Minutes 03/18/09

Approved 04/15/09

The meeting was called to order by Chair Bill Tappan at 7 pm.

Bill Tappan, Pete Jones, Bob Young and Lucy Edwards were in attendance with guests Bob Holden and Ken Curley.

The minutes of the January meeting as amended were approved unanimously. 
[The February meeting was cancelled due to weather. >

Pete Jones gave the IT Status Report.  He has made progress solving most of the password issues he had found. He replaced the main hub in the mail room with a ProCurve switch which will improve the efficiency of the traffic on the network.  He asked Ken Curley what the plan had been for rewiring the town hall and Ken said the latest plan was to go wireless on the main floor rather than spend the money to rewire the building.

One recurring problem in the building had been very slow internet downloads for the last 5 years or so.  Pete discovered that the firewall had not been set to auto, but to a fixed setting, and once it was reset to auto, the speed of downloads was much improved.  He also enabled auto-updating for the server, which for some reason had been turned off a couple of years ago.  He replaced the UPS battery back-up on the server with one he got on sale at Office Depot's going out of business sale.

The back-up procedure was discussed, mostly to update Bob Holden, the new selectman.  Mr. Holden asked about the possibility of off-site back-ups to another server.  The assessing software could be backed up to Avitar's servers free, up to a certain amount of data.  The financial software company offers a service for back-up for a fee.

Pete found an invoice from Network Managers charging the town a monthly fee for "renting" anti-virus software.  Pete has put a free anti-virus software plus Microsoft Defender on the server and will install Defender on all the PCs as he works his way through checking and updating them.  He also set up Open DNS, a free service that provides malware filtering for networks.

Pete will set up a schedule to run cleaning tapes on the back-up tape machine.  At some point we will run out of space on the tapes we are now using as the amount of data increases.  We discussed several  options.  It is not a pressing problem right now, Pete will monitor.

We discussed the history of the servers in town hall and how when the migration from the old server took place, Active Directory, which controls who can do what on the network, was not set up.  When Pete has time he will look into what should be done with this.  Again, not urgent.

Bob Young asked about the status of the bill from Network Managers that the town contests.  Pete said he didn't know, nor did Ken, but we don't need them anymore, Pete has solved the problems that involved our possible need for their cooperation.  If they send a valid bill for services, the selectmen will consider it.

Pete did a test upgrade of the town website to the newest version of the software and it worked.  He recommends we do this now, it will take about a day to complete the migration.

Bill Tappan asked if we had considered using the website for paying taxes and getting tax bills.  We discussed the availability of having tax maps on line.  There is a service for this that the town had considered, run by Cartographics, but the price kept going up, and the town dropped the idea.  Pete says there is free or inexpensive software out there we could use to set up our own, but it of course would require someone to set it up and monitor it.

Bob Young said we need to add looking at what we want the website to do to the list of things we need to explore. This led to a discussion of what we should do the rest of the year.  We agreed that Pete should report in writing on the progress he is making fixing the town network and equipment, so that his reports don't take up the whole meeting.  Bill Tappan will send out a reminder e-mail with a list of things we might consider taking up this year, such as what the website should do, and we will add ideas and suggestions as a basis for meeting agendas.

The next meeting will be April 15th at 7 pm at Town Hall.

The meeting adjourned at 9 pm.

Respectfully submitted,
  Lucy Edwards