Minutes of Grex Board Meeting 19 January 2004

Jan 20 04:46 UTC 2004

Present: aruba*, bhoward* (via phone), drew, gelinas*, kip, mary*,
         polygon*, remmers, slynne*
 [* denotes current board member]

1.  Opening Gavel Tap: 19:16 EST (7:16 PM)

2.  Election of Officers:
        President: Nominations: slynne, mary
                1st Round: tie.
                2nd Round: mary withdraws, slynne is elected by acclamation
        Treasurer: Nominations: aruba
                Elected by acclamation
        Secretary: Nominations: mooncat
                Elected by acclamation

3.  Treasurer's Report:
        $809.68 in, $468.38 out in December
                See Item 64 for December 2003 monthly report
                See Item 65 for 2003 anmual report
        $66 in January, so far.

        Monthly costs for power are going to go up.  scott and aruba used
        an inductive ammeter to measure the power usage; it appears to have
        gone from approximately 5.5 amps to 13.25 amps.  kip will borrow
        a power meter from the Ann Arbor Distrct Library as soon as one
        becomes available.  Installing it will require powering down all
        of the equipment in the room.  Uninstalling it, after a period
        of measurement, will also requiring powering down the equipment.

        The next telephone bill should be $13, with credits for reductions
        and refunded installation fees.  After that, the bill will go
        back up to approximately $90, which will be approximately $60
        less than it was before we reduced the number of lines.

        We successfully switched from Verisign to Dotster for the
        registrar of both domains, cyberspace.org and grex.org (one
        was switched a year ago).

4.  Staff Report:
        Met on Thursday, 15 Jan 2004.  
            Reset root passwords for grex, gryps and the new machine.
            Discussed adding staff members: consensus among those present
                to recommend bhoward and glenda; names to be presented
                to those absent by e-mail.
            New Grex:
                Discussed things yet to be done: Disk Quotas, Fork Bomb
                Killer, Login program's error messages, Mail Modifications,
                Robocop, Newuser/Webnewuser, Picospan, Menu Shell,
                Zapuser/Lockuser
            "Keeper of the Keys": agreed that we should be
                able to trust the Treasurer to hold them without trying
                to break root.
            DNS:  We 'fell out' of puck.nether.net's configuration again,
                at just about the time we switched from Verisign to
                Dotster, and at the same time the mail disk failed.
                We have since added three other name servers, all in
                the San Francisco area.  The name server in the Detroit
                area has been renamed.  Including grex.cyberspace.org,
                we have five name servers without puck.nether.net.
                We should change the list of name servers at Dotster to
                list these five and remove puck.nether.net.

    janc and kip managed to resurrect the mail disk, recovering all of
    the mail that would have been lost.

5.  New Grex Update:
        See Staff Report, above.
        janc made progress on zapuser and lockuser while working on the
                mail recovery.
        bhoward is working on robocop
        gelinas has configured and enabled quotas on the new machine.
        janc has mostly finished newuser/webuser
        still waiting for picospan

6.  Adding New Staff:
        At the recommendation of the staff, gelinas moved that bhoward be
            added as root staff, supported by polygon.  Motion passed 5-0,
            with bhoward abstaining and mooncat absent
        At the recommendation of the staff, gelinas moved that glenda be
            added as root staff, supported by polygon.  Motion passed 6-0,
            with mooncat absent

7.  Membership Vote Procedure Questions:
        Should the pending members' proposals be voted sequentially or in
            parallel?  Consensus of the discussion in coop is for running
            the votes in parallell.  The "vote" program can handle several
            proposals at the same time, even if all don't open for voting
            at the same time.

8.  Renewing Grex's Lease;
        polygon moved that grex's lease be extended for a year, supported
            by gelinas.  Discussion noted that this is the last year we
            can extend without renegotiating.  Insurance is becoming
            too expensive; we may not be able to afford it next year,
            which means we may not be able to renegotiate a lease for our
            current space.  Therefore, we will need to explore co-location,
            with an eye to moving at the expiration of the lease at the
            end of June, 2005.  Motion passed 6-0, with mooncat absent.

9.  Schedule Next Meeting:
        Friday, 5 March 2003, at 19:00 EST (7:00 PM), place to be
            determined.

10.  New Business:
        Need to re-establish trust with/of staff.  Perhaps the pending
           proposals will help.
        Should we reopen the CafePress account?  aruba will enter an
           item in coop for discussion.

11.  Closing Gavel Tap: 20:36 EST (8:36 PM)

response 2 of 35:

Jan 20 05:59 UTC 2004

In addition to the typos in the header, I also messed up the date of the
next meeting:  it should be 5 March 2004 not 2003.

response 4 of 35:

Jan 20 12:03 UTC 2004

Very nice, and promptly posted too!

response 6 of 35:

Jan 20 18:53 UTC 2004

One additional DNS suggestion:  If you're going to list Grex as a DNS server,
list it as dns.cyberspace.org or something of the sort, rather than
grex.cyberspace.org.  It's really hard to change an IP address of a DNS server
in a hurry, and changing Grex's IP address in a hurry is a useful ability to
have.

response 8 of 35:

Jan 20 21:41 UTC 2004

Good point, Steve.  I'll update the NS and SOA records later today.

response 10 of 35:

Jan 20 23:58 UTC 2004

Thanks Joe.  Do I need to do anything to our dotster account?  If so, send
me email.

response 12 of 35:

Jan 21 00:27 UTC 2004

The letter to our landlord's leasing agent was mailed today.
Now, all we have to do is collectively cross our fingers
that when the next liability insurance bill comes due, 
around Juneish, we can actually pay it. ;-)

response 14 of 35:

Jan 21 01:26 UTC 2004

Not really; insurance companies tell you your premium when it's time to
renew.

response 16 of 35:

Jan 21 05:23 UTC 2004

It wouldn't hurt to call the agent and ask.  When making some changes to my
car insurance yesterday, my insurance agent was able to tell me what my car
insurance premium was going to be when it renews three months from now.

response 18 of 35:

Jan 22 15:29 UTC 2004

Yes, she had sent mail to the board warning us she wouldn't be able 
to make the meeting and in it she said she'd be willing to serve 
another term as secretary.

response 20 of 35:

Jan 22 22:40 UTC 2004

(I apologise for the oversight. :( )

response 22 of 35:

Jan 23 02:08 UTC 2004

Richard - It wouldn't be a bad idea to get quotes from insurance companies,
I agree.  But the last time we tried to switch we nearly got screwed, if you
recall.  So We've been reluctant to try again.  Mary can say more.

response 24 of 35:

Jan 23 04:06 UTC 2004

Insurance for an organization like Grex is very very hard to find.  
Most companies have policies for non-profits but the minimum 
coverage is more than we can afford.  Other companies, including 
Hastings Mutual, who is insuring Grex, are getting out of covering 
organizations such as ours.  We've been warned that should we drop 
our policy, with Hastings, it probably wouldn't be available as a 
"new write".

I'm not going to be the person calling agents and encouraging a 
switch this time around.  My personal opinion is we should be 
looking at co-location.  If folks want, I'd be willing to contact 
our lease agent to see if we could negotiate a slightly higher rent 
payment in exchange for written release from our insurance 
obligation.  But I really doubt that would be acceptable.