dpc
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Minutes of the Grex Board of Directors Meeting of January 14, 2005
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Jan 16 20:56 UTC 2005 |
Attending Board Members: slynne, gelinas, mary, dpc, vanloons, bhoward
(by speakerphone), polygon
Attending Non-Board Members: STeve, aruba, remmers, jdeigert, keesan,
Sarah Kestenbaum
The Board meeting was called to order by President slynne on January 14,
2005 at 7:15 p.m. at dpc's house, 1418 Broadway, Ann Arbor. Board members
slynne, gelinas, mary, dpc, and vanloons were present.
Election of Officers:
Dpc volunteered to be secretary. He was elected unanimously.
Bhoward joined.
Two candidates for president were nominated: slynne and mary. The Board
voted by paper ballot, and slynne was elected by a vote of 4 to 2.
Gelinas volunteered to be treasurer. He was elected unanimously. The
Board thanked Treasurer Emeritus aruba for his outstanding work.
Treasurer's Report:
Aruba reported that in December we took in $421 and spent $430. The
details are in his report, which is posted online. So far in January we
have taken in $66. Aruba said that there were several tasks remaining for
him to do, including filing the personal property tax return and IRS form
990.
Aruba said that presently four people are authorized to sign checks:
slynne, janc, aruba, and gelinas. The Board discussed the pros and cons
of changing these signers. Treasurer gelinas said that he would prefer
for us to leave the signers alone because he does not like TCF bank. He
said he would have a recommendation at the next meeting for a possible
change in banks.
The Board next discussed the problem of someone who wanted to become an
individual member, but only provided a business name through PayPal. Dpc
moved that if a membership comes through PayPal, we will require a name
and address for an individual membership. Mary suggested that we make an
informal contact first and ask for a name and address. The Board reviewed
the present identification policy and decided that it covered this
situation. Dpc withdrew his motion. Aruba will follow up with the
potential individual member.
Grex Update:
Slynne said the new system was very fast. Dpc said that spam was a real
problem. STeve said that we are now running exim, and that we lost all of
mdw's sendmail custom spam filters. Dpc said that his professional mail
was bouncing, since because of all the spam, his mail quota was being
exceeded. STeve said we could couple Spam Assassin to exim. If so, what
did we want to do about mail tagged as spam? We could set the threshold
high, and throw obvious spam away, such as foreign character sets. We
could create a secondary mailbox for each account. Ideally we want the
spam filter to be user-configurable. He said that we would automatically
become one of the larger user-configurable systems on the planet. Keesan
said that she got a lot of e-mail with foreign character sets. STeve said
that there were standard ways of dealing with foreign character sets that
would not discard all such mail.
Gelinas said that spam was a staff problem, not a Board problem. He said
we might use DeSpam. He said we may have to build another AMD machine to
handle spam, and that spam is eating people alive. Mary asked for a time
frame on doing *something.* Gelinas said we should have a staff meeting
to build consensus. He said this might be on Wednesday night, January 19,
and that some time thereafter we would see progress. Dpc said that quotas
need to be increased to prevent bouncing. STeve said he agreed, and we
have more disk space available now. Gelinas said raising quotas tonight
(January 14) should not be a problem.
Backups:
There are errors when we try to use the tape drive. STeve said he would
use his precious hoard of Freon to fix the drive. If this does not work,
then the tape drive will have to be repaired. Keesan suggested a backup
to a hard drive. Gelinas said any backup should be off-site.
Continuing the staff report, STeve said that the I/O out of Grex right now
is very jerky, and that the problem may be in the network card. He will
put in a spare $30 Intel card. He said that although janc did a hell of a
job, he did not bring Grex up to Open BSD 3.6, just 3.5. Gelinas said
that janc had decided we don't need the changes that 3.6 makes. STeve
said this was wrong; there were about 1500 changes, and we needed many of
them. Aruba asked if vandals were using up a lot of space. STeve said
that if so, they would have to be making denial-of-service attacks, and
that looking at the system's behavior he did not think this was happening.
Gelinas said he thought a second Ethernet card would be useful, anyway.
Moving Grex to Co-lo:
STeve said that with Grex moving to a remote location, we will not have
guaranteed physical access at all hours, only when Provide.Net is open,
from 10 to 10. He said a PC Weasel card let you remotely control
everything but turning the machine on and off. It costs $350 for this
card. We would not have to go to Provide.Net. If there is another disk
disaster, Provide.Net hours will not be adequate, and we will have to
remove the machine.
