[wplug-board] WPLUG Board meeting May 19

[Vance Kochenderfer]

The regular meeting of the Board of Directors of the Western
Pennsylvania Linux Users Group will be held on Tuesday, May 19, 2015
at 7:30pm at the IBM Squirrel Hill office, located on the third floor
of 1710 Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

For more details or to add your own topics for discussion, see the wiki
page at <http://www.wplug.org/wiki/WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20150519>.

A draft of last month's minutes to be read and approved at this meeting
is provided below for your reference.  Thanks for preparing these, Pat.

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DRAFT Minutes for December 16, 2014

The regular meeting of the Board of Directors of the Western
Pennsylvania Linux Users Group was held on Tuesday, April 21st, 2015
at the IBM offices in Squirrel Hill, the regular presiding officer
being in the chair. All board members except for the secretary were
present. In the absence of the secretary, the treasurer recorded the
minutes of the meeting.

The meeting was called to order at 7:43pm.

The chair reported that he has not yet had the opportunity to visit
the bank with the treasurer to update our account signature card, and
that this task is still pending. He also reported that he has
contacted Nick Schembri about giving a talk at a future meeting, but
has not received a response yet.

The vice chair reported that we had very good turnout for the last
GUM, with 15 people in attendance and three new members joining,
bringing the current membership total up to 18 members. He also
reported that he has booked HackPittsburgh as the venue for the May
23 and June 27 meetings.

The treasurer reported that the group currently has $467.06 in the
checking account. Deposits totaling $120.00 were made in the month of
April. There was one debit in the amount of $12.50 (Linode hosting
and backup service fee). There was no change in the balance of the
refreshment fund since the last board meeting. There were no other
transactions since the last board meeting. The vice chair suggested
that we re-examine Linode's current fee structure to determine if
there would be a large enough discount for paying on an annual (or
longer) basis rather than monthly for it to make sense to do so.

The director at large reported that he has been continuing his
activities advocating for Linux in the local area, but that trying to
find people to connect with and events to participate in has been
challenging.

The chair (in his role as a member of the Technology Committee)
reported that the MySQL server on WPLUG.ORG crashed at 3:06am
yesterday, April 20th, due to a memory allocation failure. In the
course of investigating this outage, it was discovered that the index
of the wiki database was corrupted. This index was rebuilt this
morning. It was recommend that we consider setting up scripts to
monitor and possibly backup the MySQL databases, and also that we
determine the current size of the databases on the server and ensure
that the InnoDB buffer pool is configured appropriately. The chair
also noted that no further action has yet been taken with the
proposed member information portal.

The vice chair (in his role as a member of the Technology Committee)
reported that he will set up the "systat" tool on our VPS to monitor
it. He also would like to consider a strategy for doing additional
backups on the VPS.

There was some discussion about the existing Linode backup service
that we use on the VPS. It was noted that the backup service provided
by Linode is a server-level backup, and that it provides no means to
restore individual files from the backup - it is only possible to
restore the entire VPS back to the point in time when the backup was
created.

The treasurer (in his role as a member of the Technology Committee)
suggested that we could do ad-hoc backups of the MySQL databases into
the filesystem if it would be useful to do that - these ad-hoc
backups would themselves be backed up in the snapshot backups that
Linode is currently doing for us, and would be available to us in the
filesystem if they were needed for database maintenance or recovery
from problems. The vice chair suggested that such a system could be
set up to do this type of backup automatically via a cron job.

The chair noted that we still need to confirm a speaker for the May
23rd GUM. If Nick Schembri is not available (or amenable) to doing a
presentation of some type, the current plan would be to proceed with
the secretary's proposed follow-up presentation about copyright
issues, pending confirmation of the secretary's availability to do
this presentation.

Some discussion of the annual WPLUG picnic took place. After review
of the plausible dates for the picnic, the treasurer moved that the
picnic be held on August 8th, 2015. The motion was passed without
objection. Further discussion took place regarding potential venues
for the picnic. The last few picnics have been held at North Park,
and this will be the default venue if no other, more preferable,
venue is found. The treasurer agreed to do some research to see if
there are any other venues we should consider. The vice chair
indicated that he will make inquiries with the local Free and Almost
Free Meetup to investigate possible alternate locations as well. It
was agreed that further discussion of the picnic plans will be
deferred until the next board meeting.

There being no further business before the board at the time, the
treasurer moved that the meeting be adjourned. The director at large
seconded the motion, and the motion was passed without objection.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:10pm.

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Vance Kochenderfer
Secretary, Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group