Forest BB

Present: James, Pomme, Erika, Theresa, Daisy, Shannon, Swithun

Action room

The Action room will be worked on this week. The Dorkbot dudes might succeed in getting some electricity into the room, and the plan is to get some of the good kit from Infoseed upstairs Wednesday and Thursday. Come along in the afternoon Wed/Thur to help out.

Some things need to be sorted out. We could let people use the room for meetings if we meet them first and take a deposit. How much should the deposit be? The room could be open at other times if there is a volunteer in there to keep charge. The computers should be secured somehow. Getting locks is one thing, but the boxes need to be lockable. James will look at this. There will be a printer in there, so a way of preventing/limiting public access to it is needed. Swithun will look at printing quotas.

Crafts

Laura's craft sessions are about to start. Swithun will find out what is happening.

Buy Nothing Day

There are only 12 shopping days to Buy Nothing Day (24 November). Last year there was some good stuff happening on Princes St. Shannon will find out what is going on this year.

Tea for protesters

Blue suggested that it would be nice if the cafe gave out warm stuff to people who have been on demos. We thought that they could have the tea urn turned on, if they asked in advance.

Compost

Are we all go on Bills offer to compost our kitchen waste? I hope so.

Just to clarify the electricity situation:

There are sockets in the room which are wired up to each other in a ring.

This ring is not connected to either the consumer unit in the ground floor hallway, or to the one in the Infoseed room.

I cannot find any power cables coming out of the room that might connect to this ring. It may never have been connected to anything!

We can get power to the ring by running a cable from the consumer unit downstairs and using one of the spare breakers there.

However, if the ring is actually connected to some old wiring elsewhere then this could reconnect power to somewhere it's no longer supposed to go, like the old fuse box in the basement with the uber-retro china-insulated fuses.

Is there anyone who would know the history of the electrics in this room? If not then the only completely safe way to deal with it is to rewire all the sockets from scratch. We can't get to the existing wiring since it is behind the wooden panelling in the walls, which doesn't seem to be removable.

As well as chaining portable and expensive computers down. we need to lock the expensive computers shut. I've seen students open computers and steal RAM from inside before.

Clamps to lock round computer and other kind of case security - http://www.loxit.com/cpctower.htm#clx

Pack of big cable, lock, some brackets and strong glue -
http://www.securitycables.co.uk/com_security.htm
http://www.avanquest.co.uk/pcguardianan ... domes.html

This is basic research, we should look further to check prices.

This is also worth bearing in mind when we choose the table they go on - make sure theres a part we can chain things to.

In general, we have potentially the toughtest security problem ... locking physical access and locking software access, and stopping people hijacking connections (eg bypassing server print quotas by plugging straight into the printer). Have fun!

Dorkbot - should we run a network cable up there? I think this would be very good - some of the crappier computers Infoseed has won't do well with a wireless adapter, even if we had that many ...

Tom from Infoseed is going to come past and help set up all the computers. This is good.

There is already some cat5 running into the room. I haven't traced where it goes, was somewhat preoccupied with the power first.

We have moved all the Dorkbot stuff, and what we think is the best of the computer gear, up to the new room and placed it in the northeast corner. We have shoved the settlement's junk further into the south end so there is a clearer area to work with now.

There is a collection of extension leads by the door that allow power to be run in from the hall on a temporary basis, until someone gets some twin-and-earth cable to rewire all the sockets.