!dpc Item 282. Minutes of the Grex Board of Directors Meeting of September 14, 2005 David Cahill (dpc) Tue, Sep 20, 2005 (15:51). 83 lines, 5 responses. Attending Board Members: slynne, mary, gelinas, dpc, polygon, bhoward (via video iChat from Japan) Non-Attending Board Member: vanloons Attending Non-Board member: remmers The September 14, 2005 meeting of the Grex Board of Directors was called to order at 7:74 p.m. by President slynne at Zingerman's Next Door. Treasurer's Report: None. Staff Report: Remmers reported that the System is up, but is iffy. It is crashing spontaneously once a day. This does not seem to be a hardware problem. On Labor Day it crashed, but there was no access to Provide.Net to reset. On September 6 remmers went over, and the system did not come up because he was not able to log in. Grex was down until Monday, September 12. Remmers booted up in single-user mode, but the password file and the master password file were corrupted. But janc had written a mirroring script that copied those files to the spare disk. There were good copies of the password file, and remmers successfully rebooted. Dpc congratulated remmers on his excellent work. Remmers said that Grex still spontaneously crashes and reboots. STeve thinks this is due to a bug in the version of OpenBSD that we are running. He says this is fixed in an upgrade. STeve and remmers will work together on doing the upgrade during the weekend of September 24-25. There should be a staff discussion prior to this. There will be a couple of days of downtime. Remmers said the staff has not met in the last couple of months. The hardware seems to be perfectly healthy. He said the current staff does not seem to be very active. Dpc said he had been afraid the System was "terminal," and that the staff had abandoned Grex. He said he would be willing to vote to authorize paying someone if necessary, but he said he thought slynne had the authority to pay for services right now. Polygon said he agreed with dpc about the authority to pay. Remmers said that if someone new joins the staff there is a high learning curve because of all the customization. He said that the documentation was on non-Grex systems. Mary said she was thinking of offering pay to our own staff so that taking care of Grex would jump up in their list of priorities in a fair way. Dpc said he agreed with that as a first choice, but what if they didn't respond? Slynne said that with most volunteers, she did not think that offering money would make them less busy. Gelinas said that if we could offer janc whatever hourly rate he is earning on another project, he might do it. STeve can't take time off from MSU. Gelinas said that he and mdw were in a similar situation. Gelinas said we need to recruit from our community, but he was not sure there was anyone to recruit. Bhoward asked if we could get to our server remotely. Mary said that this time if needed to go into single-user mode, which could not be done remotely. Bhoward asked if we could have a remote console set up. Remmers mentioned the PC Weasel. Gelinas said if we have to slip a CD into the drive, then the PC Weasel is not going to help. Remmers asked if the PC Weasel could simulate hitting the reset button. Mary said someone has offered to donate a PC Weasel, but it needs a dedicated phone line. She said we need janc to check the usage on our second phone line. Slynne said we should enter another item in Coop and suggest people interested in joining the staff should come to a Board meeting. Dpc said that was an excellent idea. Slynne then said she would enter an item in Agora asking that interested people contact her personally. She will then forward possible candidates to the staff. Old Business: Polygon reported that he had found out that the County's anti-spam service costs $30,000 per year. The Board said never mind. The Board took the idea of closing newuser off the agenda. New Business: The Board agreed that slynne has the authority to spend money in an emergency to get the System up. Schedule Next Meeting: The next meeting will be on Thursday, November 10, at 7:00 p.m., at the home of Mary an John Remmers, 19 Westbury Court, Ann Arbor. 5 responses total. !mcnally ---------- (282) #1 Mike McNally (mcnally) Tue, Sep 20, 2005 (16:59). 9 lines. I realize #0 is not, itself, intended as a statement of opinion (but as a summary of what was said at the meeting) but I wish to take issue with the idea, repeated above, that "This does not seem to be a hardware problem." It may be a hardware problem or it may be a software problem, but if there is any strong evidence which points away from hardware issues I am not aware of it. !naftee ---------- (282) #2 Arc! Sin! Weld! (naftee) Tue, Sep 20, 2005 (19:32). 1 line. Gr8 notes, d8ve ! !jep ---------- (282) #3 John Ellis Perry Jr. (jep) Tue, Sep 20, 2005 (22:09). 18 lines. Dave attributed all of the comments stating the hardware is okay, to remmers. Ask him why he thinks the hardware is not causing the problems with frequent reboots. It seems to me from afar more like hardware than software. Under the same circumstances, software is a set of instructions which will always do the same thing. If there are regular errors, if every time you do X or Y the machine reboots, it might be software. I'd expect software errors to show up in log files, most likely. If there are inexplicable and intermittent errors, it's usually hardware. It doesn't take much overheating, sun spots, jiggling of the box, power fluctuation, or mysterious influences to affect hardware. Grex is complex and it's possible the staff just hasn't discovered a pattern yet, and there could be a software and/or operating system problem. !remmers ---------- (282) #4 John H. Remmers (remmers) Wed, Sep 21, 2005 (09:49). 4 lines. To clarify the minutes: Steve Andre mentioned to me that he thought Grex's recurrent crashes are due to a bug in OpenBSD 3.5 that was fixed in the next release - i.e. software, not hardware. I was relaying his opinion, not giving my own. !scholar ---------- (282) #5 By the way, this item has been archived offsite so you cannot erase it. (scholar) Mon, Sep 26, 2005 (09:01). 1 line. /me looks into the camera and waves at bhoward