minimum of three months dues.
Hmm, I say we quarter the membership cost, to $15 per year.
I say Grex should find something worthwhile to do with it's money. If it cannot do that, it should lower the amount it is taking in. There's no need for Grex to be stockpiling money.
Yes, I agree with you.
Well. It is nice to have a financial cushion.
Indeed. It wasn't so long ago that things looked pretty bleak. So before we start reducing our income, let's talk about what to do while we have a surplus. mcnally was the only one to answer my question about what we could do that wouldn't require a lot of staff time. Are there any other suggestions? We actually have a spare (rebuilt) disk, sitting on my desk, that could be installed in Grex at any time. (The result of sending in a disk for warranty repair, and buying a new one at the same time.)
er, I'd like to point out that installing a new disk into grex and moving mail to does require a bit of staff time. In fact, it would require about the same amount of time it would take to move grex to a RAID system.
Is "a bit" the same as "a lot"?
It depends on who's doing it, and how they transfered the data.
Installing a new disk onto Grex and moving mail onto it probably requires no more than an hour of staff time in my estimation.
Similarily, I'd guess that putting in a RAID storage system would require about half a day. The hardest part would probably be installing the harware into the chasis; transfering the data and setting up the system to boot from the RAID would be simple but just take a while.
re resp:35: Mark, I am in favor of Grex being financially secure. I admire and appreciate the job you in particular, and the Board in general, have done to get Grex into good position with it's money. But there *is* a point where it's secure enough. It's my feeling that Grex is there. It's taking in money which it doesn't need.
It sounds like #39 would be a reasonable thing for somebody to do, as it's not very time-consuming and would alleviate a vexing problem.
Does anyone have an order-of-magnitude guess of the cost of buying or renting an anti-spam/anti-phish appliance? Maybe something like: - http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_overview.php - https://www.mailfoundry.com/store/category_537368463fae/ - http://www.mcafee.com/us/smb/products/anti_spam/secure_internet_gateway.h tml My understandign is that the staff time to put one of these in is fairly small, and it would only consume one IP number and only require changing, like, 2 lines in our DNS zone table.
I finally got around to looking up the links mentioned in #43. Those look like serious anti-spam appliances; on the order of $1000-1500 apiece. Does anyone have any experience with any of them? If they actually work well, then maybe we should consider one.
I think the appliances work pretty well. We have a McAfee anti-spam appliance. However they would add to our physical footprint.
I wasn't very impressed when we demo'ed a Barracuda Networks spam appliance at the ISP I work for and unless I'm confusing them with another similar company I think there's a per-user component to their pricing, which would be very undesirable for Grex, which has thousands of mostly inactive users.
I can't speak on Barracuda's licensing, but McAfee does not have a per-user licensing cost outside of them recommending different hardware sizes depending on mail load.
You have several choices: