March Meeting Minutes

We raised $44 at the meeting which brings our current balance
in the tresuary up to $331.84.

Per our agreement with Nugent Telecomunications (Jay Nugent),
it is about time time we start to pay for our server co-location.
<Discussion>
When Ray Mclaughlin (President) made mention of this at the 3/12/2005
meeting there was some question raised as to why we should be 
paying for our bandwidth.  Although this question has been raised 
before it is worth raising again so that it may be addressed. 
The short answer is "reliablilty". Unlike most LUGs that I (Ray) 
know of, we are not a student organization at any particular school, 
and so do not have any particular "entitlement", for want of a better 
word, to any institution's facilities.  Our last several server 
locations were dependant on the connections and favors of various 
people. And as people come and go, so have gone their connections.

It was asked if we couldn't use some member's cable modem. As Michael 
Corral put it in reply to Gary Stahl's offer last December,
 >We've generally avoided having stuff (servers, meetings) in private
 >homes, for many good reasons. It's best to keep all that in as public a
 >place as possible.
(http://mdlug.org/pipermail/mdlug-admin/2004-December/000473.html)

Having said this I (Ray) must confess that, ironicly, Jay Nugent 
does operate Nugent Telecomunications out of his home. And so our 
server is, in fact, in his basement.  But he is not just some guy 
with a cabel modem. He is some guy with a T1 and ISDN to back it up, 
two different 1/2 Class-C netblocks, onsite DNS, and individual UPS 
on each server fed by a 3kw main UPS fed by a 4kw generator. He is, 
in short, a commercial service provider.  And further, as he is *not* 
an active MDLUG member, he's rather immune to the "politics" of the 
group that can make people change their minds about doing favors. 
</Discussion


Returning to our agreement with Jay, if we count Jan-Mar as our "free 
trial period", we ought to start paying him the $30/month in April.

Given the current state of our funds Ray proposes that Nugent 
Telecommunications be paid $270 by check, which would cover  the rest of 
this year, and leave $61.84 cash on hand in the fund (plus 70 cans of 
pop, several dozen beef sticks, and more candy bars than he cares to 
count right now.)


This would be on the advise and consent of the other officers, as well 
as the membership at large.


We had 16 members present at the meeting

Discussion ensued concerning our web hosting (see above) and other methods 
of fund raising.  It was decided to pass the hat at the meetings and look 
into pre-ordered sales of distro's at the meetings.

It was expressed and through general consenus agreed on that the facilities
offered at the theater were indeed excellent.  And that we should support 
the theater as much as possible during our meetings.  However we do still 
continue to look for other venues for a possible second meeting a month.

Mary is checking on a coffe shop in Detroit with a seprate meeting room and WIFI access

Ray is gathering contact information for local educational institutions