Minutes- November 13th Board of Directors Meeting

Nov 14 21:33 UTC 2002

Attending: Bhelliom, Other*, Mary*, Aruba*, Krj, MDW*, STeve*, Keesan, 
Jdeigert, Remmers, Russ, Mooncat* (* denotes board member)

1. Meeting called to order at 7:40 pm

2. Other hummed, he forgot the bell.

3. Aruba reported that last month we were in the black for the first 
time since March, in the black by about $42. 

We're up to 82 members, all of which are paid up.

At the end of September a membership check bounced, but the person who 
wrote the check quickly rectified the situation and covered the bounced 
check fee- thank you! 

Ameritech claims that they do not have a copy of our Centrex contract. 
Dave Cahill called MPSC. Aruba is interested in contacting Ameritech to 
find out what the penalties would be for terminating our contract early.

4. Musical Registrars: There seems to be a resounding good response 
towards changing- only reservations are towards the fact that our 
current registrars are idiots. STeve recommended Dotster (Dobster? 
Didn't quite hear the name properly). Suggestion made that we have 
grex.org and cyberspace.org with different registrars, or to switch 
them at separate times.

In the end the decision made was to switch grex.org over to a new 
registrar, leaving cyberspace.org with VeriSign for the time being, see 
how well the switch with grex.org goes and later switch cyberspace.org 
over. The new registrar was not decided upon, need more info. So 
please, share info.

5. Publicity- Life took over, so nothing to report.

6. Technical: Boring stability. Load averages spiking at times due to 
someone in Brazil deciding that Grex is a great place to exchange 
software and several computers trying to attack login to Grex- to 
accounts that have been frozen.

Next Grex Update: The UltraSparcII has bad memory, Marcus will be 
removing it from the Pumpkin and replacing it with the Sparc I

The X86 is running OpenBSD 3.2 at Remmers. Is working with the rest of 
staff on testing it- needs to have additional software ported over to 
it. Thinks Velerie and Jan may have the list of what software needed to 
be ported and would appreciate it if they would put the list in the 
staff conference.

We would like to see an item showing, in more detail, what progress is 
being made on the Next Grex.

Idea proposed of having the next Board meeting be comined with a staff 
meeting.

Need to do something to free up staff time so that they can work more 
on the new system- but how to do that is not easily solved.

7. Next Board Meeting: Tentatively scheduled for December 11th, 7:30 
pm. Want to make it a Staff/Board meeting.

8. New Business: Auction- details from the last auction cleared up- now 
to get the next one started.

9. Adjourned at 8:57 pm.

response 2 of 11:

Nov 14 21:55 UTC 2002

How about posting the list of required software in the garage group,
where it can be seen by all?  The reason I ask is that a lot of stuff
that grex staff has put time into porting to SunOS 4 is either part of
the base installation of OpenBSD, or easily brought in via the ports
collection, and it might be more efficient if more people have an
opportunity identify such things.

Also, was the idea of authentication brought up?  There's been
depressingly little conversation about it (see my proposal in garage:134).

Any discussion about colocation or other cost reduction tactics?  Also,
what does grex intend to do about dialin users if it cancels its contract
with Ameritech?

Finally, Marcus et al should be aware that if it's the Kingston memory
that's bad in the Ultra2, it's under a lifetime warranty, and should
be freely replacable.

response 4 of 11:

Nov 15 05:21 UTC 2002

Right, Grex is very much committed to providing dial-in access.  But our
current bank of lines is underused, so it may make sense for us to drop a
line, depending on the penalty for breaking the contract.  I meant to call
this week and find out about that, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

We briefly discussed your proposal, Dan, but speaking for myself, anyway, I
don't have the technical knowledge to understand the issues.  Marcus said he
didn't have time to respond right now.

response 6 of 11:

Nov 16 09:04 UTC 2002

My plan re the ultra1/ultra2 isn't quite what what's said here: I plan
to remove the bad memory, but I then plan to install the latest openbsd
on both machines, take the ultra1 that's currently at my house to the
pumpkin, and replace the ultra1 with the ultra2.  Since openbsd doesn't
currently support 2 cpu's, the ultra1 is "just as good", and this will
give me some incentive to experiment with 2 cpu's (or fixing the memory)
should I ever find the time.  I'll have to see what the removed memory
is too, all I know is it's in the 2nd bank so probably was added later.

The main reason we'd cancel the ameritech centrex contract would be if
it allows us to reduce expenses by dropping one extra line.  We'd still
keep the remianing lines.

We did not discuss colocation.  The informal research I did a few months
back (asking several local experts including the people who run
monkey.org) was that colocation was in fact not likely to be any
cheaper.  It's also pretty clear that colocation would require major
changes to how we operate (including drastic changes to if not
completely abandoning dial-up support.) There is certainly room for more
extensive investigation, ideally by somebody who has a lot more spare
time than I have.  Some good projects would be to: take a survey of the
local colocation market; determine what our local needs and wants are,
investigate one or two colocation possibilities to determine what
changes we might need to do to make colocation more feasible, and
prepare a report detailing what the tradeoffs really are.  It's been
claimed that we ought to get more reliability, more bandwidth, and save
costs -- but it's not clear that these are in fact all achievable
singly, let alone together.  There will certainly be downsides, and I
don't think any of us really understands what those will be.

response 8 of 11:

Nov 17 14:08 UTC 2002

I don't have a list of software that needs to be installed on the next
Grex.  I think at the last staff meeting such a list was made, in which
case Valerie probably has it in her notes.  However, we made the list by
looking at the list of software that is installed on the current Grex. 
That is at http://grex.org/staffnote/about.html

I don't see myself having much free time in the near future - at least
not for anything difficult.  I conference from a laptop while watching
children.  That works OK.  Not sure I could do anything that requires
any concentration that way.  I'm pretty loaded up with work, and intend
to stay that way as much as I can until I've got my finances back in
better shape.

response 10 of 11:

Nov 17 19:13 UTC 2002

I know (personally) an alternate registrar.  I'll ask him tomorrow about the
services he offers.