The Mad Hatter Hotel, London. 2:30pm
JBB had totally forgotten to do this. Since some members said they'd use it if a certificate were in place, we resolved to buy one, and buy it from Jahingo.
Action: JBB and Stuart Clarke to do the deed.
All other matters from the last AGM have been dealt with.
Since we are not experiencing sustained slow-downs, and the issue of bandwidth use does not now seem to be as important as it once was, we agreed there was little we could do besides attempting to control rogue processes, from which we have occasionally suffered in the past.
We are also running two JVMs and servlet engines (Resin and Tomcat). We should retire Resin by shutting it down.
Action: JBB to look into a way of killing off/neutralising rogue processes.
Action: Steve to retire Resin.
Action: JBB to experiment by copying relevant mailman prefs over to Alice and see if a mirror can be created on lists.hatters.org.uk.
Action: JBB to also mirror the Hatters website, or at least the members contact pages, etc.
It was agreed that while Sendmail is indeed complex to the point of gibbering insanity, we didn't think it was causing us any problems, particularly as our use of the "quick scripts" and members config files make it reasonable to maintain.
It was noted that JBB has the two 9.1G disks removed from Edith, but if they are to be installed in Alice we will need to buy ribbon converters for them.
It was further noted that Alice has a single 9.1G drive that has been spinning for almost four years. The issue of converting Alice to RAID was therefore discussed. We decided that hardware RAID was preferable to software RAID, and that we could try RAID 5 with our 3 x 9.1G drives, thereby gaining a slight disk reading performance boost.
Action: JBB to research ribbon converters and RAID controller prices.
It was agreed that since Edith and Alice should be kept as similar as possible to ease migration of applications between boxes, then both must run the same distribution. It was resolved to park the issue until the next upgrade.
Since use of the automated update tool, Up2Date (similar to Microsoft's Auto Update) is free for a single machine, it was agreed to try this.
Action: Stuart to install and run Up2Date.
Action: JBB to subscribe to the RHN.
Members are however free to IP-wrap FTP accounts, since Pure-FTP allows this at user level.
Action: JBB to re-install portsentry and logcheck on Edith.
Action: JBB to extend to two months.
Stuart asked if we should be upgrading MySQL. No conclusion was reached.
Action: Stuart to investigate new versions of MySQL.
Action: Andy to put RAM in the post to unsuspecting IT master.
Jonathan then thanked all those in attendance and closed the meeting at 4:30pm