Minutes of Genesee Free-Net Board of Directors Meeting  
March 27, 2003.

Flint Area Convention and Visitors Bureau Board Room
Flint, MI

Officer Comments:

Treasurer

Kay presented the income/expense reports. She reports that the budget
looks good. Our year-to-date income is somewhat higher than budgeted.
Expenses are currently low, but will go up when our Merit bill gets
here.

Long distance costs came up, and an office policy against calling
members long distance was discussed, and the Board agreed that the
Office Committee has authority to relax this policy.

Garry moved that the report be accepted, Denny supported, and the
motion passed unanimously.

Web Site Committee

Garry presented the report from the Web site committee on Chad's
behalf.

Chad and Larry will meet soon to talk about the database. Larry
mentioned that the database is showing some inconsistencies, and they
will be discussed at this meeting.

Chad is reviewing a list of 300 links to local Web sites he received
from Mary Ann Chick-Whiteside, and will verify the links and add them
to our links section.

Currently, the Web server statistics software "wusage" is being tested
with an organizational account. There are still some minor problems,
but no trouble is expected resolving them. When this is working, we
should be able to make statistics available to other organizational
accounts.

The FTP server went briefly offline due to a username/password
dictionary attack originating in Argentina. A block was added to
prevent Argentinian computers from connecting to our FTP server, and
the problem went away. The FTP server is only used by members to
update Web sites, and we have no members regularly using computers in
Argentina, so problems aren't expected. No accounts were compromised
in the attack.

The Web server hard drive is having trouble. Scott Swedorski has
agreed to donate a 120GB hard drive to replace the problematic one.
As a side-effect, this will significantly increase the amount of
available space on the Web server.

Office Operations

Larry presented a report from the Office Committee. 

The office has had a lot of calls since mail blocking was turned on.
Users are having trouble telnetting in to clean up mail. There are
ongoing problems with Web mail.

The committee requested a policy decision on a spouse inheriting an
account after a GFN member dies. Larry moved that the Board adopt the
following policy: when a request is made to transfer an account to a
surviving spouse, Charters excepted, their account can stay active and keep the same
username, but the name on the account will need to be changed to the
surviving spouse, and they will need to sign a new copy of the
acceptable use policy. Marilyn seconded this motion, and it passed
unanimously.

The office committee also requested a policy decision on setup fees on
new accounts with old applications, which don't mention the setup
fees. The Board agreed that current policy is to charge setup fees
even if the user sends in an application that doesn't mention setup
fees, and that enough time had passed that we should stop honoring
these old applications.

Sol brought up an issue with some accounts from UM-Flint. They had
requested some special accounts in the past, and a previous board
resolution had allowed them for a $300 annual fee. They only needed
these accounts for 6 more months, and requested that we reduce our
annual fee because of this. Sol moved that we only charge them $150
for the 6 months, Marilyn supported the motion, and it passed
unanimously.

Denny mentioned that a phone with caller ID would be useful, and Scott
volunteered to bring in a spare caller ID unit from home. Denny also
suggested that the automated attendant built into the phone system
could be put to better use, and the Board informally agreed that the
Office Committee had the authority to make whatever changes they
thought best.

Technical Committee and System Administration:

Kenny presented a report from the technical committee. 

The quota system is working well.

Scott has finished work on the new RADIUS setup, which will allow
finer-grained control over the 2 hour time-limited accounts. Kenny
and Scott discussed plans for testing the new setup.

Kenny is currently testing SpamAssassin, for possible use by
subscribers on an opt-in basis. More information will be available at
the next meeting.

Scott discussed a statewide volunteer project that may make use of the
Free-Net's Web server, and the board members present at the meeting
informally agreed that it sounded like it would be fine.

Next Meeting:  April 25 at 5:15 pm at the Flint Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.  The marketing plan will be discussed at 5:00 pm