Open Computing Facility

Board of Directors

Minutes of the March 21, 1995 Meeting

Agenda


Attendance

Board Members Present:
(8 of the 16 members attended, not enough to achieve a 2/3'rds quorom.)
Others Present:
Members Absent:
(All on first consecutive absence and will be dropped from the Board if they miss the next meeting.)

The meeting was called to order at 7:15 pm in 120a Bechtel by Jennifer.

General Manager Report

Jennifer announced the OCF's budget request for next year would be discussed by the ASUC Senate Finance Committee the week after Spring Break and we should know their preliminary decision by April 7. After that we will have a chance to appeal before the final committee decision is put up before the ASUC Senate.

Jennifer also reported that she met with Katherine Hartsell, the campus sales representative, for Sun during a "walk-around" Sun reps held on campus last week. Ms. Hartsell asked for a list of serial numbers of the Sun 3 servers the OCF has to look into possible trade-ins for the OCF.

Jennifer then told the Board that another Sparc 2 was donated to the OCF last week, and she is working on getting an Apollo DN 4500 with a motherboard, keyboard, color monitor and disk controller (but no RAM or disk) donated. Also on the way are a donation of a pair of 300 Meg SCSI disks and possibly a Sun 4/300 and Sun 4/470 with a CD-ROM drive, 8mm tape drive, and 32 megs of RAM.

Site Manager Report

David Shih asked the Board if they intended to have the OCF Sparcs be a second site, or under his jurisdiction. The general feeling of the board members present was that since the Sparcs are mostly going to be supplementing and possibly integrating with the current site, we should leave them as part of it instead of splitting them off. David said he would then start implementing a proposal he had recieved from Ari to organize a group in charge of setting up the Sparcs soon.

EJC Report

Saar reported there was no EJC meeting for him to report on, and the next one was the week after Spring Break.

Election of New Board Members

Saar would like to be added to the Board, but since the Board did not have quorom at this meeting, we could not vote to add him.

Other Business & General Discussion

Tom reported that reregistration software was still under development and that they planned to have a beta version ready for testing before Spring Break so we could begin reregistration after Spring Break.

Jennifer was asked about the mail she had sent the BoD about ASUC Senate Bill 59 setting policies for the Eshleman Hall network. Jennifer said Senator Ryan Hamilton had offered to introduce a bill containing clarifications the OCF wanted. The board members expressed their concern over the portions giving the Executive Vice President "complete and unimpeded access" to all hardware connected to the network and the acceptable uses list, and how they relate to the OCF putting a machine in our Eshleman office.

Jennifer asked the board if there were any objections to deleting the bod-only@ocf mailing list, since the Board should have no secrets from interested users, except for issues too sensitive to discuss over e-mail anyway. No one had any objections.

Since the Board did not achieve quorom, decisions on changing the Electronic Voting Bylaws and setting Disk Usage Management Board policy were tabled until the next meeting. Even though we could not vote on setting a policy, the Board discussed the history of the D.U.M.B. Chris said the D.U.M.B. was originally charged with defining how it operates and maintaining a log of it's decisions for future members to use as precedents. However, no log exists, but certain things have been set via oral tradition, such as the requirement that D.U.M.B. members get quota waivers from the Board, the rule that quota waivers must be for a limited amount of disk space and time, and that quota waivers should be "for worthy projects that benefit the OCF" (although exactly what that means is unclear, and it is not absolutely required). Jennifer said she'd like to see these things written down, either by the D.U.M.B. or the Board.

Chris expressed concern over storing user's student ID's online during and after reregistration. Tom said they would be only accesible to staff members with root access and would not be stored in an easily accessible format, possibly even encrypted. Chris asked why we needed to keep the information anyway. Tom and Alan said that the information could be used to check student status more easily in the future, to help ensure students don't get multiple accounts, and to help find which student was the actual owner of an account when multiple students have the same name. Chris said he was not sure the benefits outweighed the risks of keeping senstive information on a system thousands of users have access to.

The meeting was closed at 8:23 pm. The next meeting will be Tuesday, April 4, 1995 in 120a Bechtel Hall at 7 pm.