[Cadre-politics] status mon

[Dan MacNeil]

CASH FLOW
SERVER MONITORING
BOARD MEETING
LOWELLDEEDS
SLEEP
UTEC
IRS
OFFSITE BACKUP
SECONDARY LDAP SERVER

CASH FLOW

We've got $10,150.00 in other people's checks in the mail, but we have 
only $20 in the checking account.

I've asked the organizer's collaborative to float us the $200 for Matt, 
Rob & Manny's attendance at the conference[], worst comes to worst a 
board member has offered to loan us the money.

[] http://www.organizerscollaborative.org/

SERVER MONITORING

While Gregg Croteau has done a great job monitoring our servers:

	 "I'm so sorry to call you on the sabbath,
	  (no,no, go ahead take communion, I can hold)
	  ...but I didn't get any email between 3:00am
	  and 6:00am this morning. I was expecting
	  a message from Senator Kennedy's office
	  and I have a grant due in 10 minutes
	  could you look into it?"

...We'd like to leave him more time for baseball, the youth of Lowell 
and world peace.

Matt & Rob are almost done setting up mon installation. When something 
goes down, everyone will get an instant message, email will be sent and 
my and John's cell phone will vibrate.

To get the instant message thing working, Matt coded an extension to 
mon. (Which was easier than it sounds, but still very nifty)

BOARD MEETING

We had one. It was good. Check out the (unapproved) minutes[], The 
minutes may be easier to follow with a peek at the agenda.

[]http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2006-June/000192.html

[] http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2006-May/000166.html

LOWELLDEEDS

I'll post more detail on this project later in a separate message.

We cleared $6,400 which worked out to be $31/hour not the $45/hr we were 
expecting. This was more than fair as we billed more than we quoted.

SLEEP
Some serious backsliding here. Much of last week I walked around like a 
zombie. As the literature observes, I wasn't really aware of my lack of 
productivity. I did notice I was a bit grouchier than usual and a bit 
more willing to read slashdot. I feel bad as at last report I was doing 
ok w/ this. Today after church, I'm going to sleep on the beach.

John's been waking up around noon & getting his 8 in starting @ 2pm but 
seems to be getting enough sleep.

UTEC

Still waiting on UTEC people to get back with us on the outsourced 
exchange server config.

They are still waiting on me to get back to Gregg on his "it doesn't 
work" for the mailman / donor database script.

IRS
Thanks to Laura for spending last Saturday, answering the 9 pages of 
questions [] the IRS had for our 38 page application for 501c3 status. 
Bigger thanks for her relentless, but gentle! reminders to me to finish 
my piece. Thanks to Charlotte for being willing to help, though the 
Saturday schedules didn't match.


[]http://thecsl.org/sys/legal_and_tax/apply_501c3/1023_aug13_2005/2006-06_response_to_IRS_v2.doc

OFFSITE BACKUP

After quite a lot of Murphy's law, John got the server to store backups 
off site, to our downtown data closet. (top of my bedroom bookcase).It 
is nice to have this project finished.

Thanks also to Chuck, He started the whole backup-ninja thing.

So... right now have 3 different copies of 30 days worth of backups.

One of those backups is stored 1.2 miles away from rest of the servers, 
so even if the reactor blows up and north campus is a big radioactive 
hole in the ground, we're still ok.

SECONDARY LDAP SERVER

LDAP is where all our password and permission information is stored.

Close observers of downtime messages will notice that our single LDAP 
server is a weak link.

John's got a second server up in testing mode. We may run a caching copy 
of LDAP on each crucial server like we now do DNS or we may have a 
backup LDAP server.

There may be  timeout value to adjust but when the CS dept main LDAP 
server goes down, the secondary is so slow to respond as to be useless. 
My inclination is to go with the caching LDAP on each box w/ a stand 
alone LDAP server as a backup.