WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20160517

Venue Info

Meeting to be held at IBM Squirrel Hill at 7:30pm, Tuesday, May 17th, 2016.

Agenda

• Approve minutes of the April 19th board meeting.
• List your item here
• List your item here

Minutes

The regular meeting of the WPLUG Board of Directors was held at 7:30pm on May 17th, 2016 at IBM Squirrel Hill.

In attendance were:

• Vance Kochenderfer (Chair)
• Joe Prostko (Vice Chair) (by conference call)
• Terry Golightly (Treasurer) (by conference call)
• Pat Barron (Secretary)
• Justin Smith (Director at Large) (by conference call)

Not attending:

• (No directors were absent)

The meeting was called to order at 7:38pm.

The minutes of the previous (April 19th) board meeting were read. No changes or corrections were offered, and the minutes were adopted as read.

Reports of officers:

Chair: Nothing to report.

Vice chair: Continuing to post to social media about our events, will post tomorrow as a reminder for this weekend's event. Will follow up with the systems engineer he's been in contact with at his workplace with regard to doing a presentation, needs to get an opportunity to go to the facility where he is.

Secretary: WPLUG currently has 17 members. One membership is due to lapse in June, and that member has been notified.

Treasurer: Nothing has changed since last month's report, other than $30 expenditure to rent the Lakeshore Pavilion at North Park 8am to 11pm on August 20th for the WPLUG picnic.

Director at large: Nothing to report.

Reports of committees:

Program committee: We were able to reserve meeting space at the Wilkins School for this Sunday from 12:30pm to 7:00pm - we must double-check times with WSCC, because agreement states 2pm to 10:30pm, while our meeting is scheduled to begin at 1pm. Vance reviewed the rental agreement, there is an issue where the agreement requires a certificate of insurance which we do not have. Vance will confirm with WSCC if they will absolutely require this. WSCC offered the room for free, though it was felt that this was not fair to WSCC. WPLUG offered $50 for the room, WSCC countered with $25. Vance believes we should still send them $50. Justin believes this would be fair, but that we should be mindful of the organization's financial position as we rebuild the ranks of membership. Vance indicates we are doing better because we've basically cut our Linode bill in half, so we have more money available than we were used to having in the past. Justin wonders if we could pay the $25 rate that WSCC offered, and invest the other $25 in some Linux-related asset that WSCC could use. Vance reviewed that the reason we were offered the room free originally was due to our help in troubleshooting their WiFi, and the thing they need most is an equipment refresh which would be expensive, which might be more than the treasury could accommodate. Terry has a couple of Wi-Fi antennas that are much taller - perhaps we could buy some new antennas to improve their reception, though the walls are so thick it might not help. Vance says that the current access points there only do 802.11b/g so upgrading to access points adhering to the newer standards may improve connectivity, as they may be more directional. Vance moved to authorize Vance (as chair) to sign the agreement subject to negotiation of the insurance requirement, and also to authorize the treasurer to pay WSCC $50 for the use of the meeting space. The motion was adopted. Our August venue is reserved for the picnic. We need to start making plans in terms of setting up wiki page for picnic, planning who is bringing what, etc. We do have some money that we are able to spend on that event. We can take that up in earnest next month. We currently have no plans for June or July, Vance is trying to see if there's anyone we can recruit to speak; we should start trying to make contacts with people Vance doesn't know, and thinking of other possible events we could organize. We could follow up with the person who runs the microcomputer museum, as people found the big iron museum interesting. Please try to beat the bushes for any other talks or events. Justin asked if we've detected any common threads in conversations with people who've attended our recent events. Pat indicates that he didn't notice common threads in conversation, but the recent successful talks we hosted were all intermediate to advanced level presentations, rather than more beginner-level presentations. Justin might be able give a presentation during the week of June 7th (the 11th would be our normal meeting date), he will check his calendar to determine the possibilities.

Technology Committee: Vance hasn't had a chance to look into the swap issue much more, other than creating a cron job that logs vmstat statistics every 5 minutes. Swap usage seems to be monotonically increaseing. Pat summarized a discussion he had with a Unix kernel VM internals subject matter expert, and the results of his investigation of monitoring services - the net of that investigation is that there are third-party monitoring services available that have "free" plans, but the type of monitoring available from any of the services investigated under their "free" plans would not meet our current need. Vance says there is a daemon called "monit" that is flexible as far as what it monitors and what actions it takes. There was a brief discussion about John Lewis's suggestion to use Nagios, and other options investigated by Pat.

Marketing and Communications Committee: No report.

Investigating Committee: No report.

New business:

For this Sunday, Vance suggested it would be a good idea for us to try to have a pizza order or something to help attract some people, we should try to reestablish the refreshment fund to accommodate this. Vance is willing to contribute to this, as is Pat, and we can ask others who want to participate in the food order to chip in. Pat suggests we should scout out places to order from in advance. Terry says there is a Vocelli's nearby.

Terry asked about creating a page for people to know what to expect from the event and to allow them to list what they're working on. There is already a page on the wiki for this event, that could be used for this purpose.

Old business:

None

There being no further business, it was moved to adjourn the meeting. The motion was adopted. The meeting was adjourned at 8:44pm.