Minutes of Board of Directors Meeting, February 26, 2006

Mar 3 00:42 UTC 2006

Grex Board of Directors Meeting Minutes.                 

February 26, 2006

Board members in attendance: Mark Conger, Lynne Fremont, Larry
Kestenbaum, John Remmers, Jan Wolter

Others in attendance: Mary Remmers. 

Opening gavel tap. 7:06pm

Treasurers Report. 
Grex took in $665 last month. So far in Feb, we have taken in $90. Our
monthly expenses are around $150-$175. We had four new members in
January. We have two new members so far this month. Currently, we are at
about 60 members with around 40 paid up. Provide.net double billed us.
They seem to be rearranging their bookkeeping. Aruba will call on Monday
to straiten that out. 

Staff Report
The idle daemon has been turned off and so far there have been no
significant problems. The load on the system used to be too high if we
had too many users but now we have different hardware and different
internet, etc.  No one has heard from Steve about the memory. He was
going to send it back. Jan said that Jeff Kaplen lives about two blocks
from Provide.net. He said that he would be willing to go over and do
reboots.

Remmers moves to add Kaplan to staff pending staff approval. Aruba
seconds. Passed unanimously. 

Schedule the next meeting: Sunday March 19th 7:00. At Aruba s

Old Business: Email. The status of email is that it is turned off for
newusers. We were going to go to a system where we limit the amount of
mail per login. That hasnt happened yet so mail is currently turned off.
Aruba had a person call him and ask him if they could use Grex for email
but mail was turned off for newuser so Aruba had bhoward allow mail to
that user. Janc thinks that some program could be written to tell us
about how many emails users send so we could effectively set an outgoing
email limit that wont impact regular users too much. All users can
receive email. Janc said that he would be happy if we set up email
separately from newuser. Maybe we should focus less on mail. Grex might
not be the best service for mail. It might not be a good use of our
bandwidth. Not so much discontinue it but don t give it to all newsuers
as the default. We will make sure that people who use Grex as their
primary email will not be cut off. 

New Business:
updated board and staff email lists. 

Aruba helped a newuser set up an account on grex. He said that he got
some feedback that grex might be too hard for some of our less tech
savvy newusers. Aruba said that over the past 10 years he has always
kind of felt that this is a charitable organization and he feels that we
should support people like that. He wrote a document about connecting to
grex with hyperterminal. It isnt hard to set up. He said that it could
be expanded to include basic stuff like how to connect a modem to a
phone line and also some instructions on how to use grex. This would be
a little booklet or pamphlet that we could put in the library or
something. There is a grex handbook but it hasnt been updated since
1998. Aruba is going to enter an item in coop. 

Janc says that we might not be able to meet the needs of people who
don t know anything about computers but we might be better able to offer
services to people who need things like C compilers and shell accounts.
This might be an area where we can make a real contribution. Larry says
that this might be something were we could leave a booklet or a pamphlet
in local computer labs. Also perhaps a web version. 

Dialins - we only have two lines and we should make a commitment to
keeping them. Newuser says we have four lines when we have two. 

Closing Gavel Tap = 7:53

response 2 of 15:

Mar 3 14:06 UTC 2006

Newuser should be rewritten.  I got about halfway there, and had to put it
aside to do some other things.  My idea was to write most of it in Perl,
with a small setuid wrapper around the system ``useradd'' command.  As it
is now, newuser is something like 12,000 lines of poorly written C code,
all of which runs as root.  A few hundred (or perhaps a little over a
thousand, but say, less than 2k) of Perl could replace that and be
significantly more secure.  I got sort of bogged down trying to do something
like `gate' in it to replace the nasty and inflexible input mechanisms.  If
I could find a package that does what would be the equivalent of a multiline
readline, I'd probably just finish knocking it out.

response 4 of 15:

Mar 8 17:51 UTC 2006

why not just change newuser so it prompts "do you want email on this login?"
Then have it state that grex only offers free email for the first thirty days
without user verification.  If said user wants to keep free email after that,
he must provide verification.  

response 6 of 15:

Mar 8 17:55 UTC 2006

Also couldn't newuser be modified so it doesn't allow the same password to
be used on more than one login.  This would thwart mail spammers having bots
running newuser and generating dozens of logins

response 8 of 15:

Mar 8 18:37 UTC 2006

I'd also like to see a web interface for new user, as I think grex can attract
users who otherwise would never join because they don't kow or run telnet.

response 10 of 15:

Mar 8 18:43 UTC 2006

yeah but when you click on that link you are telnetted in to grex.  I'm
talking about a full newuser web interface, where you get your login on the
web page and NEVER have to telnet in

response 12 of 15:

Mar 8 22:49 UTC 2006

(Jonathan's right, Richard.)

response 14 of 15:

Mar 9 00:58 UTC 2006

whoa !