Item 15. Minutes from the Grex Board of Directors Meeting, 2/25/93 Valerie Mates (popcorn) Mon, Mar 1, 1993 (23:05). 248 lines, 4 responses. Grex Board of Directors Meeting February 25, 1993 Zingerman's, 7:30pm. Present (for at least some part of the meeting) were: ceor, chelsea, davel, ecl, jfk, mdw, meg, mju, morel, mta, popcorn, remmers, robh, slynne, srw, steve, tj, and tsty. Gavel Banging - Remmers ------------------------ Remmers banged the gavel, read the agenda, and called the meeting to order. Treasurer's Report ------------------- None - he absconded with the treasury. No wait... (See the item in the Agora conference for treasury details.) NEW Center Update - Remmers ---------------------------- Six Grexies (mju, morel, mta, popcorn, remmers, and steve) had an interview with Ann Glendon at the NEW center on 2/24. It's hard to say how the interview went; we left with ambivalent feelings. They said they have room for at most one computer organization, not both us and M-Net, and they asked what makes us different from M-Net. A subcommittee will be reviewing the notes from the interview and deciding which organizations to admit. Steve and Marc brought a laptop computer and a modem to the interview. We had some trouble using the phone network at the NEW center; finally managed to dial Grex only to get a busy signal. Ah popularity. JFK was interviewed for M-Net/Arbornet. He too came away unsure about how M-Net did at the interview. The interviewers seemed concerned about 24 hour access to the hardware. We talked briefly about Grex and M-Net sharing space. We don't know if the NEW center could allow that. Non-profit (501(c)3) status might help the NEW Center be more comfortable with us. Overall, Grex will have to wait and see. Acknowledgement of Donations - Steve ------------------------------------- Aaron Larson donated a cool Apple computer; Grex would like to publically thank him. Also, Dale Fay and Steve Weiss donated binders; thanks to both of them, too. Misti will enter a thank you item in the Coop conference. Meg may be able to get hold of loads of 286es, maybe for use at a future JCC sale. Hardware Changes - Steve and Marc ---------------------------------- Grex had its first major disk disaster. Marc and Steve and TS fixed it. It was scary, but it worked out OK with no data loss. They worked three and a half days testing and fixing things with miscellaneous donated disks. (**Thanks**, you three!!!!) Some of Grex's backups turned out to be unreadable, so the fixing required some Truly Creative data transfers. Mcnally and power got disks from Arbortext. The disks are now at mdw's and TS's places. If all the disks work OK they'll be an additional 1.5 gigs! *Grex needs a new power conditioner first* before these disks can go on-line. If you have a spare one you can lend or donate, Grex will kiss your feet and be deeply grateful to you. One donated disk works great for a time and then conks out. It may work better with increased airflow. Grex is now running on a 130 meg disk from Greg Cronau. (Thanks Greg!!!) That disk has a case with several muffin fans. The case and fans might work well as airflow for the big disk that conks out. The 130 meg disk has the same power consumption as the 80 meg disk it replaces. Grex gets its Usenet News and mail via a PC that converts high-speed incoming characters into ethernet packets. That PC is called the PC Route box. It seems to be working out to be reliable and quick. Now Grex needs more disk space to store all that news that's pouring in. Grex throws away as many as 30 batches of news in a day because there isn't space to store it. Usenet volume doubles roughly once every 18 months, so lots and lots of disk space would be heartily useful. As a side-benefit of the disk disaster, the bigger new disk has enough free space that mju and remmers (I think) were able to install Taylor UUCP and Nethack 3.1. Taylor UUCP is a Gnu version of UUCP. It needs less computer time to do the same amount of work, and it allows data to be sent and received at the same time. If Grex is going to be down for extended amounts of time, tell meg so she can prepare Netmeg to deal with the mail delivery problems that ensue. The donated Apple could be kind of an "answering machine" for Grex, so when you dial in and Grex is down it tells you what's wrong and how long Grex is expected to be down. The computer running test software for a future incarnation of Grex is up and running. Its name is Gaggle. "That free version of BSD" is running on it; it's patched to the latest and greatest patch level, but the machine needs more disk space on it so Marc can compile other programs we will need to run on it. The version of Unix running on it, 386 BSD, looks likely to be nicely matured (bugfixed) when we are ready to move to the new machine. Backup Schedule: ------------------ Grex has, at times, gone as many as 5 months between backups. Since the tape failure and the new disk, folks have been doing daily backups. Are daily backups worth the effort? Some people argue yes, others argue no. Is it worth having people with a finite amount of time to donate to Grex spend their time making backups when they could be doing other productive things for Grex? Folks who have volunteered to drop by and make backups are: glenda, morel, mta, steve, and tsty. TS volunteered to even do the slow full backups as well