dpc
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Minutes of the Grex Board of Directors Meeting of September 14, 2005
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Sep 20 19:51 UTC 2005 |
Attending Board Members: slynne, mary, gelinas, dpc, polygon, bhoward
(via video iChat from Japan)
Non-Attending Board Member: vanloons
Attending Non-Board member: remmers
The September 14, 2005 meeting of the Grex Board of Directors was
called to order at 7:74 p.m. by President slynne at Zingerman's Next
Door.
Treasurer's Report:
None.
Staff Report:
Remmers reported that the System is up, but is iffy. It is crashing
spontaneously once a day. This does not seem to be a hardware problem.
On Labor Day it crashed, but there was no access to Provide.Net to
reset. On September 6 remmers went over, and the system did not come
up because he was not able to log in. Grex was down until Monday,
September 12. Remmers booted up in single-user mode, but the password
file and the master password file were corrupted. But janc had written
a mirroring script that copied those files to the spare disk. There
were good copies of the password file, and remmers successfully
rebooted. Dpc congratulated remmers on his excellent work.
Remmers said that Grex still spontaneously crashes and reboots. STeve
thinks this is due to a bug in the version of OpenBSD that we are
running. He says this is fixed in an upgrade. STeve and remmers will
work together on doing the upgrade during the weekend of September
24-25. There should be a staff discussion prior to this. There will
be a couple of days of downtime.
Remmers said the staff has not met in the last couple of months. The
hardware seems to be perfectly healthy. He said the current staff does
not seem to be very active. Dpc said he had been afraid the System was
"terminal," and that the staff had abandoned Grex. He said he would be
willing to vote to authorize paying someone if necessary, but he said
he thought slynne had the authority to pay for services right now.
Polygon said he agreed with dpc about the authority to pay.
Remmers said that if someone new joins the staff there is a high
learning curve because of all the customization. He said that the
documentation was on non-Grex systems. Mary said she was thinking of
offering pay to our own staff so that taking care of Grex would jump up
in their list of priorities in a fair way. Dpc said he agreed with
that as a first choice, but what if they didn't respond? Slynne said
that with most volunteers, she did not think that offering money would
make them less busy. Gelinas said that if we could offer janc whatever
hourly rate he is earning on another project, he might do it. STeve
can't take time off from MSU. Gelinas said that he and mdw were in a
similar situation. Gelinas said we need to recruit from our community,
but he was not sure there was anyone to recruit.
Bhoward asked if we could get to our server remotely. Mary said that
this time if needed to go into single-user mode, which could not be
done remotely. Bhoward asked if we could have a remote console set up.
Remmers mentioned the PC Weasel. Gelinas said if we have to slip a CD
into the drive, then the PC Weasel is not going to help. Remmers asked
if the PC Weasel could simulate hitting the reset button. Mary said
someone has offered to donate a PC Weasel, but it needs a dedicated
phone line. She said we need janc to check the usage on our second
phone line.
Slynne said we should enter another item in Coop and suggest people
interested in joining the staff should come to a Board meeting. Dpc
said that was an excellent idea. Slynne then said she would enter an
item in Agora asking that interested people contact her personally.
She will then forward possible candidates to the staff.
Old Business:
Polygon reported that he had found out that the County's anti-spam
service costs $30,000 per year. The Board said never mind.
The Board took the idea of closing newuser off the agenda.
New Business:
The Board agreed that slynne has the authority to spend money in an
emergency to get the System up.
Schedule Next Meeting:
The next meeting will be on Thursday, November 10, at 7:00 p.m., at the
home of Mary an John Remmers, 19 Westbury Court, Ann Arbor.
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mcnally
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response 1 of 9:
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Sep 20 20:59 UTC 2005 |
I realize #0 is not, itself, intended as a statement of opinion
(but as a summary of what was said at the meeting) but I wish to
take issue with the idea, repeated above, that "This does not seem
to be a hardware problem."
It may be a hardware problem or it may be a software problem, but
if there is any strong evidence which points away from hardware
issues I am not aware of it.
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jep
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response 3 of 9:
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Sep 21 02:09 UTC 2005 |
Dave attributed all of the comments stating the hardware is okay, to
remmers. Ask him why he thinks the hardware is not causing the
problems with frequent reboots.
It seems to me from afar more like hardware than software. Under the
same circumstances, software is a set of instructions which will
always do the same thing. If there are regular errors, if every time
you do X or Y the machine reboots, it might be software. I'd expect
software errors to show up in log files, most likely.
If there are inexplicable and intermittent errors, it's usually
hardware. It doesn't take much overheating, sun spots, jiggling of
the box, power fluctuation, or mysterious influences to affect
hardware.
Grex is complex and it's possible the staff just hasn't discovered a
pattern yet, and there could be a software and/or operating system
problem.
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