Grex Board of Directors Meeting, June 2, 2003

Jun 4 03:00 UTC 2003

Attending Board Members: Gelinas, Other, Mary, Mooncat, Flem, Aruba, MDW
Attending Non-Board Members: Bhelliom, Carson, Kip, Glenda, Steve, Janc

1. Opening gavel: 7:48 pm

2. Treasurer s Report: For May took in $406, paid $589. 
        Our rent for the Pumpkin is going up 5% to $80.41
        Many of the expenses for May were for the Next Grex- 2 case 
fans, cooling compound, 2 motherboards (which were not the ones we 
needed, were returned and 2 new ones purchased in their stead).

Rebate came in for the cd read/write drive. 
UPS batteries were purchased (but at the time of the meeting they had 
not been installed, Steve has the batteries and has been having trouble 
getting another key to the Pumpkin).
1 New member in May, Kip.

Auction: so far the high bids equal $492.  We also received a picture 
of Charcat s cat (along with his check for an auction item), who is 
really cute.

For Next Grex we got the cds for OpenBSD, and some really neat stickers.

4. (Passed initially, waiting for Janc and Steve to arrive)

5. Adding new staff: there is currently a discussion in staff e-mail, 
will wait another month for names of potential new staffers to be 
submitted to board for approval. Staff is still discussing what needs 
to be done in terms of choosing new staffers, training, and coming up 
with a list of tasks.

Board debated the idea of some sort of apprenticeship system of 
training. No real conclusions reached at this time.  Staff needs a list 
of what tasks need to be done, and on what kind of scheduled basis do 
these tasks need to be done.

It has been suggested that at the next staff meeting staff compile a 
list of who does what, and what needs to be done- perhaps an item in 
the staff conference should be created ahead of time so those staffers 
not able to make the meeting can contribute to the list. The results of 
this list can be brought to the next board meeting.

4. Next Grex: Janc reports that Aruba delivered the machine to him, he 
set it up and installed OpenBSD 3.3. Jan also experimented with RAID 
(initially he didn t know anything about it, now he does, and has 
figured out that RAID isn t what we would want to use for Grex.) In 
short, the benefits of using a RAID software set-up does not balance 
with the system lag is causes. So instead of using RAID Jan is 
experimenting with mirroring files onto the IDE disk.  He has installed 
a couple packages from PortTree (correct name?) and had detailed 
documentation of what he has done so far. Also set the SUID partitions. 
Next step would be porting packages. Some discussion at this point of 
the version of OpenBSD that was installed, apparently there may be a 
problem with ELF (?) and the a.a version is probably what we want. 

Currently Next Grex seems to be working just fine, although there is a 
potential problem in that when it boots up it occasionally does not 
recognize the network. This may just be a result of the card on the 
motherboard, someone will find out.

3. STeve has the UPS batteries at his home, will be stealing MDW s key 
and making copies as well as taking MDW to the Pumpkin with him.

7. New Business: Board needs to think about phone lines, how many do we 
want? Do we want to continue with the dialins at the number we have 
now? Canceling a few of the phone lines might allow for that funding to 
be put towards increasing our DSL speed.

Again about the Portmaster, we have documentation and a Portmaster, but 
the two don t go together. Some unofficial talk of finding a Portmaster 
that fits the documentation that we have.

What happens if a board member misses three meetings in a row: the 
general conclusion was that we should worry about this when a board 
member really abandons his/her post, and move on for the present time.

Spam  board@cyberspace.org  receives, a possible short-term fix could 
be as simple as making the address on the website non-clickable. After 
much discussion of possibilities (making the address merely 
unclickable, making it a .gif file, changing the board s group e-mail, 
etc.) it was finally decided to merely make the address non-clickable 
for now, Other is heading up the project.

6. Next Meeting: scheduled for Tuesday, July 29th, 7:00 pm at Zing s 
Next Door in the Kid s Room.

8. Closing Gavel 9:10 pm.

response 2 of 16:

Jun 12 03:59 UTC 2003

Regarding the staff@cyberspace.org spam:

Recent research has shown that non-clickability probably won't
help you, but obscuring the address might (until the next phase
of the spammer arms race).  Encoding the address as \#116;\#117;\#97
etc. (or however it's done) was quite effective as of the date
of the test (which is not to say it's effective now, as the
people who write address harvesters probably read that report).

A more effective system is to use Javascript to defeat harvesters.
If you want an example of this, look at the contact information
on this site:  http://www.commutercars.com

Hint:  The displayed addresses are clickable, but there is no
recognizable string in the page source for spam harvesters to
grab.  The address is built by a bit of Javascript from obscured
components.  I expect that this will be effective for some time.

response 4 of 16:

Jun 12 04:25 UTC 2003

It could be done with perl forms.

response 6 of 16:

Jun 12 18:16 UTC 2003

lynx can do Javascript.

response 8 of 16:

Jun 13 06:37 UTC 2003

Send mail to st<!-- staff -->af<-- cask -->f@cy<!-- equipotent -->ber<!--
emilio -->space

response 10 of 16:

Jun 13 15:15 UTC 2003

My two cents:  I think that making sure access to staff and board is easy is
more important than protecting staff and board from spam.  If someone tries
to send staff/board a message and can't figure out how, that's a worse
outcome, imo, than me having an extra ten spam a day in my inbox.  

response 12 of 16:

Jun 16 04:44 UTC 2003

Subjective.  For me, the board list gets a lot of spam.

response 14 of 16:

Jun 16 15:51 UTC 2003

Doesn't sound like a big problem if that's a representative sample.  I'd
be thrilled if I only got five pieces of spam a night.  If only one of
them was addressed to the board list, it doesn't sound like there's much
to be gained here.

response 16 of 16:

Jun 18 17:06 UTC 2003

I'm also using MIMEDefang with Spamassassin.  It works great once it is
configured correctly.