Minutes 01/21/09

Approved 03/18/09

Members present were Chair Bill Tappen, Selectmen's Representative Ken Curley, Secretary Lucy Edwards, Kevin Ash, Bob Young and Pete Jones, Technology Contractor.

The minutes of the November 2008 meeting were approved as written.

Kevin Ash informed the committee that he was voted in by BOS and sworn in as a member.

Bill Tappan told the group he would like to have an agenda for each meeting, and encouraged us to add items to it by e-mailing him.  He would like to try to make the meetings last about an hour.

Pete Jones presented the IT Contractor Report.  Two new hard drives were installed in server, the existing ones RAIDed together, and new hard drives are also mirrored.  The issue of running out of space is solved for quite some time.  One of the new hard drives proved to be defective and had to be exchanged.  Pete is keeping a log on the server to track history, location of information, etc., so that the information will be available to whoever is handling the networking services in the future.

Pete listed some things that need to be addressed.  He believes that Network Managers, the previous vendor, has passwords and other information, such as licenses and documentation.  The Town Administrator has asked them for that.  Network Managers claims that the town owes them money and they won't release the information until the bill is paid.  Since the only invoice they sent was actually for services to another town, Mr. Martel, our town administrator, is asking for billing documentation and will not pay until it is provided.  There is a question as to whether we actually owe them anything.

The Cisco firewall needs a password.  There is no reasonable way to reset it without a password, as far as Pete can tell.  This is a much more expensive firewall than we need, what it is doing for us could be done by a $50 firewall.  The tape back up software  has no license or documentation in town hall.  There is back up software in the server we could use. Mr. Martel is working on finding out more about the firewall.

Symantec anti-virus used on the server also has no license that Pete can find.  He installed a freeware software virus scan, Clam AV.  He also discovered that at the end of 2007 the auto update was shut off on the server.  The same thing was done for workstations some time before June 2008.  There is also a need to update to Microsoft Explorer 7.

A more serious problem is that the UPS battery backup is not communicating with the server. When the power goes off the UPS should be able to let the server know so that it can do a clean shut down.  Again, there is no documentation for this software in town hall. Bill Tappan suggested Pete contact Steve Roberts, the technology director at the school and see if they might have a copy of the software.

The tax records and assessing databases are set to back up onto server daily, as well as the finance administrator's files. An automatic defrag is set up now.  Pete says that most of this sort of housekeeping is now complete and he feels we are mostly out of emergency territory for now.  He is still not sure to what extent is Active Directory being used to handle the network.  This would control who gets to access what information.

Bill Tappan asked us to bring our ideas for strategy, goals and objectives for 2009 to the next meeting.
 Some suggestions are:

Pete: find out how Active Directory is currently set up.

Bob Young: look for some off site location to bring up the town network in case town hall destroyed.

Pete: need a back up power supply for the server, for less than $500 you could buy one of our servers on eBay for cannibalizing or as a back up.  He strongly feels we need some hardware redundancy.

Bob Young: needs from the ice storm - how about a joint meeting of cable advisory committee, school technology person, and this committee regarding communication and media.
  Also maybe look into a low power local AM radio.  (There was a lot of discussion about this.)
  Really need backup power system, several generators failed during the ice storm.  (Mr. Curley noted that two generators are among the items to be funded out of the emergency request to take money from surplus.)

 Bill Tappan: economic development committee? Chamber of Commerce?  A single town network for all departments including the schools. 
  Internships for Coe Brown students with Pete Jones?
  Sharing procurement between school and town.

The next meeting will be on Feb. 18th at 7 pm at Town Hall.

Respectfully submitted,
  Lucy Edwards