Item 45. Minutes from the 11/18/98 Grex Board of Directors Meeting Scott Helmke (scott) Fri, Nov 20, 1998 (17:26). 58 lines, 12 responses. In attendance were: Scott Helmke (scott, Secretary), Jan Wolter (janc, President), Mark Conger (aruba, Treasurer), Misti Tucker (mta, Board), STeve Andre' (steve), Valerie Mates (valerie, Board), Sindi Keesan (keesan), Steve Gibbard (scg, Board), Jennifer Kriegel (jiffer) 204 Initial Gavel Pounding - janc The meeting was gavelled to order at 7:53 pm. 212 Treasurer's Report - aruba a. $656 in,$586 out in Oct. November is a good month so far, 3 new members. b. Grex store no activity (how to get stuff sold? Scott will enter motd, mta will do Agora item. Jiffer showed up, will be taking stock to upcoming events). c. Auction data has been mostly reconstructed (from archive account getting nuked). Set up meeting w/ Accounting Aid Society for next week. Auction has more items to be entered. 46 Publicity Committee - mta a. Misti: nothing to report. Would be willing to design more flyers, if some people would volunteer to distribute them. b. STeve has been investigating what countries we get users from...we are global. c. Ann Arbor Observer will have an article in Dec. about Grex/M-net. d. Arborweb is still displaying Grex ad. 130 Technical Committee - staff a. Grex was rebooted today by Valerie, after 35 days up. Hardware has been very reliable. STeve may be able to buy spares at a *very* good price. b. Grex might need another disk soon. c. Scott has started on PPP for local dialins, may need some help w/ authentication from Grex. d. Valerie wrote a CGI script to display the list of members (Web display) e. Janc has picked up a heavy duty SCSI enclosure from n8nxf for Grex. 198 Money Market Accounts - aruba Some discussion occurred online. Would be good to get more return on savings, but more work to set up. Aruba needs to do some investigation (same bank would be good). Some concern about FDIC insurance, complexity, etc. 108 New Business - all Pumpkin cleaning? Need to get rid of old hardware. 4 Final Gavel Pounding - jan Meeting was closed at 8:59 pm. 12 responses total. ---------- (45) #1 Scott Helmke (scott) Fri, Nov 20, 1998 (17:27). 3 lines. Every month the Treasurer brings in a sheet of paper full of data, but it is just a printout of the already-posted report. How important is it to reprint all this stuff in the minutes? ---------- (45) #2 Misti Tucker (mta) Fri, Nov 20, 1998 (17:56). 1 line. I think a pointer to the item should suffice. ---------- (45) #3 David Cahill (dpc) Sat, Nov 21, 1998 (13:11). 1 line. What does "PPP for local dialins" mean? ---------- (45) #4 STeve Andre' (steve) Sat, Nov 21, 1998 (15:47). 7 lines. We think that it might be reasonable for people to connect to Grex via PPP as they would to their ISPs, such that you could have a graphical connection to Grex, as well as POP and some other things. This would mean that you'd be able to telnet to Grex from you r machine, use Netscape to use Backtalk for conferences, Eudora for mail, and all that. Net access to the rest of the net would be disabled, or be disabled for all but members. ---------- (45) #5 Valerie Mates (valerie) Sat, Nov 21, 1998 (20:20). 5 lines. Also, most Windows 95 (or 98) computers come with the software already installed to make a PPP connection, so many new users may find it easier to connect to Grex via PPP rather than learning how to use a terminal program. Right now I think we're losing potential new users because they don't know how *not* to make a PPP connection. ---------- (45) #6 STeve Andre' (steve) Sat, Nov 21, 1998 (23:55). 5 lines. I wouldn't have believed that a month ago, butI do now, after talking to some folks who I'd given some fliers to a couple of months ago, I see that there are indeed people out there who don't understand that there *can* be something other than what Windows does. ---------- (45) #7 Steve Gibbard (scg) Sat, Nov 21, 1998 (23:58). 3 lines. Although I would expect those who know how to establish a PPP connection to have an ISP account somewhere, in which case they don't need Grex's dial-up lines. ---------- (45) #8 John H. Remmers (remmers) Sun, Nov 22, 1998 (09:31). 3 lines. Our dialup lines might provide a cheaper alternative if their ISP account isn't for "unlimited hours". Also, they'd be free of net lag. I'd be interested in trying this and seeing how it works out. ---------- (45) #9 David Cahill (dpc) Mon, Nov 23, 1998 (09:49). 3 lines. I think this is a really *neat* idea! Sorry I drifted; I have a vague memory of this being discussed in an earlier item. Should we take this discussion there? ---------- (45) #10 Steven R. Weiss (srw) Sat, Nov 28, 1998 (01:55). 3 lines. I look forward to providing our email service to local users in such a way that the mail client runs on their own machine. This is a prerequisite for that. ---------- (45) #11 Joel N. Weber II (devnull) Thu, Dec 10, 1998 (04:42). 5 lines. The slirp program might work well if people find that getting the terminal server to support ppp is painful. Of course, I'm assuming that the terinal server provides perfect 8 bit clean connections, which might not be the case. If anyone can get an account, why is authentication necissary? ---------- (45) #12 John H. Remmers (remmers) Thu, Dec 10, 1998 (07:03). 1 line. Do you mean verification? It isn't, not for incoming connections.