Item 23. Minutes of the Board Meeting of April 19, 1994 John H. Remmers (remmers) Fri, Apr 22, 1994 (15:53). 193 lines, 0 responses. Minutes of April 19, 1994 0. Initializing gavel Board members present: Steve Weiss (srw) [chair] (arrived 8:40), John Remmers (remmers) [secretary], STeve Andre (steve), Rane Curl (rcurl), Mike Smerza (morel). Board members absent: Meg Geddes (meg), Dan Romanchik (danr) [treasurer]. Others present: Misti Anslin (mta), Charles Bullock (chas), Valerie Mates (popcorn), Carl Miller (carl), Mary Remmers (chelsea), Marcus Watts (mdw). Steve Weiss had announced that he would not arrive until about 8:30. In view of this and the lack of a quorum, it was decided, until such time as Steve arrived, to handle brief reports that would not require extensive discussion or board action. Remmers acted as chair and Carl took notes during this portion of the meeting. 1. Treasurer's report (danr) - as Dan was absent, there was no treasurer's report. 2. 501c3 Committee (rcurl) Rane is in the process of getting current forms and information. 3. Computer Rehabilitation Committee (rcurl) The press release has been sent to the Accounting Aid Society. There's been no response as yet. 4. Publicity committee (mta) Misti had not yet arrived, but STeve Andre remarked that inasmuch as there were 592 new accounts in March and 603 so far in April, mailing hardcopy brochures to all newusers for whom we have addresses, as has been the practice in the past, would no longer be practical. There was some discussion of how best to get brochures into the hands of people who need it. Ideas suggested included mailing brochures to new users who get as far as entering a response in Picospan; continuing to send brochures to people who connect through the local dial-in lines, to try to preserve a local emphasis; or making it as easy as possible to capture the information on-line via the user's capture buffer or local printer. 5. JCC Sale post mortem (popcorn) We cleared $600 from the sale, our best ever. Valerie added: "We had great volunteers. ITI is god." (The remainder of the meeting took place in the presence of a quorum, chaired by Steve Weiss.) 6. Technical committee report (steve) STeve Andre, Greg Cronau, and Ken Ascher have been attempting to set up a rendevous time to mount and test the Eagle disk formerly used on the Sun-2. So far a mutually convenient time slot has not been found. The donated 300mb SCSI disk has not yet been attached. It is not clear whether a new disk controller will be needed to utilize it. The hardware currently in use by Grex has proved remarkably stable. There have been only a couple of unscheduled reboots. Currently we have only one spare 8mb memory board to press into service should any of the four currently in use fail. This is not as comfortable a margin of safety as we would like. STeve has been looking into possible sources for a Sun SCSI-3 disk controller, and currently has a line on a possible one priced at $295, which he regards as a somewhat steep price. Such a controller may be needed for the SCSI disk we currently have and would definitely be necessary for any new SCSI disk that we might purchase. A bug in the PC route box software prevents Grex from talking to any internet host with an IP address of the form *.*.30.*. Rather than attempting to find and fix the bug, it may be preferable to consider other software solutions, such as a recent version of KA9Q. A task to be done before any Grex move is to mount the Eagle from the Sun-2 and get files off of it. 7. Disk quotas STeve Andre indicated that he felt disk quotas were necessary, due to the continual filling of user partition and excessive amounts of staff time being used in freeing up disk space manually, and to prevent individual users from inadvertently or maliciously running the system out of disk space. Further investigation is needed on exactly what options are allowed by the SunOS operating system and quota-management software (e.g. hard vs. soft quotas, warnings, etc.) STeve also indicated that with our present amount of disk, a quota of 2mb per user would be appropriate, with a sizeable increase when we have more disk. Whatever the default limit, exceptions could be made for individual users with needs for larger amounts of space. Mary expressed some concern that a staff-sanctioned default disk quota far in excess of what a typical user would require could be viewed as enabling inappropriate activities, such as the exchange by minors of GIFs with sexual content. There was concensus that membership status should not have a bearing on disk quotas or individual requests for changes in quota allocation. MOTION (srw, rcurl): Staff is authorized to implement disk quotas for the efficient management of disk space. Staff may allow increases in quotas of individual users for special needs. Space will be allocated without consideration of membership status. Users may appeal the decisions of staff to the Board. - PASSED unanimously (5-0-0) 8. Dungeon Issues STeve reported on the landlords' remodeling plans for the basement in which Grex is renting space and into which the Grex hardware will be moving. The new room being constructed for our use will be 10 square feet larger than the old one but will not have a window. We will have to provide fans for ventilation, but this will not be an expensive item. The issue is whether we should wait for the construction to be completed or move into the currently allocated space as soon as possible and then move the hardware to the new room when it is ready. After some discussion of the opposing viewpoints, concensus among those present emerged to schedule the move as soon as possible, and before the new construction is finished. MOTION (srw, remmers): To schedule the move for mid-May (changed from April 1). - PASSED unanimously (5-0-0) 9. Hypertext Committee (srw, carl) Lynx has been reinstalled with the "lynxexec" option enabled; this allows Unix commands to be executed from within lynx. Steve has prepared a "Grex activities" page that provides access to Picospan and other applications directly from lynx. The goal is to eventually make lynx a shell option to provide a friendly menu-style interface to Grex for users with vt100, ansi, or comparable terminal connections. Steve has entered an item in Coop to discuss this. A. Internet Access (all) Rane read a draft motion he had prepared authorizing the formation of a committee to formulate an internet access policy that would be presented to and voted on by the membership. Discussion focused on the relative merits of a traditional committee approach versus on-line discussion with participation open to all. Sentiment appeared to favor the latter approach with the reservation that on-line discussions often tend to unfocused and inconclusive. This might be overcome with appropriate "shepherding". With that in mind, the following motion was made. MOTION (rcurl, morel): A group will be appointed by the President to guide a conference discussion toward formulating an adaptable policy for access to Internet resources from Grex, for consideration by the membership. - PASSED by a vote of 4-0-1. FOR: morel, rcurl, remmers, steve AGAINST: (none) ABSTAINTED: srw B. Mailing Address change (morel) Mike Smerza, who has been listing agent for Cyberspace Communications since its inception, wishes to be relieved of that duty. There was some discussion of listing agent's duties and who might be an appropriate person. Rane will post some information that he has regarding listing agents. C. Guides Rob Henderson (robh) had requested that the appointment of "guides" (online helpers for users) be considered. As the hour was late and the demise of a quorum imminent, the item was postponed. D. New Business - none brought up. E. Terminating gavel The quorum vanished and de facto adjournment occurred at about 10:30 p.m. Respectfully submitted, John Remmers, secretary