Minutes of 02/20/08

Approved 04/16/08

Meeting began at 7 pm. Present were Pete Jones, Ken Curley and Lucy Edwards.

The committee approved the minutes of the Dec. 5, 2007 meeting.

The committee reviewed the progress of the data backup process. Pete Jones had e-mailed Town Administrator Paul Martel and Office Assistant Kathy Todt Jan. 14th, with directions how to set up the grandfather/father/son system of backups.

Here is the text of that e-mail:

The Technology Committee has recommended a new backup procedure to the selectmen to be implemented in the town hall. It is called the "grandfather, father, son" system, and essentially it minimizes the potential loss of data over a longer period of time than the current system in use. It should be fairly simple to understand, and labeling the new tapes you should be receiving will help a lot. Nothing has to be changed on the server; no software settings, etc.

The idea is to take the twenty-one tapes, rotate them daily, and pull out one weekly tape (like the Friday tape) and one monthly tape for offsite storage.

Here is how it is done:

1. Label four tapes with the first four days of the week; Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
2. Label five tapes like this: Friday1, Friday2, Friday3, Friday4, Friday5.
3. Label twelve tapes with the names of the months; January, February, March, etc.
4. So the labels should pretty much explain what to do. The daily tapes just get used on their day, Monday on Monday, etc.
5. The Friday1 tape gets used on the first Friday of the month, the Friday2 on the second, etc. After a while you'll run out of sync with the actual Friday of the month, meaning for example, you'll be using the Friday3 tape on the first Friday since there are five tapes and sometimes only four Fridays in a month. This is not a problem.
6. On or about the first of each month you want to put the corresponding monthly tape in the tape drive. These tapes will need to be taken off site, maybe to the Library for safekeeping. Should the town hall disappear one day, we can always go to the library for the data.
7. All of the tapes should be stored in a fireproof safe/cabinet when they are not in the tape drive. They should not be left in the sun, near extreme heat, or near anything with a magnet in it like a speaker or radio.

As of Feb. 6th, all was going well with the new system, except there was no place in library that was fire proof for storing the monthly backups, and a request to the police department to see if they have such storage has not yet received a response.  Ken will follow up with Kathy and it was decided that there were sufficient funds in the budget to purchase a small fire proof safe for the library.  Once the backup system is working smoothly, it will be necessary to make sure that all the data is actually on the server, since that is what is being backed up, not any data that is stored only on an individual PC.

Ken gave an overview of the LAN (local area network) wiring project. When it was discussed it seemed that everything was getting lumped in with the LAN, cable, phone, power from the generator, and it was getting to be a very expensive project.  The committee feels that data transmission should be the issue, which would be the computer network and the cable TV and internet. It was suggested that if the cable TV and internet were included possibly the Cable Expendable Trust funds could be used.  The discussion turned to using a wireless network, which could be secured by a number of options, proximity, passwords, trusted machine access and encryption.

At this point the members did a survey in the main floor of town hall to see exactly what sort of routers, etc., were currently in use. The technologically savvy seemed to think that some of the network was probably worth keeping, and that perhaps using wireless in the old part and in the building department and maybe part of the selectmen’s office would work.  If there was wireless in the main hall, someone taking minutes on a laptop could save their work directly to the server, without having to take the laptop to a workstation dock and log in there.  This would be a much less expensive proposition than the $9000 estimate to rewire the town hall as a whole, and any expansion could have wireless included.

Pete reported that JTAN, our e-mail service, changed their SPAM filtering, and it has been very much improved, so the concern over SPAM filtering is no longer a compelling reason to change.  There is still the issue of e-mail storage, but Ken noted that the current law is unclear and has few teeth. There is also the issue of having someone other than Pete setting up e-mail accounts, JTAN is not user-friendly, while other services, like Google, are much easier.

Pete will ask Town Administrator Paul Martel for help finding out where staff put their data on the server, how do people organize their files, etc., so we can get an idea of how things are now, and how can we do a top down policy for data filing if that seems appropriate.

The meeting adjourned at 9:15.

Respectfully submitted,
 Lucy Edwards, Secretary