as quick incremental backups. Do we cycle backup tapes outside of CE? Yup. No backing up Grex on the weekend: it's not fair to Ken or to the people who have to log out so Grex can go down to be backed up. Are we bugging Ken by dropping by a lot to make backups? In case of a disk disaster, how much data are users willing to lose? We need to create a login ID for doing backups, to make it really easy to back Grex up. Steve or Marc sounded likely to do this. Remember (yup, you, reading this, this means you) to back up your files from Grex to your own system at home. If you care about your data, this is the best way you can protect it. Steve will coordinate backup volunteers. Maintenance Line - Steve ------------------------- Power thought up a way to do a cheap or free maintenance line: use the PC Route box as a remote console as well as for packets of news and mail. No new phones or modems needed. Steve has the source to PC Route and he can work on it. Would this be a security hole? Not really; since Grexies are writing the code ourselves, we can create a killer password scheme. Of Grex's problems that have come up so far, 80 percent of them could have been fixed with a maintenance line. Of course, there's no guarantee that this percentage will stay that way in the future. The board members present are unanimously comfortable with going ahead with this maintenance line. Staff Appointments ------------------- TS suddenly became a staff member during the disk emergency. This is not standard policy for how new staff members are made. Future emergency staff access will be handled by 1) calling as many board members as possible, first, to get a consensus, and/or 2) using a temporary password rather than a permanant account. We need a printed-out list of board and staff phone numbers. In a hardware crisis, you can't log in to find out people's phone numbers. It's probably not written anywhere, but at some point the plan for appointing new staff members was to have the staff suggest new people and the board approve or disapprove of it. JDG will be Grex's ugames (unix games administrator). I think I remember someone else volunteering to be ugames on Grex, a long time ago, but nobody remembers who this was. If this was you and you're still interested, please send e-mail to talk about it. Grex Manual ------------ Danr is coordinating this. The folks who volunteered to do it need to write their chapters!! Grex's new newsreader, tin, crashed Grex once and news twice. Tin is turned off for now, 'til mju teaches it some manners. Use of Grex as a Business Resource ----------------------------------- There are several people using Grex as a business e-mailing address, possibly sending credit card numbers and stuff over the net. What if someone starts doing shady business deals from Grex? Is Grex liable? Does it look like Grex is condoning businesses that use Grex for e-mail? Would writing a disclaimer help? Mail spends time on random intermediate systems where you don't know how secure it is from prying eyes, plus bounce messages can go to postmasters all over the place, so mail really isn't private. E-mail is not a safe thing to do with credit card numbers. Would it help if Grex posted a disclaimer in all outgoing Usenet postings? There's already a line that says "Grex Public Access Unix +1-313-761-3000" in outgoing postings; does that make it clear that users are posting as themselves and not as representatives of Grex? We'll take up this discussion on-line. Grex's mail volume on Netmeg is twice that of M-Net, and Grex's mail is delivered at 2400 baud, which is sloooow. Grex's mail goes mostly to about 6 users. If it takes 1.5 hours to deliver the mail, the 15 other systems that netmeg delivers to all have to wait. Looks like it's time to revive the mail ettiquette item or enter a new one. Elections ---------- The bylaws don't say how officers are selected, so we'll elect officers again this year, and possibly ammend the bylaws to talk about how officers are elected. Remmers and popcorn ran for president (chair?) of Grex for the year. Each got 3 votes; we will try holding the vote again when all the board members are present at the same time (in the year 1997?) Hopefully we can carry off the election next month. In the meantime everybody will keep their current job. Publicity ---------- Misti has been paying out-of-pocket for publicity expenses. Grex will reimburse $3/month for flyer expenses, plus $30 for 1000 flyers for the upcoming JCC sale. We looked at several paper samples Misti may use for Grex flyers. Anybody who would like some Grex flyers to post, please contact Misti (login ID mta). It's time to start thinking about the next JCC sale again. Actually we talked about the JCC sale at the previous meeting and agreed to participate in it. Hardware and software donations and volunteer time are eagerly accepted! We'll look into getting a dial-in connection to Grex going. Actually, though, jfk says M-Net tried this once and the only people who really logged in were already diehard M-Netters. March is usually the biggest JCC sale of the year. The "connect-to-Grex" disks at the last JCC sale were a good idea; maybe Grex should give them away free this time instead of charging for them. Adjournment ------------ Remmers banged the gavel and adjourned the meeting. The next meeting will probably be held some time in March.