Minutes/2025-03-21

Present: RL, MM, TM

• Administration
  • comp.lang.asm.x86
    • No response yet to RL's message to three volunteers asking for an update. RL pinged the volunteers again on 2025-02-21; awaiting a response.
  • news.groups.proposals
    • The group's signing key uses the e-mail address ngp-approval-key@ngp.big-8.org. Agreed to leave this as-is for now, as this is just an identifier. We can later consider adding a new identity with a new address, and/or upgrading to a GPGv2 key.
  • comp.compression.research
    • MM prepare a draft group removal RFD. RL and TM to review it.
  • Moderated groups without moderators
    • soc.genealogy.surnames.britain : no further update from volunteer
    • rec.humor.funny : TM wrote to Brad Templeton offering to help find volunteer moderators, and RL also posted about this in the 3rd RFD thread. Conversation ongoing.
    • RL reports that in the 3rd RFD thread, Ivan Shmakov has expressed interest in moderating some groups, preferably as part of a team.
  • soc.sexuality.general (non-functioning moderated group): Agreed to defer until mass deletion RFD is concluded.
  • news.admin.announce
    • RL to post an announcement about the new moderators to news.admin.announce, news.groups.proposals, and news.announce.newgroups.
• Infrastructure
  • MM has been doing further testing for the IPV6 downtime for our web and mail server. He will raise a ticket with Contabo if necessary.
  • Status of cron jobs for offsite backups: No further update from RL.
  • MM has implemented UCEProtect filtering on the mail server (which?)
  • MM noticed that some mails and bounce messages with mail.big-8.org in the sender address had been disappearing into the bit bucket. He has implemented a partial fix that at least redirects cron messages (sent to root) to the Board's e-mail account. MM to look into adding a mapping of mail.big-8.org to big-8.org addresses, or eliminating the use of mail.big-8.org as a sender address altogether.
  • cron error messages relating to our unused Nextcloud instance are now getting through; RL has disabled these messages while MM investigates disabling or uninstalling the instance.
  • MM has noticed that our mail/web server is doing searches on unqualified domain names, as if a search list had been set in /etc/resolv.conf, though there is no such line in that file. MM is continuing to investigate the cause.
• Software/funding
  • TM: No update yet on GPG signing best practices on Savannah
  • Thunderbird 128 contact deferred given Julien's comments on INN.
  • TM still to respond to Julien.
  • OTF IFF/NGI0/Sovereign Tech Fund: no further updates
• Misc
  • Paul Schleck proposals: no further progress.
  • BDCAM25: RL to prepare an outline/draft of the talk.