1. SSL certificates
It was decided to renew the certificate for tradeline.org.uk for a further year. As last year, it was thought that while some members may not actually need it now, at approximately £35, it would be better safe than sorry.
ACTION: David to renew with Geotrust.
2. Tidy up rules I.2 and II.2
It had been suggested on the list that these rules might conflict, but we decided they did not. If at any point we could not contact members to agree on a modification of I.2, we'd have bigger things to worry about than changing the rules.
3. Upgrading Alice
Bought in 2006, Alice now has a book value of zero. As noted last year, it is not reporting high resource usage (and we added more RAM this year) so we agreed it does not need upgrading. However, its age does raise the possibility of component failure. We should make sure we could replace such components if needed (eg power supply).
ACTION: JBB to post Alice's specs on the web site for reference and discuss these on the list to make sure we can replace components.
4. Tor payments as Club subsidy
JBB had earlier posted to the list about the possibility of the Club befitting from the recent announcement on the Tor mailing list that they can pay fast exit node operators. It was agreed that in common with other resources on Alice, any individual member's profit from operating a resource should be kept by them and not given to the Group.
5. New Members
Steve introduced prospective new member Constantin Mitron (although Constantin himself was absent due to illness). Steve has known Constantin as a work colleague since 2008. There were no objections to having a new member, so it was agreed to accept him (membership starting October 10th)
ACTION: Steve to give David Constantin's details. David to send him an invoice for subscription. JBB to set up his account on payment, and arrange all to welcome.
6. Setting a date for the next AGM
To avoid a last-minute scramble for the arrangement of an AGM date, it was agreed to set one in advance. We can always re-arrange nearer the time if this proves inconvenient.
ACTION: All to put September 21st 2014 in their diaries for the next AGM.7. Members' Subscription for 2014
Subscription to be £100 plus VAT (£120 incl.)
ACTION: David to send out invoices.
1. Amends to Rules
As part of a discussion about the Hatters Year date and payment of invoices, new joiners, etc. some amendments to the Club rules were agreed:
a) It was pointed out that the "60 day" provision in rule III.2 ("...meeting to take place not less than 60 days before the end of each Club Year...") has never been observed. We agree to delete this provision.
b) It was decided that rule I.19 ("Annual subscriptions will be payable 60 days before the end of the Club Year...") should be amended entirely to read "Annual subscriptions will be payable 30 days from date of invoice."
c) Rule I.6 to be better amended to "No moneys are refundable at any time or for any reason. An exception to this being on dissolution of the Club, whereupon any surplus funds left unused are to be returned to members equally."
ACTION: JBB to amend rules accordingly.
2. Money for hardware
We currently assume that the contingency fund of circa £1000 is enough to buy new hardware and keep a reasonable emergency fund available. Is this enough?
ACTION: JBB to start discussion/research on the list to answer this question.
3. Alternatives to L&C hosting
It has been suggested previously on the list that we periodically investigate alternative hosting, for example a cloud provider such as Amazon. Some investigation during the meeting showed that this would be too expensive given our current bandwidth use.
4. OS upgrades
It was noted that we will be running Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS until its end of life in April 2015, and since we know Alice cannot run KVM virtulalisation to help with future OS upgrades, we can give ourselves until the Ubuntu EOL to worry about this. However, this is only about 18 months away. Steve thought that paravirtialisation might help with the OS upgrade process by allowing us to test it before committing.
ACTION: Steve to investigate paravirtualisation.
5. FTP security risk
Steve pointed out a possible security risk is involved if anyone has FTP accounts to their home directories on Alice or Edith. This is because such accounts, if compromised, could have their SSH keys replaced and the attacker gain console (and thereby sudo) privs on the machine.
ACTION: Members to check they do not have FTP accounts configured in this way. JBB to add a check in createftp.sh
The meeting was then called to an end.