Minutes/2020-06-05

Present: RL, JE, TM

Wiki

Bill Horne forwarded a message from Roman Racine with login credentials to the machine that was running the news and web servers on albasani.net; the machine had crashed but there is a (possibly non-working) disk image available to download. Bill, JE, and TM had all replied to Roman Racine to inform him about the new Board but so far the Board had received no answer. It was agreed to that TM would use the credentials to download the disk image for inspection and see if the MediaWiki database can be recovered.

Newsgroups

JE did a brief survey of newsgroups in the Big-8. There are currently 1992 newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy, with rec.* and comp.* having the greatest number of grousp, and humanities.* the least.

Misc

JE reported on his progress installing a news server: INN uses the system's GnuPG installation to verify the control messages. Since the keys we are using are so old that recent versions of GnuPG cannot process them, this probably means that nobody running an up-to-date news server is able to verify the official list of Big-8 groups.

Panix

RL reported that he was continuing to investigate STUMP, having installed it locally. The next step is to install local news and web servers for testing purposes. RL also attempted to subscribe to the STUMP mailing list; he received no confirmation but no bounce message either.

Future meetings

It was agreed to invite Todd M. McComb to the next Board meeting so that we can introduce each other. JE to get in touch with him to confirm his participation and, if necessary, to reschedule the meeting for a more mutually convenient time. TM gave advance notice that he may not be able to attend the regular Board meeting on 26 June due to a conflicting meeting.