Item 365 by (kentn) Kent Nassen entered Thu, Mar 16, 2017 (22:58) as: BOD Meeting Minutes, March 16, 2017 ------------------------------------------------------- Grex Board Meeting, Thursday, March 16, 2017, 7:30 p.m. ------------------------------------------------------- We had trouble getting everyone connected on Hangouts, so some Board members communicated via telephone. Call to order at 7:53 p.m. Members In attendance were Dan, Chuck, Todd, and Kent. We have a quorum so can conduct business. First item of business was to approve the previous minutes. They were approved unanimously. Second item of business was to set the next meeting time. It was unanimously agreed to hold the next Cyberspace Board meeting on June 8, 2017, a Thursday, at 7:30 p.m. EDT. Main Business: 1. Elections: we need to confirm when current Board members terms end. However, we'd like to have an election in 2017 to fill the open seat as well as any expiring or expired seats. 2. Treasurer business: Todd is working on filing 4 years of State of Michigan corporate updates. We also agreed that we need a new registered agent, who must reside in Michigan. Kent will fulfill this role and Todd will do the paperwork. The Board discussed the PO Box. We believe this to be expired now and no longer accessible to Cyberspace, Inc. We will remove references to it from our web site. If checks need to be sent, Todd said he could set up a PO Box near where he lives to receive them. Otherwise, users need to use PayPal. The Board showed no interest in maintaining the Ann Arbor, MI PO Box. The Board discussed tracking memberships and their expirations. The Board agreed that whatever Todd can do as treasurer to keep a good list of payments for memberships will be acceptable. Most (if not all) of our memberships are coming in via PayPal currently. Thus, PayPal records can be used to determine recent payments. Treasurer's Report: In the past month we've received 3 memberships. 2 were for $18. One was for $36 (2 years). The PayPal balance is $1844.52. We have enough money to meet current expenses of running the corporation. We also have money in TCF Bank. The Annual Reports to the State of Michigan cost $25 each, so this will be a $100 total expense. (Todd got disconnected at this point) Staff Report: Staff discussed moving to a new system. One of the main obstacles, other than free time, is the difference between how OpenBSD handles our web-based BBS and RT help desk and how FreeBSD would handle them. FreeBSD uses the PAM system for passwords, so that requires either building PAM functionality into applications, such as the web server, or try to do what we've been using on the current system. That is, use a library developed by Jan Wolter to allow web-based BBS users to access the shadow password file. We do not want to run the web server as root. Potentially we could run Apache on the new system and port this authentication library to work with it and continue to offer web-based BBS. If instead we switch to the nginx web server, we would probably need to drop web-based BBS support as well as RT help desk support unless some authentication module could be developed to allow access. This led to a discussion of the RT help desk. There are three issues with getting it working in a new system. First, it has been a long time since anyone on staff has set it up, so on a new system it would be like starting over from scratch. A second issue is spam, which we receive by the bucketful on the RT system. It is an on-going maintenance task to update the procmail recipes to keep most of it out. Finally, there is the authentication issue noted above. Potentially we could let RT have its own password database just for the people who need to have access. We agreed that there just are not that many staff members using RT currently (just 2) so we don't really need it for its ability to allow multiple people to respond to issues. There was some discussion of moving help desk facilities off of Grex to some remote server. What that would look like, no one was sure, but it would mean our data would be elsewhere. The advantage of having the help desk software on Grex is that we control our data. We noted help desk software as something we would investigate to see what is available for both on Grex (to replace RT) or remote access (such as GitHub). The discussion of spam in RT generated further discussion of how e-mail works on Grex currently. That is, we are constantly fighting spam with few staff resources. One option is to turn off incoming e-mail. Another option is to turn off e-mail entirely. This is not desirable because at least staff need to use Grex email to send out payment notices, password resets, and other information. We need incoming e-mail to get help desk requests, unless that e-mail goes to a help desk system outside Grex. We want to be sensitive to the concerns of the host of the virtual machine that is running on Grex currently. We don't want to overload his system with spam. An option may be to move administrative e-mail off of Grex and to a separate server. Other user e-mail access in this scenario would be shut off. It was noted we need a viable e-mail architecture to continue to provide incoming and outgoing e-mail on Grex. And we need a viable web architecture for our web site and help desk to continue to function as they do now. 9:16 p.m. Motion to adjourn was made and seconded. Vote was unanimous to adjourn.