Minutes

19 Feb 1998

February 19th, 6pm Present: Steve, Dennis, Tim, Wesley, Isaac, Ian, one guest Steve: Officers still needed. At the end of this meeting we’ll do more temporary nominations. Chicago trip still looks good. At last count I had about ten people who were interested. Remember, non-club members are welcome, just let me know. Final headcount is necessary to determine if extra vehicle(s) are needed. Tim: I’ll make calls to reserve the van. I believe 14-15 can be fit in it. Is there anything else? Everyone bring money. Bookstores, Museum of Science and Industry… Battletech is something like $11/person. Would be nice to have some non-videogame things for the girlfriends coming along… Steve: If anyone here has not been down to the lab, check it out. There are fifteen or so Compaqs moved there from somewhere else which replaced the old VT terminals, which will soon be running NT. They’re P-75’s with 40Mb RAM or something, so performance won’t be the best . For now, they have no keyboards, power cords or mice...because they still have 95 on them. They need work done on them, and Ken would appreciate some assistance installing them, getting Samba running, etc. Dennis and I got the NIC's working Monday. Great experience and opportunity for anyone with the time and inclination -- let me know so I can coordinate/schedule things w/Ken. And of course, Ken still has all his other projects on the burner, so feel free to volunteer for any and all. I'm trying to be in there Mondays and Wednesdays from 11am to whenever, and Dennis is joining me. Don't let good computers gather dust! As some of you may have noticed, we now have a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 machine on our LAN -- it has no daemons running, but it can FTP, telnet, run Netscape, etc. We will be installing more apps since it still has lots of wiggle room on the hard drive; if someone brings in a printer cable, we can hook up the Canon inkjet. One more different machine! On a related note, I organized the file cabinet so motherboards, daughtercards, etc., are all in the same place and easier to find -- with all the cases we have, folks are welcome to get more machines running. Let people know if you require any extra equipment; someone might be able to temporarily bring in a CD-ROM, or we can possibly allocate funds to purchase something. Ask fellow members, officers, etc. Tim: Two items on my agenda. Declan is not talking to me, I don't think he's interested. Shari Steele was interested once and may be again. We planned on Declan talking about Internet censorship; Shari being EFF's staff lawyer, she would probably concentrate on CDA and similar attempts at legislation. The lecture series I scheduled earlier ran into many problems because it was so close to the beginning of the year (and folks wouldn't get back with me), and we ended up focusing on coursepacks. Declan did help us out with the MIT mirror, so he's probably just too darn busy -- so I will refocus on Shari for now. Second, I want a tape drive in Yakko ASAP. We are tempting Murphy bigtime. All it takes is a blown superblock and we're done for. Steve: We're backed up through the T's, remember... I'll talk to Ken and see if he's managed to track down the problem with the backup script. Isaac: Maybe one of those drives that uses VHS tapes... Steve: Open to discussion. What kind? Iomega 4Gb? New, used? Tim: I trust new more at this point. Isaac: Memorex EIDE rewritable CD, 300 bucks? I have one at work. The only problem is they're quite new, and drivers might be a problem. Steve: Drivers would be the biggest issue. Tim: SCSI tape drive... Ian: Do we really want to add SCSI to the equation before the eventual new server to replace the existing Yakko? Tim: All you need is to recompile the kernel... um... yeah. (Burning CD's would require a standalone machine that wasn't running anything else, for fear of flaws in the burn process.) (EGA monitors to work with Lenny: Two out of three are fried as far as I can tell; the third we aren't sure about yet. D. Christian will try to bring in EGA cards/monitors.) [D. Christian arrives. Bow down!] Steve: Some backup definitely must be acquired. I like going with SCSI, so what media shall we choose? In theory, external SCSI devices could be run from hologram... [Full backups would take multiple CD's but incrementals can fit on one disk, and full ones don't need to be made that often. Rewritable is standard now, packet writing is not standard yet. CD's can be written to at least 1,000 times (according to the advertising...), cost about 25 bucks each if you buy one at a time. CD's are faster AND cheaper than tapes...] Steve: Looks like everyone likes CD's. Research on prices, compatibility, driver availability must now be done. We can also burn copies of Linux distributions... Christian: Wiley running NT would be a good bet to install the CD on -- more drivers available, and it's the fastest machine we have right now. Steve: SCSI card prices? Christian: Really good ones for 300, 2940UW's are 200-250. Steve: So include a price for the card in your research. Send all data to me... Tim: I'll talk to Ozz. Steve: And ASAP, we'll discuss all the data we receive. The drive should be new, the card may be refurbished since there are no moving parts. Dennis: We made an astounding $94 this week. Account is approximately $2900. Steve: Still two boxes of coursepacks left, and they still haven't had their first test yet, so we may yet still sell some. They're in the corner by the bottle return box. Elise was interested also, and Pietkowski would like to do this again; I'll speak with him about summer, but definitely fall and winter. The couch is in the office because someone came by and said we can't have it in the hall because it's a 'safety hazard'. As much as it's useful now, we're getting rid of it by the end of the week, so say goodbye... whoever takes it should wet-vacuum it to get rid of any lingering asbestos :) Any further business? Nay? It's a meeting. 6:50pm.

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Minutes