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Grex > Coop12 > #117: Board Minutes: Thursday July 18, 2002 Meeting | |
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mooncat
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Board Minutes: Thursday July 18, 2002 Meeting
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Jul 19 14:53 UTC 2002 |
Participants (in order of appearance): Mooncat*, Bhelliom, Mary*,
Other*, Flem*, Aruba*, STeve*, Glenda and MDW*
(* indicates board member)
1: Gavel Sounded at 7:05 pm
2. Other posted a note in the systems problem item of summer Agora
indicating receipt of an increased amount of spam mail to unusual
accounts
3. Aruba reports that in June we took in $296 and spent $432 (base
expenses). So far for July we have taken in $297.
a. Presently we have 84 members, 79 are paid up.
b. Notes: Back in March he received an ID card, returned it with a
check- check never cashed- Grex’s books credited that amount.
c. Discussion on setting up some sort of goal based on current
baseline costs.
Add traces of Agenda Item #6:
Discussion to reminder e-mail messages every three months to users
regarding how Grex gets funded.
Aruba made the motion “For the Board to approve a gentle e-mail
reminded, regarding how Grex is funded, sent every three months subject
to a review of the message in co-op, provided there is a way for users
to “opt out” of receiving the e-mail.
Mary seconded
Vote: For: 7, Against: 0,
4. Re: Item in Co-op- needs more discussion.
What are the goals for the publicity committee? Get Grex’s name out
there, get people involved in spreading the word.
Potentially have a flyer linked to Grex’s website so that out of town
users can download it and print it out should they want to flyer their
area.
5. Other than a nasty modem, we’ve had a relatively boring month-
though Scott had to replace the Ethernet hub, twice. As far as the
broken modem is concerned- waiting currently for a Portmaster to be
delieverd, before that can happen documentation for said Portmaster
must be located. Once these are accomplished the Portmaster will be
installed and the flaky modem can be taken care of. MDW volunteered to
also look for documentation.
6. Covered in #3
7. Next meeting: Thursday September 5th-, 7:00 pm, Kid’s Room-
Zingerman’s Next Door
8. No new business
9. Gavel Sounded: 7:59 pm
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| 16 responses total. |
dpc
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response 1 of 16:
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Jul 19 15:02 UTC 2002 |
I really like the idea of sending reminder e-mail every 3 months!
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polytarp
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response 2 of 16:
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Jul 19 17:41 UTC 2002 |
Hello, Dave CAhill!
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carson
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response 3 of 16:
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Jul 19 20:39 UTC 2002 |
(thanks, anne, for posting the minutes so quickly!)
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glenda
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response 4 of 16:
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Jul 19 22:18 UTC 2002 |
A quick look at google turned up httl://portmasters.com/ech/docs/manuals.html
Might be a good place to start.
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danr
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response 5 of 16:
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Jul 22 00:09 UTC 2002 |
I guess that I actually have to finish the text of that email now.
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mooncat
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response 6 of 16:
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Jul 23 13:02 UTC 2002 |
<bows>
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gelinas
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response 7 of 16:
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Apr 22 14:36 UTC 2003 |
I asked the folks at Merit about getting copies of the manuals for
Portmasters. They told me that they don't have any, but the manuals are
available on line at http://portmasters.com/tech/docs/manuals.html
I took a look; there are manuals for the PM2, PM3, PM4, PM IRX, and PM Office
Routers.
I see that Glenda mentioned this site previously, in #4 above. Did we get
the manuals we needed?
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scott
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response 8 of 16:
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Apr 22 14:55 UTC 2003 |
Have wait for Dang's response, but I think the basic problem is that the
firmware in our unit doesn't seem to behave according to the documentation.
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keesan
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response 9 of 16:
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Apr 22 15:43 UTC 2003 |
What would it cost to replace it with something that works? I would tie up
the current modems significantly less if they were faster and dropping a
couple of phone lines earlier could probably pay for other modems.
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jep
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response 10 of 16:
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Apr 22 21:24 UTC 2003 |
If we're down to just 4 phone lines, do we need terminal servers at
all? Couldn't that many serial ports be connected to the system? I
thought the purpose of the terminal servers was to take some of the
load from the system, back when we had 10 or 12 phone lines. Is that
really still an issue?
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mdw
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response 11 of 16:
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Apr 22 22:13 UTC 2003 |
Um, well, yes. Firstly, we don't *have* 4 extra serial ports. We
probably have 2, maybe 4 tops. One of them is for the console. 2 of
them may be for the keyboard & mouse. One of them might have full modem
control. We of course still do have the VME serial concentrator, which
I think wasn't fully supported with the current OS, and which I think
also has trouble with more than 4 really high speed lines. Getting this
to work would be pretty chancy.
On i386 hardware, getting 4 serial ports to work is "tricky", because of
various interrupt sharing issues and I think there's also a I/O port
space issue. Getting 2 to work would be less trouble than with the sun.
Getting more than 4 serial ports to work with i386 requires buying or
finding special hardware to do this. It exists, but it's not commodity
hardware, and there will definitely be "wrong" hardware that won't work
quite right.
With either of these, serial interrupt load is still an issue. Modern
processors are *fast*, but -- well, with I/O and interrupts things
rapidly get less pretty. We'd have to do some benchmarks to be sure,
but a high speed serial line with a lot of use could have a significant
impact on the speed of the rest of the system.
It's worth remembering that modems speeds and user expectations have
increased -- I think we artificially limited the speed of the current
modems, but if we want to support ppp or other nifty modern stuff, we
pretty much need to get 28.8K or better yet 33K going.
Getting any of the above is going to be more work than getting a modern
terminal concentrator working, and since they're relatively cheap, I
don't think it's cost effective to make our own terminal server.
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keesan
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response 12 of 16:
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Apr 22 23:36 UTC 2003 |
How many of the phone lines are in use more than 5% of the time now?
I have not had a busy signal for at least 6 months (but I have had a lot of
NO CARRIER signals after dialing in, and been dumped repeatedly from Pine).
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scott
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response 13 of 16:
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Apr 23 00:26 UTC 2003 |
There are some great i386-based serial port boards - usually well supported
by Unix, too. But the Portmaster includes some faster (and very robust)
modems than we're cuirrently using.
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aruba
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response 14 of 16:
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Apr 23 02:44 UTC 2003 |
Re #10: John - we have 7 phone lines, 6 of which are open to the public and
one of which is the staff line.
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jep
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response 15 of 16:
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Apr 27 00:46 UTC 2003 |
Well, I guess I was barking up the wrong tree, wasn't I? Heh.
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tonster
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response 16 of 16:
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May 24 06:47 UTC 2003 |
I think M-Net might still have at least 1 multi-port serial card that
we're never going to use again.
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