[Cadre-politics] status: drunken master

[Dan MacNeil]

DRUNKEN MASTER
501c3 TAX EXEMPT STATUS
GYM SLEEP
XEN
SPAM
FRED'S JOEL LINK
BUDGET MEETING
TIDYING
CONTROL PANEL
POWER

DRUNKEN MASTER
The August alumni and fellow traveler reunion had more high points than 
I have fingers to count them on. Chris Sacca shared some redhat gossip 
about RPM.

Cary introduced his new dog[1], a  Labradoodle [2] and also some 
accidental levity when I found myself lead to the wrong blind guy.(who 
lives in my building)

	[1] http://www.guidedog.org/Progserv/guidels.htm
	[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labradoodle

The high point of the evening was Josh Harding's drunken master [3] 
performance at foosball. [4] After three pints of dark alcohol rich 
beer, Josh simultaneously held a conversation with and defeated the 
three people playing against him.

	[3] http://www.lovehkfilm.com/reviews_2/drunken_master_2.htm
	[4] http://www.ehow.com/how_16974_play-foosball.html

In his spare time, Josh is also our BOD president. Perhaps our next 
president will be required to defeat Josh at foosball.

501c3 TAX EXEMPT STATUS
Mrs Smith said "I decided to take the chance and approve your 
application." A few days latter we got the official letter.

All the money people gave us this year is tax deductible.

We are eligible for more grants.

We get audited in three years.

GYM
It has been almost (2) weeks that most of us have been making it to the 
University's gym most of the time. For now, we're just doing laps. 
(never less than 4/5 of us in the office now)

Tomorrow, we will see a group personal trainer. She will access our 
physical condition. (more laps?) and train us.

The lab bought memberships for John, Kamala and I and paid for 15 
training sessions for everyone. The total was $700.

So far it has been worth it. I certainly don't have troubles sleeping at 
night.

XEN
Rob spent July researching servers. (His work study ran out so he's a 
pure volunteer, between his hours at CVS). He settled on a solid vendor. 
[5] and a decent quote. A feature of the vendor is that they test the 
server with the OS you will install. They did that. It took until 
Monday. It would take them 11 days to ship the system.

	[5] http://asacomputers.com/

Matt goes back to school the day after the system arrives. He's the Xen 
guy. Everyone else has other important projects. We've postponed the 
server purchase until Matt has a break from school or somebody else is 
free to take on a new project. By that time hardware will be cheaper and 
  better.

SPAM
John is finishing up our efforts to improve spam filtering. He's 
upgraded SPAMASSASSIN and added some new custom rules. This was harder 
to do right than it sounds. Pinning SA to the back-ports version of SA, 
was particularly deft.

With Manny's help, John's working a script to train the Spam filter on 
missed SPAM.

BUDGET MEETING
The meeting with cadre went well. John had the good suggestion that a 
future VISTA might be focused on fundraising. (duh!)

Our finances are at:

	http://thecsl.org/sys/finance.d/
	

TIDYING
Last Friday, I spent 5 hours cleaning up our system configuration. All 
the config files and scripts we've added are in CVS. Every night a 
script runs to compare the files in CVS to the ones on the systems.

CONTROL PANEL
It looks like setting up a control panel will be a huge effort. The 
control panel we selected [6] has some issues. For example the lead 
developer on the bug tracker said something like "the customer control 
panel is mildly broken and right now not maintained."

	[6] http://ispman.net/

POWER
We lost it a couple times. Once it was enough to drain the UPS, bring 
down csl-ldap-01 hard enough to corrupt the password database. The 
backup ldap server  was on a bad UPS and didn't come up right away.

The university's people were helpful. The contractor was not listening 
to the university people so we expressed our concerns directly.

Setting up the UPS monitoring daemons to do a clean shutdown is pretty 
close to the top of the priorities. This is the second time we've lost 
power as part of an upgrade.