Item 61. Minutes from the 11/17/92 Board of Directors Meeting Valerie Mates (popcorn) Wed, Nov 18, 1992 (00:28). 131 lines, 12 responses. Grex Board of Directors Meeting Minutes, Tuesday 11/17/92 at Zingerman's at 7:30pm. Present (in order of appearance) : popcorn, remmers, danr, davel, mju, steve, power, morel, mcnally, tj, mta, ceor, mdw. Gavel Banging - Remmers ----------------------- This went as planned, with some commentary from the rabble about the chair having to pay Zingerman's for any damaged tables. :) Hardware - Steve ---------------- Lots of work has gone into setting up a new 140 meg disk we got for free from Dave Parks. Steve, Marcus, and Marc have spent a bunch of time trying to get it working. Dave said the disk was slow on his Plexus. It seems that the Plexus kept re-reading failed reads until it got the information it was looking for. That's what slowed it down on Dave's Plexus. Grex doesn't keep re-reading the disk; it simply fails. It'll be a while 'til we know for sure if there's any chance that this disk will work. There are some other disks possibly in the wings. It would be a Good Idea to be able to move /tmp/keep_this_directory to someplace other than /tmp. Steve is looking for volunteers to go help clean out a space in Marcus's basement "computer masoleum" to plop Grex's spare 350 meg disk drives onto pallets and run them off Marcus's computer, acorus, until we're sure the disks are OK. Does anybody have a good source for free pallets? Ken's insurance people have some concerns about safety around Grex's hardware. In particular, there are some areas where, if you were very determined, you could probably reach live power. Some of Grex's disk drives are too big to fit in the rack mount; we'll need a bigger rack mount, hopefully enclosed. McNally may have one. In the meantime, Steve is going to look into locating or building enclosures for all of Grex's components, especially two disk drives and the Sun computer itself. Also, the insurance people are concerned that Grex may be overloading its power conditioner. This is because its plug is warm. Steve points out that the plug is not hot and that it is UL listed, so it should trip its own circuit breakers before doing anything nasty like catching fire. Still, we would like to make the insurance adjusters happy and we would like Grex to be as safe as possible, so we are looking for another power conditioner. We'll balance Grex's power consumption between the two power conditioners. Grex needs a bath before we enclose it. Marc is working on getting the fast modem going with a terminal server. We need a PC ethernet card. The cards we have are old models that won't do what we need. We need ethernet drivers for the old cards we've got, or any kind of ethernet card with a packet driver. Treasurer's Report - Danr ------------------------- We had about $20 in membership contributions before the meeting, plus about $50 of contributions at the meeting. We still need about $110 to meet this month's bills. To find out how to become a member, type "support" at any prompt. We can also use contributions for the "getting ahead" fund. What about other fundraising? Membership levels? Several board members feel strongly against having tiers of access to Grex, but the consensus is to discuss this on-line rather than making a decision about it in the meeting. We talked about going to local businesses and asking them to donate money or hardware to Grex in exchange for a plug in the motd or the banner for a conference. On the whole, this seems like a good idea, though one or two people said to beware being like Prodigy. Grex gets about 200 K of mail per hour. What on earth are we receiving?! We're not sure. At ConClave I noticed that there were a lot of posters telling people to log in to Grex, M-Net, or some other system and subscribe to some mailing lists. We should check to see if we've got lots of duplicate mailing list subscriptions. If so, let's write an exploder program and/or route the message into a usenet newsgroup instead of into bazillions of people's mailboxes. The system has seemed slow lately. This is because the Usenet "expire" program runs almost continuously, looking for articles to expire to free up disk space. Someone needs to look at Grex's dialup MTI driver (NTI driver?). It's yukky assembly language level work that would need to be done in person at acorus, then installed on Grex. Any volunteers? Danr will be chair of a fundraising committee. Everybody is invited to join the committee. Send mail to danr to sign up. I'll create a useradm account for Morel, who volunteered to take care of reaping users and such. We should do a backup to save people's files before reaping them. (I think this is unnecessary since we're reaping the people who haven't been on in a year, so their files have been backed up many times, but OK, why not?) We'll do a backup of the system and label it "last backup before accounts of aaa, bbb, and ccc were deleted". The NEW Center - remmers ------------------------ The NEW Center is a building that will be devoted to non-profit groups. It sounds like an ideal place for Grex to live. We have applied for space there. Moving Grex to the NEW center would get us much-wanted 24 hour access to the computer equipment, plus possibly lower electricity bills. And we can be very useful to other NEW center tenants, providing connectivity and technical expertise for them. We should know in December if the application was accepted. Moving the phone lines would cost $700 (that's $100 deposit times 5 lines, plus $40 startup charges, times 5 lines). Ouch! Where would we come up with that kind of money? Dunno. We need to keep working on 501(c)3 status. Remmers passed papers to mcnally to continue working on this. Mju applied for an IP address and the domain name cyberspace.org for us. This will be particularly useful when we get on the Internet. Leases at the NEW center are for 3 years. Can we commit for that much time? Yup. The board passed a motion to approve the fact that Grex applied for space in the NEW center, 6 to 0. Grex will be listed in an upcoming issue of the Merit newsletter or Linkletter or the ITD Digest. It's in an article that talks about interesting things to do from Merit. Upcoming pot luck soon, when Denise is in town. We may also have a Winter pot luck. Adjournment - Remmers --------------------- John banged the gavel again.