srw
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Minutes of the Board Meeting of Oct 23, 1996
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Oct 24 04:38 UTC 1996 |
Minutes of the Meeting of the Cyberspace Communications Board of Directors
Wednesday, October 23, 1996 at 7:30 PM in the Cafeteria of the
ITI Building on Hubbard Road in Ann Arbor.
1. The meeting was called to order at 7:36 by Scott Helmke.
Directors present:
Scott Helmke (scott), President
Mark Conger (aruba), Treasurer
Steve Weiss (srw), Secretary
Steve Gibbard (scg),
Valerie Mates (popcorn),
Rob Henderson (robh),
Misti Anslin Tucker (mta)
Others present:
Dan Gryniewicz (dang),
Jan Wolter (janc),
Rob Argy (ajax)
2. Treasurer's Report
Mark Conger had posted the results from September online. In summary,
he described September as a pretty good month. We took in $1448, but much of
that was exceptional income, and our expenses were $529. We now 100 members.
Mark also indicated that October is shaping up to be a good month too.
We have collected $856 from the auction so far, but we have $300 more
to collect. Valerie said that she expects another wave of income from the
auction as a result of e-mailed reminders to the high bidders.
3. Rehabilitation Committee
Grex received a donation of random really old computer hardware. It consists
mostly of 8088 machines, even though it was billed as 80286 or 80386. So it
is not clear how useful these machines can be. Dan Gryniewicz offered to
take a look at them to determine which are working OK. These could be used to
build terminal emulators (Grex Terminals), that boot from floppy.
4. Publicity Committee
Misti announced that the production of new fliers is under way, but not
complete. Misti needs some help in moving the fliers to their destinations.
5. Technical Committee
Discussion was deferred, as more staffers were expected to arrive.
6. Grex Has Moved
Valerie and Jan reported a total of about $100 in expenses were needed to
complete the move of Grex (aside from the telephone installation cost).
Jan wrote up a description of the activities during the move, which is
posted online in response 549 of item 77 in coop. Valerie and Steve Gibbard
reported that the Ameritech Installer was wonderfully helpful.
There remains some concern that we are near the limit of the 20 amp
electric circuit that we are on. Valerie pointed out that the landlord had
suggested that more power could be obtained from the Fan's circuit, which
is on a separate breaker.
10. New staff appointments
Valerie, representing the staff, reported that at the most recent staff
meeting, staff decided to recommend two appointments to staff for the
board to consider. One was the authorization of root access for
Michael O'Leary (nephi), and the other was the appointment of
Ryan Antkowiak (ryan1) to party administrator. There was brief discussion
on both of these appointments.
MOTION: (popcorn, srw) Authorize Michael O'Leary (nephi) to have root access
with all the privileges and responsibilities pertaining thereto.
PASSES (7-0)
MOTION: (popcorn, scg) Authorize Ryan Antkowiak (ryan1) to be
"Party Administrator" with all the privileges and responsibilities
pertaining thereto.
PASSES (7-0)
12. New Business
* Valerie has been contacting Sun Microsystems, looking for donations of
equipment. Sun's official policy is that they only donate to educational
institutions. Valerie will continue to investigate.
* Valerie reported some more specific costs for T1 phone links. These
prices do not include internet service, but are the price of the phone line.
There is a connection fee of $587.50
$330/month for a month-to-month contract.
$311/month for a 12 month contract.
$276/month for a 36 month contract.
$250/month for a 60 month contract.
If you need to shorten your contract, they will permit this by paying them
back in a lump-sum the difference over the term of the contract so far.
They will waive the connection fee for 36 or 60 month contracts if ordered
before 12/31/1996.
There was no more new business.
5. Technical Committee Report.
This topic had been deferred, but we have no other topics to cover. Valerie
identified the following technical items of interest:
* We are running out of UIDs. Staff plans to start having the newuser
programs begin reallocating old discarded UIDs beginning at UID 1000.
This will begin shortly, as we are now over 60,000 out of a total of
65,500+.
* We have moved to a new location.
* We need to upgrade our CPU to a SUN 4/400.
* Load averages have been creeping higher and higher, and there is no simple
explanation. Steve Weiss has noticed an increase in pine usage, which could
have some loading effect due to its large size.
* Heavy ftp users have been contacted and asked to find another place to use
for this purpose.
* We have been inundated in spam mail from some sites. We blocked access from
one of them (moneyworld.com) due to this abuse. There have been other kinds
of mail abuse, too.
* M-Net was reported to be down. This could increase Grex's load if it stays
down.
* We still need to install modems. Now that Grex has moved and we are on
Centrex, so that outgoing calls can be blocked, there is the likelihood that
this will happen soon. Steve Gibbard, Valerie Mates, and Jan Wolter expressed
interest in this project. We have only 10 of 13 lines of the hunt in
operation, and this would allow us to use all of the lines.
* Gryps (the Free-BSD router) still crashes regularly, and is rebooted by an
automated script. As a result it is rarely responsible for large outages, but
regularly responsible for short outages of the internet link.
* Backtalk is functional and is being used by some conference users. It is
improving as Jan adds features to the engine and Pistachio interfaces. Steve
Weiss plans to upgrade the Vanilla interface to add more graphic elements and
forms, and features it lacks. Steve also acknowledged a known problem in
which it fails to strip control characters. Steve has been too busy to make
progress recently.
* Grex's disk partition which holds users' files (/home) has been close to
full recently. We have been trimming unnecessary things to keep it from
running out of space, but we could use a new disk. It was proposed that
there wasn't much point in waiting, given the currently low price of disk,
and the fact that prices are no longer dropping so fast. The disk could
first be used to reorganize home hierarchically, which would speed Grex a
great deal. This is a long standing staff project. Several staffers urged
the board to consider authorizing the purchase of a new disk.
MOTION (Scott, srw) Authorize of to $500 for a new disk drive of at least 2
GB for use to expand Grex's home area.
PASSES (7-0)
Staff will begin to search for the best price and product to fill this need.
[Two more items appeared, but these are not part of the technical committee
section of the meeting]
JCC Sale Report
Rob Argy reported that we took in $201.50 at the sale and also received a
donation of $65, for which a recipient of a Grex membership was to be chosen.
Rob Argy asked online for volunteers to receive this, and has coordinated the
membership award with the treasurer.
Library Report
Valerie reported that an area in the "grexdoc" directory was set aside for
a library, as requested by T.S. Taylor (tsty). This area has not been
populated yet.
13. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 9:17 PM.
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