[Linux-aus] Annual General Meeting 2011 Minutes

[Andrew Ruthven]

Hey,

A couple of the discussion topics tickled my interest so I've watched
the video, it would have been nice if more of a summary of each of the
discussion topics was included in the minutes.

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 10:11 +1100, Peter Lieverdink wrote:

> Mr Joshua Hesketh presented the treasurers report and interim financial
>  report. A special general meeting will be called to approve the
>  financial reports once they have been finalised.

Good to hear that the LCA2012 guys already had access to a bank account
before 2011 had even started.  I know that has been a major issue in
past years.  I cheated by opening a bank account in a different
country. :)

Minor clarification, in the financial records shown the .nz bank
accounts had a negative balance, they do in fact have positive balances.
When they were added to Xero they were defined with an opening balance
of $0.00, which was incorrect, and every withdrawal threw the Xero
balance further into the red.  We are reconciling the transactions in
Xero though and I hope to have this sorted soon.

> Mikal Stil asks whether LA should invest in some form of asset
>  tracking. Julien Goodwin adds that a wiki page will probably suffice.

At the end of LCA2010 I recorded the serial numbers of a couple of the
major items that Steve Walsh had missing from the asset list he has.  So
we certainly have a pretty good idea of what is in there pre-LCA2011.
Sticking this information on an LA wiki certainly sounds like a good
idea.  

I was told what kit was available to me early in 2009, and I in turn
provided the information of what kit I had to the 2011 team.

Unfortunately we had a bit of fail in not getting it onto a boat quickly
enough to send to 2011, but there were multiple points of failure that
occurred.  All topped off by the flooding which caused the ship to be
307'ed to Sydney the week before the conference didn't help either!

I'd recommend that the gear is sent as soon as possible to the next
destination (yes I realise this statement is amusing after the last
paragraph).  I would have found some of the items very useful in
preparation for LCA2010, and I'm sure the 2011 guys would have as well.
Especially the printers.  My poor little HP all-in-one got a hammering!
I've had to bake the main board in it twice now.[0]

It would also provide a lot more time to test things out using the kit
and see what, if anything, needs to be added to it.

> There is a question from the floor about IPv6 connectivity for LA
>  services.

The LCA2010 VM hosted on the LA infrastructure has had native IPv6
connectivity since July 2009.  I should have stuck a dancing turtle on
http://www.lca2010.org.nz !

The reason that the rest of the LA services aren't IPv6 enabled yet has
already been discussed.  But the transit and addressing is there, just
waiting to be setup.

> James Iseppi wonders whether LA should make use of cloud and related
>  infrastructure rather than owning physical hardware.

Just in response to the email that James sent to the list on Sunday
about his reasoning here.  I understand that the hosting is sponsored,
as was most of the hardware.  I don't think you can get much cheaper
than that!

Likewise there is 24x7 monitoring donated by a community member to alert
the LA admin team of outages or issues.  The response time from the
admins might not be instantaneous, but with a hosting service you
wouldn't have instantaneous responses either, and even then the hosting
company would typically only respond to hardware issues.

Also the idea of using the cloud is somewhat amusing given the topic of
one of the keynotes. ;)

Cheers!

[0] http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/48992#134

-- 
Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand
At home: andrew at etc.gen.nz |      linux.conf.au 2012 
                           | Come with us, Under the stars
                           | http://lcaunderthestars.org.au
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