OCF Board of Directors Meeting of Apr 6 1994 minutes

The meeting was called to order at 6:20pm, present were: (Sorry, I have no idea who is on the board and who isn't)

David Shy (shyguy) Ari Zilka (ari, sm) Nevin Cheung (nevman) Steve Martino (marto) William Thompson (billy) Rune Stromsness (runes) Chris "NetBSD" Demetriou (cgd) Chris Williams (clw) ERic MeHlHaFF (mehlhaff) Tom Waung (twaung) Peter Norby (norby) Marco "When!?" Nicosia (marco)

General - Manager's report:

There was a small mixup on who was handling what aspects of
the donation stuff earlier this week, however it has all been
cleared up and tasks have been properly delegated.

Nevin has also arranged for payment of "Bob" (the 660 MB disk
sold to us by the CSUA) and for Keir to be reimbursed for a 
check that he wrote for the OCF to pay Marco who bought some
equipment a LONG time ago.

Nilay Patel has told Nevin that an IBM RS/6000 desk-top sized
server should arrive within the month. Sorry, we don't have
any more details than that right now...

Norby asked about the status of the very large server from IBM
that was to be donated, and Nevin replied that the status
of that machine is totally unknown at this time.

Site - Manager's report:

No accounts are being created right now - partially because the
disks are VERY full and partially because we have a very small
backlog of accounts to be created.

Mehlhaff quietly swapped Whirlwind's 660 MB disk and Typhoon's
330 MB disk last night, leaving a lot of stuff still to be done.
He also added a clone registry to Monsoon. All this stuff caused
a bit of a nuisance the next day, but has been ironed out now...

Ari: Since Monsoon is doing so much server like stuff (basically the
same stuff that Typhoon does) should it be running X and allowing
remote logins? Mehlhaff thinks that it'd be bad to disallow logins
since it is such a popular machine, but we didn't discuss it much
further than that.

Ethernet connections - Flemming Larsen (A DCNS wiring tech and 
basically cool guy) requested the labels of each of the ethernet
cables. Did he get a copy? Nobody is quite sure, especially since
the coordinator of this particular project is not at the meeting,
Kenji, who really needs to get in touch with all the right people.

General - Discussion:

Complaint - (I might have this wrong...) A UC employee out at the
Richmond Field station mailed a complaint to DrMicro, who forwarded
it to Vance Vaughn (head of CCS) who finally forwarded it down to
the OCF. The situation is something like this: A potential user came
down to the OCF at the beginning of the semester and had to wait for
15 minutes before he could get a staffer's attention. (That staffer
turned out to be Ari, who is the OCF's Site Manager) After all that
waiting, he was told that he couldn't get an account without some
sort of proper identificiation. Since he comes from the Richmond
Field Station, it's hard for him to get out here, so he was highly
irritated.

Marco pointed out that the potential user needn't have waited all
that time as it clearly says at the top of the account form (which
Marco happens to have written) that users cannot get an account
without proper ID. So... it's the user's fault that he waited for
so long, he could have just read the documentation and been off.
In fact, if he had read the OCF's on-line documentation, he would
have known to bring proper identification ahead of time.

Ari pointed out that this was at the beginning of the semester,
where a 15 minute wait is common - the staff and the cluster are
always WAY overloaded at the beginning of any semester!

Marco attempted to sum up, ``Basically, someone needs to write
this person a nice letter informing him of the huge resource
problem that we have and hope that he understands why we can't
provide the services that both he and we would like to provide!''

Staff - Ari claims to have a new idea in staff management (yay!)
that should make better use of OCF staff's resources. This mostly
involves splitting staff up into teams and putting them under a
team-leader's direction.

CGD wanted to know just how much staff resources the OCF currently
has, and was informed that a LOT of people are interested in helping
staff.

Marco thought that this type of project is one that should be attacked
in the summer when people have more time/less load so that we can be
organized at the beginning of next semester. Ari said that he'd like
to work on it now, since he's got the time. (He's withdrawn from
school!!!) Marco seemed satisfied with that and hopes to see results.

More random discussion ensued about staff, and we finally adjourned
the meeting at 6:48pm.