[HCoop-Discuss] Sunday Board Meeting

[Clinton Ebadi]

Since no one else made an agenda for the Sunday board meeting during the
week I sketched out what I thought we agreed to vote upon or at least
discuss at <http://wiki.hcoop.net/IrcMeetings/20091108>. Naturally this
can all be adjusted at the meeting itself.

Unfortunately I stand a low chance of being able to make it to this
meeting. A few friends (they have instructed to me to note that two
attractive woman are involved) wished to go to a renaissance festival
Sunday and this is the only weekend other obligations allow any of us to
go. No one else can drive and so I would be ruining everyone else's
chance to go if I didn't. As such I just wanted to note my opinions on
the agenda items (but felt it would be best in an informal email rather
than on the wiki page itself).

For dues I think $7/month is reasonable no matter what we do so long as
we do not eliminate pledges. At peer1 with pledges this covers our
current costs and slightly more; migrating to a lower cost colo this
should work out to about $1/pledge/month to offset the cost of the new
hardware required to transition. Either puts us in a similarly stable
financial position.

I think that we should, however, set a moratorium on pledges at the
Feb/March dues reassessment. Right now we don't quite have enough
members to to support the ~$8 dues required to eliminate pledges, and I
think that it would also unnecessarily price some members out of the
hcoop. We only need 25ish more members to have $7 dues and, with a
modest capacity upgrade, this is a pretty feasible membership increase
within a quarter.

At this time I think maybe we need to scrap the plans to migrate for a
quarter or two. Given our options we can't really move to a comparable
datacenter (and I don't think we really want to accept a lower class
data center because the monentary savings are probably too small to
justify the availability cost) without spending *more* money, and really
Peer1 has not been terrible to us. At the same time I think we need to
keep our ourselves open to leaving Peer1 within a quarter or two
depending on circumstances then.

As such if we stay at Peer1 I think we might want to add a new AFS /
Database / Email super powerful workhorse machine to replace deleuze
(and decomissioning after transitioning services to hopper/new-machine
from deleuze). This would cost us a reasonable amount ($1100-1600
realistically) and give us dramatically more capacity which would
actually allow us to expand pretty significantly. We need to plan the
software side of a migration a bit more and so I think we should delay
deciding to purchase a new server for about a month (or just authorize
the purchase of a server whenever docelic/Adam/I are confident we can
get a new machine online within a couple of weeks).

I'll try to hop on IRC from my phone, but I recall service being pretty
spotty where I'll be, and I really can't promise I'll be able to do much
more than vote on things if I do manage to make it.

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