From Interlock Rochester Wiki

Officer Report 5/4/2010

Summary: This month was follow up on existing goals. The network setup is functionally complete and we’ll be following up on proper documentation and labeling. Frontier is continuing to cause us problems that I’m spending a lot of time on. Next steps will be to establish some member services on the network (LDAP, file share, virtual machines) and establish the inter-hackerspace Agora link.

Network: Infrastructure is just about complete at which time we’ll move on to providing services on the network. We received a donation of 9 blade server but none of them have hard drives. One of the future needs will be hard drives that fit into the bays of the systems.

Tasks Complete:

• Physical network drops
• Switch/router configuration
• Physical cable organization

Tasks Incomplete:

• Employ labeling system for jacks
• Replace pfsense with a lower power device
• Setup a more stable wireless solution

Internet: Frontier has not followed up on their promises to discount our bill and provide double the service. I have been actively nagging our Frontier rep until they do.

Policies: One of the tasks of the VP role is to draft policies of the corporation. The induction and deduction checklist is drafted on the wiki as well as an acceptable use policy. More policies will be drafted and eventually evaluated for approval by the general members.

Items Completed from last month:

• Add technical steps to induction and deduction checklist

• Finish installing network drops and configuring the switches on the network

Next Steps

• Provide a better technical documentation management system away from the discussion lists
• Pursue issue with Frontier and come to a conclusion
• Support final infrastructure changes

Officer Report 4/6/2010

Summary: The big items this month are related to networking and Internet. The physical and logical portions of the network are close to complete. We’ve received a lot of very important donations from members and non-members. Internet has been an issue trying to get the service that we’ve purchased. Overall, there are no major problems and we’re progressing quickly towards a great network setup.

Network: This month, members of the group have laid out the physical network, punched down jacks all around the space, helped coordinate purchasing of necessary parts, and started to lay out the framework for the network infrastructure. We received a lot of important donations related to the core networking. The current documentation for networking is on the wiki including subnet schemes and logical setup. [See Figure 1 and Figure 2]. There is private documentation that we’ll be storing in a yet to be determined location.

Network consists currently of a project, warzone, and production network. Project network is unmanaged but is connected to our main firewall to keep track of bandwidth and provide QoS if necessary. Warzone network is a dedicated info sec sandbox area. Production network supports the main services that Interlock provides to its members and guests. It’s sub-divided into servers, member wireless, member wired, and guest. Firewall rules are set up appropriately to restrict guest access.

Wireless access is provided to guests, members, and to the Warzone network. The member access point only supports 10 or 15 clients at one time so we’ll be replacing it with something that doesn’t have that restriction.

There is a new server donated to us that has ESXi on it. The hardware is good enough that we may be able to virtualize all necessary servers on it (ex. LDAP) without having to setup individual hardware. This will minimize power consumption. Web Site

Website is hosted under Dreamhost donated by Mark Manning. Interlock.org has the latest version of Wordpress as of 4/5/2010 as well as the latest plugins. The wiki is also hosted on Dreamhost (MediaWiki) and is the latest version. The wiki and Wordpress blog have had a few issues of spam but they’ve been easy to manage.

Mailing Lists We are using Google Groups to manage our 3 mailing lists: Interlock Rochester, Interlock Rochester Announce, and InterlockRocPrivate which is a director only mailing list. There have been only a few instances of spam on the mailing lists but not anything that’s a problem. There is some discussion about re-organizing the lists or going with a different software in the future but at this time, nothing has been officially planned.

Email Accounts Each user should have an email account hosted with Google Apps. We have 32 accounts and are allowed to have up to 50 accounts. This isn’t up to date so we’ll be updating the induction checklist to include this as new members join.

Internet We have functioning Internet access in the space provided by Frontier. The available download speed is only half of what our contract says we should have. Mark has had phone conversations every business day since 3/14 at 10:00am with the account rep to rectify the issue. Frontier has also had a billing mistake and over charged us. We have received quotes from Timewarner Cable to also provide service but continue to work with Frontier to either get the speed we requested or a cheaper rate.

Security We’ve installed an IP based webcam this month that has a dedicated line run back to the network rack. It hasn’t been configured at this point. The plan is to setup a closed circuit security system that monitors the door. No specific details of the software or configuration have been set yet.

Next Steps:

• Add technical steps to induction and deduction checklist
• Provide a better technical documentation management system away from the discussion lists (GIT)
• Pursue issue with Frontier and come to a conclusion
• Finish installing network drops and configuring the switches on the network

Long Term:

• Establish connection with Agora network
• Decide and setup member services (LDAP, file storage, VPN)
• Install better battery backups for the equipment
• Implement a security system

 

(omitted)

Figure 1. Physical network setup  (omitted)

Figure 1. Logical network setup.  NOTE: This is the proposed network setup and not necessarily the current one.  

See full report: media:VP_Report_04062010.docx