[Cadre-politics] status: control panel | bonuses | spam | virtual servers | sleep

[Dan MacNeil]

LDAP
CONTROL PANEL
CASH BONUSES (none)
SPAM BY US
SPAM TO US
VIRTUAL SERVERS (too much obedience)
SLEEP (related issues: frogs)

LDAP
John has the secondary LDAP server up and running, for more details see 
his blog [1]

[1] http://www.cpcs.umb.edu/vista/blog/john_miller/archives/001389.html

CONTROL PANEL
After a month of research Manny has recommended we go with ispman [2] I 
accepted his recommendation.

	[2] http://www.ispman.net/

The selection process, was: list all software libre control panels [3], 
narrow the list to the ones supporting an ldap backend and then pick the 
one with the best documentation and multiple server support.

	[3] http://wiki.debian.org/HostingControlPanels

When John finishes upgrading SpamAssassin, he and Manny will get the 
control panel going. For now Manny is working on a bunch of small well 
defined projects.

CASH BONUSES (none)

The board discussed paying some of our small surplus as cash bonuses.[4] 
The discussion didn't go as I wanted. In the short term this is 
annoying. Longer term it is good to have a real check on my power and 
some authority to rebel against. Medium term, yeah, some good points 
were made.

[4] 
http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2006-July/thread.html#224

Over-simplifying the clear and relatively short discussion, the board 
had some or all of these opinions. (a) We should ask cadre what 
motivated them, instead of assuming cash. (b) competition was bad. (c) 
Money is for rainy days, not bonuses.

SPAM BY US

Getting our mail delivered is becoming more of a problem.

In recent weeks, we spent a few days getting off Verizon's black list,

Right now, we're trying to get off the black list maintained by the 
Lowell Sun's anti-spam vendor.

A general problem is that everyone is  more willing to napalm bystanders 
to kill spam. The source of our particular problems is probably the fact 
that at least one of our users considered his message more important 
than the danger of getting everyone blacklisted.

People have a tendency to drag a message into their SPAM folder instead 
of telling somebody that they don't want the email. As a result we get 
blacklisted.

Beyond manual, wack-a-hole de-blacklisting, We don't have firm plans to 
fix this problem.

Some possibilities include SPF [5], modifying mailman to not allow 
people to add entries to their lists without confirmation, and replacing 
mailman with something that allows one-click unsubscribe.

  	[5] http://openspf.org/

SPAM TO US

At the same time, SPAM to our users is increasing.

An obvious strategy is to upgrade SpamAssassin from 3.0 to 3.1 which has
sa-update [6] for automatic upgrades of spam signatures.

[6] http://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.1.x/dist/doc/sa-update.html

John's spent a big but distracted chuck of the past 3 weeks trying to 
get a working duplicate of the main mail server setup so as to safely 
test the upgrade. --Obviously this points to a potential disaster 
recovery problem.

The current plan is to look carefully at the differences between 3.0 and 
3.1, checklist the upgrade and rollback if there are problems.

VIRTUAL SERVERS (too much obedience)

Matt's sick truck has required his attention. Between the truck and the 
holiday, he's not logged as many hours as in past weeks. Progress is 
merely solid this week.

Rob should have some hardware recommendations for the new server soon.

One mistake I made was to idly suggest looking at User Mode Linux [7], 
with the vague thought that we might someday run per domain virtual 
servers. A disadvantage of xen is that if you have 10 servers running 10 
copies of apache, each copy takes memory.

	[7] http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

Rob & Matt plunged into testing UML which is a bit of a surprise since 
people usually ignore my whims. After some conversation and 
documentation checking, We (Matt) figured that UML didn't have a lower 
memory footprint and got back to work check-list-ifying xen.

SLEEP (related issues:frogs)

Every is back to more or less sleeping at night and working in the day.

Some sort of flu has cut into John's sleep, Friday he was heading out to 
the Lowell walk-in.

I've continued to improve my score at getting to sleep at a reasonable 
hour, when the weekend hit, I spent only a few extra hours catching up.

Manny's getting an appointment to have his sleep monitored overnight. 
His deviated septum is probably treatable without surgery.

As the sleep situation improves, a lot of other efficencies become 
possible.

Sitting at the computer  and reading fiction at night keep me awake past 
bed-time, so I've been reading non-fiction.

Last week I spent a bit more than an hour on the book: "Eat that 
frog"[8], as the outline [9] suggests. It's hard to say how much the 
book has helped me in a week, but there problably is something to the 
idea that you should do your most important chore first.

[8] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583762027/102-5079950-2247338
[9] http://home.earthlink.net/~denmartin/etf.html