srcf

Minutes SRCF committee meeting Thu Apr 27 2000 

Venue: Starbucks 

Present: 

	 Bob Dowling 
	 Martin Keegan 
	 Hanna Wallach 
	 Peter Clay 
	 Jock Busuttil 



1. Matters arising 

The minutes from the last meeting (Mon 16 April 2000) were confirmed. 

2. Review of the accounts 

Bob said that he had reviewed the accounts for the SRCF and that all
was in order. He asked the committee to explain its reasoning for the
removal of the membership fees. Since the accounts demonstrate that the
vast majority of our assets have been donated, and that the money
generated from membership fees was sitting largely untouched in a bank
account (apart from the outlay on the backup tapes that Matthew Vernon
bought), the change to the membership fees is justifiable. 

It was suggested that the remainder of the money directly from the
membership fees should be set aside for critical hardware failures
(such as a hard drive or memory failing) and not used to acquire new
kit. This should be done by soliciting donations from members. 

3. Members 

Jock raised the concern that, with the floodgates open after the
announcement that membership fees had been removed, the SRCF might be
unable to cope with the demand. It was pointed out that we can
currently host two hundred users on our disk, and that is on the
assumption that they all are completely filling their 100Mb quota. In
any case, we would have sufficient warning if we looked at buying a new
hard disk when the number of users reached 70-75% of our capacity. 

Jock proceeded to get his coat. 

Bob asked about the member registration procedures in place. We
currently have two stages of registration: 

     -- add2canon / addsoc - add entries to the canonical membership
     lists, then emails the information to the admins for account
     creation (executed by anyone) 
     -- customised adduser scripts that create the account and
     password which it then emails to the new user (executed by root).



Bob then pointed out the impact of the recent changes to the Data
Protection Act. For existing members (the 'transitional phase'), an
email must be sent out detailing what information is stored about them
electronically (in our case, not a great deal), what it is used for and
informing them that they need to explicitly opt out. For new members,
we must ask their explicit permission to store the same information (an
opt in situation). 

It was noted that two users had not received passwords because for some
reason, adduser.local was not executable. This has been rectified. 

4. AOB 

Societies syndicate: it was noted that they meet for the last time this
academic year in June. It was resolved that we would make an
application for capital to purchase necessary hardware and consumables
(hard drives, magnetic tapes, larger tape drive, new box, memory etc.) 

DNS stuff: we now have kern and snook.srcf.societies.cam.ac.uk. We need
to subsequently request www.srcf.societies.cam.ac.uk from the CS and
kern and snook.srcf.ucam.org from Ian Jackson. Care must be taken at
all stages NOT TO BREAK THE MAIL SYSTEM. 

Techlinks: it was noted that it would be nice to be privy to the
missives that the CS sends to departments who have techlinks. 

Root appointment: Jock is to be made root (qua Jock, not webmaster) so
that minor admin tasks can be carried out more quickly. 

Website indexing: Jock is to ask for kern to be added to the list of
sites indexed by the main university search engine
(http://www-search.cam.ac.uk/). 

Service wishlist: what kind of stuff should we be doing? 

     -- website hosting (which we do) 
     -- anonymous ftp (for download only) 
     -- email and mailing lists (which we do) 
     -- allowing users to add an interface to ldap service, integrated
     to exim, that MSIE and Netscape can make use of 
     -- thor-a-like services 
     -- self-signing SSL 
     -- becoming the top of the 'trust tree' whereby we offer key
     signing of all flavours. 



The meeting closed at 15:20.