Item 29. Minutes of the 7/23/1997 Board of Directors Meeting Misti Anslin Tucker (mta) Wed, Aug 20, 1997 (18:56). 112 lines, 10 responses. 7:39 Board Called to Order In attendance: dang, remmers, mary, bmoran, steve, aruba, tsty, jared, janc, kaplan, senna, scg, mta Treasurers Report: Membership has been constant over the last several years. We might start to consider marketing GREX with eye toward new membership revenues not just new users. Possible ideas: Newspaper articles Increase membership by $1 Publicity push at the next major upgrade Focus efforts on locals (who tend to make up most of membership) Merchandising push Publicity push by individuals Publicity Report: Rob and Misti are supposed to get together to work on the t-shirt order. Technical Committee Report: GREX's reliability had been so-so lately. Jan and Klaus Wolter have pulled GREX apart, installed memory cards to load GREX to it's capacity. Everything was up to speed. Klaus tweeked a power supply to improve the amount of available power. GREX speeded up at that point and hasn't crashed since. Modems and phone lines are having some serious trouble. It may be related to power problems. This hasn't been resolved yet. The terminal server is now stable and working for a week and a half. A new version of the operating system doesn't seem to want to talk to anything off the subnet. We've had an endless stream of eggdroppers. FTP now has a wrapper reminding people that eggdrop won't work on GREX. It seems to be working well. 670 - not much new progress to report. The 670 is having trouble talking sensibly to the disks. Marcus is concerned about the physical health of one of the SCSI cables. It's been folded and bent. The staff will be replacing it. We still need to get our power consumption verified. We need to balance our power bills and we may very well have been paying too much. It looks like modems with physical dumb modes may be on the market again. SSH seems to be having problems. Staff will move it temporarily to Griffis and make it unavailable to non-staffers while they plug a security hole. The phone list needs updating. The ISDN Report An ISDN line is now available through Dorian's T1 -- which is better connectivity that the UM has! We need to put in the lines, Jared will pay for most of the installation costs. Steve will verify that CENTRX and ISDN aren't going to be incompatible. Money fro an ISDN is a major concern, but many present feel that history shows that when GREX makes a major improvment, the money to maintain it has always followed. Question: - Should we keep the 28.8k line when we get ISDN? The concensus is that "yes", we should, but that it needs to be discussed in coop before the board votes on it. jan moves and valerie seconds: I move the board authorize the following: (1) The expenditure of up to $200 for the installation of two ISDN phone lines. (2) The expenditure of up to $60 per month for the same lines (3) Contingent on a fund raiser raising at least $800, the expenditure of up to $1400 for two ISDN routers. Motion passes 3-0-0 Auction Report: The auction made somewhat less than it did last year. You can run the !auction command from within the auction conference to check on the status of the auctioned items. New Business: 501c3 - work is underway. Jan still needs help to assemble some financial data. Grexstock - only two people have reserved sites and lots of people seem to plan to drop by for a day or an evening. 10 responses total. ---------- (29) #1 Misti Anslin Tucker (mta) Wed, Aug 20, 1997 (18:57). 1 line. Sorry it took so long folks. ---------- (29) #2 Steve Gibbard (scg) Wed, Aug 20, 1997 (23:27). 5 lines. Thanks for posting that. I think your vote total is wrong on the ISDN motion that passed. The previous ISDN motion, made by me and seconded by dang, which failed, isn't mentioned in the minutes. ---------- (29) #3 amin wijaya (awijaya) Thu, Aug 21, 1997 (03:15). 6 lines. Hello << Telephone lines problem related to Power problems >> Do you need a big UPS? Or just a giant Stabilizer? I have several APC 1250 Watts Stabilizer. Is this useful. Best regarsds (AW) ---------- (29) #4 Valerie Mates (valerie) Thu, Aug 21, 1997 (11:15). 6 lines. I was at the meeting too. Re 3: Actually, the telephone line problems were related to needing to change the programming in the modems, I think. Grex could use another power conditioner (I think). Would your APC work on US 110 volt electricity, or only on 220V? ---------- (29) #5 amin wijaya (awijaya) Thu, Aug 21, 1997 (12:35). 3 lines. Hello Valerie, sorry about voltage and socket (DIN EURO). But IMO we can get one for 110 V & standard American plug. Regards AW. ---------- (29) #6 Misti Anslin Tucker (mta) Thu, Aug 21, 1997 (16:10). 2 lines. Yow, I knew I should have made time while my cryptic notes still made some sense. Sorry, Valerie and Dan and Steve. ---------- (29) #7 Steve Gibbard (scg) Fri, Aug 22, 1997 (00:43). 2 lines. Power problems won't cause phone line problems. Phone lines get their power from a comletely different source. ---------- (29) #8 Klaus (n8nxf) Fri, Aug 22, 1997 (11:45). 5 lines. Power conditioners are resonant devices. i.e. frequency is as important, if not more important, than voltage. Changing taps on the transformer inside the conditioner will solve the the voltage problem. However, changing a 50 Hz unit (Europe) to 60 Hz (USA) requires changing out expensive capacitors. Be warned! ---------- (29) #9 Marcus D. Watts (mdw) Fri, Aug 22, 1997 (15:53). 5 lines. Actually, noisy power lines *can* cause problems with modems. The analog coponents in the power supply definitely need clean DC, and if the AC power is too wild (or if the modem maker has been a bit too cheap in the power supply section), reliable modem operation will definitely be compromised. ---------- (29) #10 Mark A. Conger (aruba) Mon, Aug 25, 1997 (16:34). 8 lines. The command to check on the auction status is "query", and it can be run from any UNIX prompt, not just within the auction conference. I also reported some numbers in the Treasurer's report; they can be found in the July and June Treasurer's reports. I also circulated a summary of our finances for the first 6 months of this year, comnpared with the first 6 months of last year. I guess I should post that online, when I get back home.