March 2017 - PSDR - mailman.hamwan.org

VOTE: Gas Cans!
by Bart Kus 04 Mar '17

04 Mar '17

Hello, I would like to bring 40 gal of fuel up to Haystack tomorrow. To transport this, I'll need 8 5-gallon cans. I would like to leave half of these up at the site for easy re-fueling in the future without the need to drag a fresh gas can all the way up on a snowmobile. We're lucky to have a snow cat available tomorrow to do the heavy lifting. I'll buy these out of pocket tonight, and will keep the receipt for billing HamWAN later. Cost should be ~$160. These will be clearly marked as HamWAN assets for future re-use elsewhere if needed. --Bart

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Anybody with a snowmobile feel like making a Haystack run?
by Bart Kus 03 Mar '17

03 Mar '17

We've been burning tons of fuel there this winter. Need another resupply mission. I've got my sled in working order again, but don't wanna go up there alone. --Bart

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VOTE: Board Elections
by Nigel Vander Houwen 02 Mar '17

02 Mar '17

Hello Everyone, It’s been a year since our current board members were approved, so it’s time to revisit! As a quick recap for folks that haven’t been around, or need a reminder: Board member positions last for one year. Any supporting member is eligible to vote for board members. Any supporting member is eligible to run for a position on the board. There is no limit on the number of board members, so if you want to run and participate, you’re not taking a spot away from anyone else. There is a minimum number of 3 board members. Supporting members are those who have contributed at the Basic level ($20/mo) (or more) for the last 12 months. Voting is open for 7 days. Each board member is a separate “election”, IE you don’t have to choose one person to vote for, you choose Yay or Nay for all individuals. Please respond to the list with your votes, the list serves as our public records. Our current list of supporting members is as follows (the folks who are eligible to vote): Robert Salsgiver Benjamin Krueger Nigel Vander Houwen Ryan Turner Bartlomiej Kus Daniel Ransom Allen Johnson Clifton Gurlen Ian Finder Ryan Spott Mike Shirley Terence Chan Tim Osburn Cory Johnson In addition, we have a few folks that have made one time donations, or haven’t been on a recurring donation long enough to be a supporting member. Jim Hudspeth Francis Haugen David Yost Nick Austin I’d like to thank all of the above folks for supporting HamWAN and our ability to purchase gear to expand the network and provide services to users. We’ve been very fortunate in our ability to keep overhead low, so we can put as much as possible into things that directly improve the network. We’ve seen the last year bring a pile of great progress: A number of new Open Peering Policy users have joined us, using our network infrastructure to announce their 44-net networks to the internet. Capitol Peak was approved and brought online. Additional hardware for Gold was approved and brought online. We added a high resolution PTZ camera at our Baldi site with generous donations specifically for the camera. Rob has done some fantastic work bringing some hospitals online. We worked with our friends in Victoria BC to bring the Triangle site online We underwent a routine IRS audit that found no problems, and I’d really love to thank Cory for his efforts on this, and hope for his continued involvement on the board. We rebuilt the HamWAN.org <http://hamwan.org/> website from scratch, Bart and Tom put a huge amount of effort into this. Thanks guys! Our sister networks in Memphis and Tampa have both grown. We purchased our own ASN to improve our ability to help our sister networks get online via BGP, and released the borrowed one we had been using back to Threshold Communications, which had been generously letting us use it. They continue to support our Westin edge router, which we appreciate greatly. We purchased a number of locking equipment racks to help us install our gear securely at sites. We’ve purchased extra batteries to extend the runtime in case of a power outage at Baldi (yet to be installed). We’ve purchased and replaced a few failing modems over the year as well. We’ve had some repeaters get connected this year, and we’ve recently added an on-network DMR C-Bridge to support their efforts. As you can see, there’s a lot of forward progress over the last year, and there’s no end in sight. Which brings me to the bit about actually electing board members. For the last year, Bart Kus, Cory Johnson, Ryan Turner, and myself have acted as the board for HamWAN. I’ve confirmed with each of them that they’re willing to serve again this year if elected, so we’ll combine the votes for all four in one email thread. Cory Johnson - Cory has graciously handled HamWAN’s financial and legal filings and reports. I’m incredibly grateful for his efforts in general, and especially this year after completing our IRS audit. Thank you Cory! Ryan Turner - Ryan heads our sister network in Memphis, and has put a lot of effort into our automation, and outreach. Thank you Ryan! Bart Kus - Bart continues to put enormous effort into the physical aspects of the network, acquiring new sites, installing and maintaining them, as well as some software projects, as well as acting as an administrator for the Puget Sound network day to day. Thank you Bart! Nigel Vander Houwen - (me) I handle much of our contract work, and record keeping around technical aspects like LoAs, I serve as a day to day network administrator, and have helped deploy and maintain some of the on-network services, occasionally I manage to make a site visit with Bart to get things done, and I handle things like the email you’re reading now. Voting is open for Cory, Ryan, Bart, and myself for 7 days, after which the final results will be decided by the majority of votes cast. If any of the supporting members from above would like to participate on the board, please announce your intention on this list, and your 7 day voting period will end 7 days after your announcement. Duties are not time intensive, and mostly consist of being available for occasional calls to approve expenses, and assisting HamWAN in whichever other ways your time and/or skills/knowledge allow. Thank you all for reading this rather long email, and hope to serve for another great year with HamWAN. Nigel Vander Houwen

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Do we have any cloud / distributed storage experts?
by Bart Kus 28 Feb '17

28 Feb '17

Hello, Lately I've been working on network automation stuff for HamWAN, and I'm at the point where storage systems have to be dealt with. I'm wondering if anyone in the group has knowledge to provide some design feedback in distributed storage systems. Not from a "how to use it in AWS" perspective, but rather how to design them ground-up. Ideally we want a couple abstractions available network-wide: 1) A global DB (NoSQL should be fine, and Cassandra is looking possible for this) 2) A global FS (GlusterFS is in very early stages of being evaluated for this) Each of these has to have N-way redundancy where N is the # of sites we have, with each instance being capable of continuous operation even if it finds itself on its own network island for a while. Conflict resolution / merging when the network heals is a must. --Bart

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