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Grex > Coop > #267: Feb 2010 Board Meeting Minutes | |
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denise
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Feb 2010 Board Meeting Minutes
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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.
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| 66 responses total. |
tsty
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response 1 of 66:
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Feb 10 01:24 UTC 2010 |
w0w .. fasssssssssst and good! tnx
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mary
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response 2 of 66:
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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?
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cross
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response 3 of 66:
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Feb 10 02:23 UTC 2010 |
Could someone please clarify the staff issues? My understanding was that
Remmers and TS do Not have root access.
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veek
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response 4 of 66:
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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.
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tsty
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response 5 of 66:
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Feb 10 16:11 UTC 2010 |
one amplificatoin about he hardware inventory ... apparently the
board-at-the-time was wholly disinteresdsted in keeping arond (or
offering to return) anyhtiikg that was not activly in-use.
keesan said she recycled a lot of it ... mdw & steve captured some that
was going to head to teh shredder .. and some hit the shredder.
i think i have that right .. at least close.
re 3 ... dunno about remmers but i don;t ahve root at this second, but
it should be coming along some time soon.
re 4 .. teh xyz.cyberspace.org was brought up sted *.org/~xyz for
persoanl sites and the board (between meeings) is considering how
to best effect the idea whilst -also- benefiting grex, i.e., some $$$.
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remmers
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response 6 of 66:
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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.
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nharmon
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response 7 of 66:
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Feb 12 00:55 UTC 2010 |
I'm surprised the root password isn't sealed by the board in a
tamper-evident envelope with staff just given least privileges via sudo,
with a couple of staffers having root-level sudo.
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kentn
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response 8 of 66:
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Feb 12 01:26 UTC 2010 |
It's more likely in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar under
Funk and Wagnalls' porch.
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nharmon
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response 9 of 66:
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Feb 12 01:47 UTC 2010 |
*snort*
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tonster
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response 10 of 66:
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Feb 12 05:51 UTC 2010 |
resp:7: that's how ford used to keep their root passwords sealed.
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nharmon
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response 11 of 66:
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Feb 12 09:58 UTC 2010 |
It's also the recommended safe practice for financial institutions.
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kentn
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response 12 of 66:
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Feb 12 13:16 UTC 2010 |
That doesn't sound like all that bad an idea, actually.
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jgelinas
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response 13 of 66:
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Feb 13 18:34 UTC 2010 |
The board approved root access for both tsty and remmers. When either
will get that access is, I guess, up to the staff.
Most of the stuff is done by sudo now, I think. Note that sudo just
makes more passwords lucrative targets.
There is still some disagreement on broadcasting the board meetings.
Thus the limits on recording and disseminating the recordings. We are
probably going to have to take membership-level action to get it
'right.'
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cross
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response 14 of 66:
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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.
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veek
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response 15 of 66:
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Feb 14 02:02 UTC 2010 |
you'd suppose Grex was an attractive female with all this plotting
going on *grumble* anyway, umm..
1. Surprisingly, though I find the concept of old and new guards to be
weird (what is their to guard even?), I kind of agree that Cross is
right about Remmers appearing to be very sneaky <g> I have been
pondering his sneakiness, myself, the last few days, and making
speculative assumptions - mostly because, not sure if you remember
but.. like the time ppl were grumbling about staff and asking for
volunteers or some such thing, and I volunteered and then remmers
volunteered and well.. *sigh* and after that all was forgotten..
anyway, the impression I got was that he volunteered simply to squelch
me - I'm acutely aware that it's logically unsound but read on without
flaming me and thou shall see, what it's to bee, to be mee.. :p
2. If Remmers is being a sneaky ol' coot, that's okay - the matter is
irrelevant because.. at the end of the day, what counts is work done
for Grex by staff and that is a very measurable quantity!
So.. *miaow* wouldn't it make sense for the board to give emm a task
list, or Cross and Remmers to duke it out by doing stuff for us.. like
E-Mail (which we don't have) or My-SQL stuff etc etc..
Basically, the whole sneaky Remmers AND old-guard thing, becomes a non-
issue see.. if a guy is laboring on your behalf, why bother with the
color of the cat so long as it catches mice.
3. I mean, we should clearly demarcate tasks.. both are competent, both
know Unix, BOTH have CONTRIBUTED in the past.. give emm whole projects
and see who *does* what to determine the future. Would this work??
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veek
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response 16 of 66:
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Feb 14 02:51 UTC 2010 |
Re #15: mind you, I'm NOT saying Remmers IS sneaky and it's not my
intention to even hint or cast doubt on his reputation! I don't know
remmers at all! I've always found him polite and reasonably helpful.
What I am saying, is that: divining intent is a waste of time when you
can use work done as a measure of competence. Not work done 10 years
ago..
The reason I mentioned my own remmers thingy was because I meant to
illustrate how my perception of some random guy on the net could
influence my thought process. Not that Cross is mad or that Remmers is
innocent.. we have simply no way of knowing for sure what their motives
are.. so use measurable evidence.. in any case work gets done.
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veek
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response 17 of 66:
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Feb 14 03:31 UTC 2010 |
BTW, SRW got back :) all is well.. he's waiting for his Grex passwd to
be reset so he can make changes.
See now.. that's another case to point.. I was a bit worried about that
- thinking that he was being nasty and Oo! what a scum-bag! In fact, if
ye had asked me for my opinion on SRW just 10 secs ago, I'd have slayed
the man! In fact, and I hate to admit this, I was wondering if board
had done some nasty evVil thing by telling me one thing and had snuck
behind my back and told SRW to silently discard my request.. and I was
in the process of listing all my sins and pondering which particular
stunning discourse with Chad had been the last straw. Then the whole
remmers thing, for a moment I contemplated a remmers sneakily calling
SRW and telling him to you know.. put my request in the dustbin. *sigh*
It's all very embaressing and it's not meant to detract from what Cross
is saying (because Cross is a different person and probably does not
react the way I do).. my point is Resp 16: makes a lot of sense and
avoids this complicated debate. Remmers can suggest something and work
on his project - even if Cross thinks it's crap and Cross can do the
same. It doesn't have to be perfect, or the most beauteous, or the most
elegant piece of work (RT).. it's just a stupid shell with hardly any
users.. so we should be able to do what we want and have a lot of fun.
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veek
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response 18 of 66:
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Feb 14 03:33 UTC 2010 |
so long as Steve can reset the box<g>
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jgelinas
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response 19 of 66:
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Feb 14 16:20 UTC 2010 |
Since the matter of 'staff stamp' has been raised: The matter was
discussed in e-mail. No formal vote was taken, but the discussion made
clear that the majority of staff were in favour of adding tsty and
remmers. So the board acted.
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cross
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response 20 of 66:
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Feb 14 16:25 UTC 2010 |
a) If it's the discussion I'm thinking of, the stipulation was that both
be added without root access.
b) It seems that the majority also wanted tonster added.
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tsty
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response 21 of 66:
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Feb 18 04:28 UTC 2010 |
wel, i did wnat tonster added. and i will lobby for tonster in
the futre.
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cross
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response 22 of 66:
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Feb 18 05:52 UTC 2010 |
I did, too. Who wanted more in the way of an interview or whatever?
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tonster
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response 23 of 66:
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Feb 19 16:34 UTC 2010 |
I do find it rather odd that there's some question and need for an
interview, like I'm asking for a job and grex is some top secret weapon
or something. I've been around m-net and grex for 17 years, and I've
been a root/sysop for m-net for over 10. I'm not some new person no one
knows.
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nharmon
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response 24 of 66:
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Feb 19 18:39 UTC 2010 |
If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
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