Feb 2010 Board Meeting Minutes

Feb 9 21:18 UTC 2010

Grex Board Meeting, 2/7/10

Present: gelinas*, aruba, kentn*, keesan, jim, steve*, tsty*, unicorn 
[by phone]*, denise*
[* = board members; board member cross missing]

7:58 pm, meeting called to order.

-- Officer election results:
    Chair [president]: kentn
    Treasurer: tsty
    Secretary: denise

--Staff report:
    STeve summarized the hardware problems we had [he posted a summary 
in, I believe, item 4 in agora].  
     Backups were discussed, doing remote backups for now, then in a 
month or so, try doing a usb backup.
    Discussed adding members to staff. gelinas moved to add tsty and 
remmers to staff [with root access], denise seconded, motion passed.  
Staff would like to meet with tonster to get more info before adding him
 to staff.

--Next Meeting: Sunday, March 7, 6pm at Zingerman s

--Grex status and future:

    What is/should be our policy of disseminating info from taped 
meetings?  Should discuss in co-op. tsty moved and gelinas seconded: All
 grex meetings recorded for board members to use and to provide mp3
files  to be available if needed for other use/dissemination, subject to
board  approval. Motion passed.

   What has happened to the old grex equipment? Steve and mdw have most 
of it; keesan has recycled some of the old equipment.  Current Inventory
 includes:
   -I386 Box
   -external usb disk
   -spare motherboard
   -2 modems
   -gavel? [Slynne, do you still have this?]
   -speaker phone
   -treasurer s records
   -domain name

   The board has received email from srw [steve weiss] stating that veek
   
has been in touch to see about using srw s photos he has to use in a 
wikipedia article about grex. Does the board agree with this? There were
 no objections; go for it!

   
   Where to communicate when Grex is down?  Possibilities:
     -Posterous [sp?]
     -M-net: people can post info on mnet but mnet will not be the 
[only] place for staff to discuss info. 
     -twitter/facebook/myspace: looking into setting up accounts on one 
or more of these.
     -HVCN -doesn t work
     -Check google page

   Email question/item in coop posted by veek about the possibility of 
using postfix/
white listing. Will be discussed in veek s item as well as with staff.

   What about having personalized web domains? Will look into this, can 
also discuss online. What can we do without having to involve 
provide.net?

9:45 pm, gelinas moved to adjourn meeting, Steve seconded; motion 
carried.



    

response 2 of 66:

Feb 10 01:40 UTC 2010

Could someone please clarify the bit about opening up board meetings by 
both simulcasting and keeping those audio/video recordings available for 
folks to listen/watch at their convenience?  The coop discussion seemed to 
support doing this.  Yet the minutes are fuzzy as to what came down.  

What's up?

response 4 of 66:

Feb 10 12:45 UTC 2010

Re #0: so SRW didn't forget :) Regarding the personalized web URL 
thing.. it could be done by creating a subdomain called 
xyz.cyberspace.org and delegating authority for the subdomain to a 
nameserver run on grex.cyberspace.org, so any further changes would be 
local BUT this would require that staff do the initial one-time 
delegation on Provide. 

BUT, I'm thinking that perhaps this could wait till later - the actual 
benefits being, rather marginal..

Anyway, so could we decide something for sure (even migrating to 
tonster's box is okay with me) regarding Mail, MySQL and Ping/
Traceroute/NMap (i'll open a thread on this). All are very useful for 
ppl using the shell.

response 6 of 66:

Feb 11 21:46 UTC 2010

I'm of the opinion that root access should be parceled out conserva-
tively on an as-needed basis.  In particular, since I don't know
exactly what I'll be doing as staff yet, I don't know if I need it.
Certain kinds of administrative tasks can be carried out without
root - for example, I didn't need it to run the recent board vote;
just needed privileged access to certain directories and files.
If I'm going to be authorized to go to Provide and hit reset,
I don't need root for that either.  On the other hand, if I'm
going to fight fires such as runaway processes and the like, then
I'd need root.

I think staff needs to get together, either in person or online,
and figure out who's going to do what.  Then I'll know if I
actually need root.

At the December board meeting, a staff meeting was scheduled
for early January.  It didn't happen because Grex was still down
with disk problems.  I think it's time to schedule another one.
If it's an in-person meeting, I'm out of town at the moment but
will be available from February 21 on.

response 8 of 66:

Feb 12 01:26 UTC 2010

It's more likely in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar under
Funk and Wagnalls' porch.

response 10 of 66:

Feb 12 05:51 UTC 2010

resp:7: that's how ford used to keep their root passwords sealed.

response 12 of 66:

Feb 12 13:16 UTC 2010

That doesn't sound like all that bad an idea, actually.  

response 14 of 66:

Feb 13 22:15 UTC 2010

resp:13 Sudo does *not* "just make(s) more passwords lucrative
targets." Sudo is a very, very useful tool and is the preferred
mechanism for doing things as the superuser these days.

I have given root access to both Remmers and TS via adding them to
the 'wheel' group.  Both should use sudo to access things as root.
I don't even know what the root password is, but it would probably
be a good idea if someone changed it to something that they know,
write it down, and store it somewhere securely.

I should state publicly that I have serious objections to adding
remmers to staff.  When I lobbied to get re-added to staff some
years ago, remmers objected strongly.  When I got re-added to staff
and elected to the board, remmers resigned from both.

I find that timeline suspicious and have found him difficult to
work with.  He created what I felt to be a very divisive forum to
discuss Grex being down during the recent outage, which fragmented
the discussion, *despite* being asked not to do so, by me, as a
baord and staff member.  In the past, he was not responsive to
email; I recall asking him multiple times to create me an account
on the machine that housed Grex's CVS server and he did not respond
until after I'd resigned from staff.  I feel like John is the type
of guy who likes to "take control."  I feel like he doesn't work
particularly well with others, and I'm concerned about him having
root access.

A lot of John's technical ideas are not well thought out and tend
to rely on things he's heard, rather than things that he's done.
He lobbied strongly to put in a complicated content-management
system on Grex, without having even used it.  I find that problematic,
and I'm worried that, with root access, John will do things that
are not easily supportable by the rest of us.  Similarly with his
ideas about virtualization.

I see his no-staff-stamp addition to staff as something of a coup
by the Grex old-guard.  I would have been happy to have him do
webmaster things, but full-on root access is an entirely other
matter.