Mary asked what is our priority on expenses, between fixing the backup
tape drive and the Weasel card. STeve said that since we are leaving the
Pumpkin, Weasel is the priority. He said that with regard to backups,
half of our disk disasters were on system disks. He said he had 99% of
Grex at work, and that janc is mirroring the 1a and 1c partitions.
Mary said we may not have enough money, considering the projected February
and March low point in cash because of the move. Gelinas said he was not
convinced we needed the Weasel card. Slynne said we should move to
Provide.Net first, and then assess our needs. Dpc said he personally
supported the purchase of the Weasel card, but would not get ahead of the
rest of the Board. STeve said that Weasel was turning into the de facto
standard to manage a system remotely.
Mary said that according to her rough figures, the move was going to cost
$840, then double rent for February (at the Pumpkin and Provide.Net). We
plan to move February 1. In mid-February we will move the phone lines
over. On March 1 we give our landlord the remaining rent under our lease
(March, April, and May), paying the lease off. Then there is 5 months of
DSL service at 75% of $135 per month, which we are locked into paying.
STeve suggested delaying the move by a month. He said we are now using
Grex under real-world conditions, and that any hardware failure would
likely happen soon. It would be easier to deal with hardware problems at
the Pumpkin than at Provide.Net. Mary said that we may have flaky phone
lines or a modem at the Pumpkin, and that the move may improve stability.
STeve said he did not think this would happen. He said there is a lack of
staff time.
Dpc suggested that that staff recommend a different move date if they meet
on January 19, and that otherwise we keep the February 1 date. STeve said
he will bet that if the hardware works perfectly on March 1, it will
continue to work until summer, 2007. Mary said we will consider any staff
recommendation in mail. Gelinas said he had not been in recent contact
with John at Provide.Net, and we need the new IP addresses. Mary asked
what about not paying the extra $50 per month to Provide.Net for more
gigabytes? We will have the use of 50 gigabytes of traffic per month
under our basic agreement with Provide.Net, and if we go over that, then
we have to pay the extra $50. STeve said we may crash through the lower
bandwidth because of graphic downloads. Slynne said this issue was best
discussed online. STeve said we may be without dialin lines for a couple
of days during the move. Gelinas said he would deal with the phone
company.
Aruba said that once we are out of the Pumpkin, we will have immediate
savings of $140 per month. The moving costs (4 months' rent, 4 months of
75% of our DSL cost, and two phone lines) should come to $928. Slynne
will call about the DSL fairly quickly, and see if we can get a break on
cancellation of the service.
Terminating the Pumpkin Lease:
Gelinas moved to notify the Pumpkin landlord that we will not be renewing
our lease, and will be out March 1. Mary suggested an amendment, to just
say we will not be renewing. Her amendment was friendly. Dpc seconded.
Dpc said we should not just hand the landlord a bunch of money to pay off
the 3 months of the lease when we will not be in the space. When we leave
the space, the landlord has a duty to try to rent the space. We, of
course, guarantee that we will make up any shortfall on May 31. The
rental rate is $84 per month. Mary said she would feel out the landlord
on a possible deal. Gelinas' amended motion carried unanimously.
Schedule Next Meeting:
The next meeting will be Friday, February 18, at 7:00 p.m. at slynne's
house.
New Business:
Dpc wanted to know how to find out about trends in system use. He asked
if we keep any records. STeve said no, we don't. He said there were
about 12,000 entries in the password file recently, and it had been steady
for the past year.
Vanloons brought up the suggestion that we allow blogs on Grex. Dpc and
slynne said this was a great idea. STeve said that blogs are a type of
conference. He felt the Board did not need to do anything to make this
happen.
Polygon and Sarah Kestenbaum arrived.
Mary said blogs allow censorship, and were like private conferences.
Remmers said that under Grex policies, all conferences except the staff
conference shall be open. A blog is like a conference with an owner. The
Board decided that the staff will discuss blogs, the discussion will
continue on line in Coop, and the Board will decide on Blogs at its
February meeting. Mary said she thought blogs were a cool departure.
Vanloons raised the matter of longer loginids being allowed by the new
system. The Board felt this was a staff issue. Gelinas said they could
be a good thing because they eliminated the need for abbreviations.
There being no further business, Gelinas moved to adjourn, slynne
seconded, and the motion passed unanimously. The meeting was adjourned at
9:07 p.m.
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