Editing WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20150421

== Venue Info ==
Meeting to be held at [[IBM Squirrel Hill]], located on the third floor of 1710 Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill at 7:30pm, Tuesday, April 21, 2014.

== Agenda ==
* Approve [[WPLUGBoard/Meeting-20150317#Minutes | minutes of March 17]] board meeting
* List your item here
* List your item here
* List your item here

== Minutes ==

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.

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 next 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.

[[Category:Meetings]]
[[Category:Board]]
[[Category:Agenda]]
[[Category:Minutes]]