Special Meeting on February 15th

Jan 26 13:43 UTC 2003

On Saturday, February 15th, Grex board a staff will be getting together to
discuss where we are in the process of deciding our next hardware platform
and maybe formulate a plan on how to get there from here.

Jan and Valerie have generously offered their home as a venue.  At one
point someone suggested having a pot luck dinner too.  I don't think a
start time has yet been determined.  Valerie or Jan, what time would you
like to have us arrive?  With or without food?  And could you drop a link
to a map for those who need directions? 

If you can't be at the meeting but have a question you'd like addressed,
add it here and I'll bring it along. 

response 2 of 54:

Feb 4 12:21 UTC 2003

I'm going to send mail to staff and board reminding folks of
this meeting, especially those who don't read Co-op.  

response 4 of 54:

Feb 4 23:55 UTC 2003

I'd be happy to go either way.  Mostly I'm just hoping we can
get a meeting started by 7:00 so those of us who want to 
leave by 9:30 can do so without missing too much.

response 6 of 54:

Feb 6 15:54 UTC 2003

Between approximately 7:20 and 8:10 Valerie and/or I will be busy
putting kids to bed.  This needn't particular inconvenience anyone -
we'll just miss out on part of the meeting.

Starting at 7:00 is fine.  So is most any other time.

response 8 of 54:

Feb 6 16:17 UTC 2003

(If you decide to do food, you can do it before 8, because I will be fed 
when I arrive.)

response 10 of 54:

Feb 6 21:50 UTC 2003

How about food at 7:00 and meeting at 8:00?

response 12 of 54:

Feb 7 04:47 UTC 2003

That sounds good to me, too, Mary.

response 14 of 54:

Feb 10 00:06 UTC 2003

I'll bring some type of salad that would go with pizza or a 
potluck.  If I have the time I'll also make something dessertish.

response 16 of 54:

Feb 10 00:48 UTC 2003

I'll try to be there, but I'm certain I'll be able to.

response 18 of 54:

Feb 11 01:48 UTC 2003

If we're doing pizza, we need RSVPs so that we know how much to order. 
If we are doing a potluck, we only need to know that we have enough
people to make a decent potluck, and we can presume that if more people
show up, more food will too.  So maybe the potluck is the better idea.

response 20 of 54:

Feb 15 14:41 UTC 2003

hmmm, that blows teh beef stroganoff idea out the window ... <g>.

response 22 of 54:

Feb 16 20:26 UTC 2003

A great deal was accomplished at the meeting last night.

First of all, STeve and Marcus (with some sadness) dropped their opposition
to Grex moving to Intel architecture.  So we agreed that the next Grex would
be an Athalon-based system.  STeve had drawn up a tentative list of
hardware, which will be discussed online before we buy anything.

STeve suggested that we get the hardware soon, and then build the software
on that system.  That's a departure from what we had planned before, but the
consensus seemed to be that if that strategy helps us to move forward, let's
go for it.  The staff seemed to think that having the new hardware on hand
would, indeed, be psychological motivation to get things done.

Here are some action items we also agreed on:

- Marcus will be investigating how to integrate Kerberos with the new
system.  There are a number of issues to worry about.  We'll need a KDC
server, and Marcus will see if it's possible to put that on some kind of
Power PC system.

- Marcus will work on mail issues, including the xm Open BSD program. We
currently have specialized strategies for heirarchical mail directories,
dealing with spam, enforcing quotas, and slowing large outgoing mails, and
for each of these we will need to decide how/if to integrate them into the
new system.

- Marcus will work on teaching newuser to do Kerberos.

- Marcus will work on figuring out how to integrate the kernel block
safefork (which prevents fork bombs) into the new system.

- STeve will enter an item to talk about hardware.

- Jan will work on figuring out how to move robocop to the new system.

- John (Remmers) will upgrade the current test machine to the latest
stable version of Open BSD.

We tentatively scheduled a followup meeting for Saturday, March 15th, same
time and place.

Attendees were: tpryan, drew, gelinas, dang, nette, srw, scott, flem, mdw,
steve, other, mary, remmers, janc, aruba, valerie, and i.

response 24 of 54:

Feb 16 23:46 UTC 2003

Wow.