Subject: UCC General Meeting Minutes Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 18:15:00 +0800 X-Venue: loft@cameron-hall.gu.uwa.edu.au X-Present: [JEB] (James Bromberger - Pres.), David Luyer - VP, [NTU] (Nick Bannon - Sec.), [SD:] (Sophie Divliaev - OCM), [SAF] (Simon Fryer - Hardware Officer (HWO)), [TDH] (David Manchester - HWO), [MTL] (Mark Tearle), Evan Scott, Patrick Hew, Ian McKellar, Christopher Grubb, Paul Androszczuk, Robert Poulter, Leighton Heynes, Rick Grigsby, Simon Brayshaw, Arie Paap, Peter Wilsmore, [AJW] (Andrew Williams), Daniel Oi, Glenn Butcher, Alastair Irvine, [ECF] (John "West" McKenna), Lyn O'Brien-Lynch. X-Apologies: [DGC] (David Chinnery - Treasurer), [DAS] (Duncan Sargeant - OCM). President: [DGC] is unable to be here, but has provided a base agenda. UCC Camp: [SAF] reports that three possible places for accommodation in Pemberton are its youth hostel, a guest house, and the Pemberton Camp School. Ian McKellar can accommodate a small number of people on a property, in tents. [SD:] suggests that a good time for a camp could be during the break in the middle of semester 2. What To Do With Our Money: Mackerel upgrade is still going ahead. Jeff Miller (who is selling the boards in question) has said that he'll be able to give us exact pricing on Monday. Possibility of getting one or more of the recently advertised $450 Vaxstation 2000 X terminals. More SCSI disc space is another possibility. We are having some difficulty getting a suitable cable to connect ours Suns to any SCSI drives that we'd like to put on them - without one we can't make mackerel NFS serve any additional drives, so new drives would have to go into a PC. NFS on Linux is quite inefficient - by running NetBSD on a PC we'd get a much better NFS server than what marlin is currently. We may want some extra space if we wanted to host the OLGA archive as opposed to mirroring only. The main OLGA site shut down under threat of legal action by EMI - the maintainers are looking for a new host, and we could choose to be it. The maintenance requirements would be minimal as we could create accounts for the remote maintainers to use. It would, however, increase our international traffic costs substantially. We already have a hit on our OLGA mirror every 30-60 seconds. More disc space isn't urgent _yet_ - we can gain quite a lot of space with a little effort. As of a few weeks back, we have 1Gb or so completely free, albeit scattered amongst various drives. Our Debian 0.93R6 mirror (about 260MB) is to be deleted - there are other, more up to date, Debian mirrors in WA, and we can't afford the network traffic required to update from its home site. Buying memory would be good. The most useful amount and type would probably be 32MB of 72 pin SIMMs. This could be put into a new 486 motherboard. An ethernet hub. A "Delni" would be appropriate to our needs - not a switch, but a stupid AUI hub. It wouldn't require transceivers. Only actual computers can be connected to it, not routers. A secondhand one could be easy to find - there are many underutilised ones on campus. We do _not_ want a DECServer. They talk a proprietary protocol (LAT), and there are already a lot of them on campus, almost entirely unused. An Alpha. If we get one, we could put OSF/1 on it under the campus' site license. A decently fast one is currently too expensive for us. starfish can provide us with a fair bit of processing power currently, and it may become more reliable if we get a necessary file from SunOS 4.1.1 for it. ACTION: Luyer will speak to Carl to try and get the file. ACTION: [AJW] will see if he can get a SunOS 4.1.1 installation CD. A DAT drive for backup would be nice. A 40Gb one would be _very_ nice, not to mention completely outside our price range. The GCL one will not apparently be able to be repaired under warranty. A completely new machine to replace marlin as the main user machine. A new Pentium system would be of the order of $1500. marlin could then become a NetBSD machine, doing NFS serving only. Some guesstimates at some appropriate specifications: P-133, 16MB RAM, crap video and ethernet cards, 1 or 2GB HDD space. There's little advantage in paying for a good PCI Ethernet card, and a good video card will only encourage us to slag it by running an X server. Getting it with a SCSI interface and/or drives may or may not be worth the cost. EIDE drives will not be as movable as our current raft of SCSI drives, but they will be cheaper, and the interface will be effectively free. EIDE drives can be much faster than SCSI ones under current Linux kernels, but this may only be because the Linux SCSI drivers aren't good enough - yet. Getting a decent SCSI card down the track may be no more expensive than getting one now, or getting a motherboard with on-board SCSI, but it will mean that we aren't able to swap drives over to the new machine quickly. We could get a single 1GB drive, a single 2GB drive, or two drives for software striping (space on a logical disc is laid down alternately on two (or more) physical disc drives, almost doubling the rate at which files can be read from or written to). We may not _need_ to get two of exactly the same size of drive for striping to work, but we _really_ should, so as to give a chance of recovery if things go wrong. Consensus of the meeting was that we should follow the last plan - to get a new machine to replace marlin. Some club members would like us to investigate alternatives to Intel CPUs, too... ACTION: [TDH] will have a look at prices of a few systems. Power conservation: The last door group member out at night should organise to have screens and machines turned off where applicable. Specifically - turn off the dumb terminals and DOS boxes, in general, shutdown and turn off the Macs, turn the screens of the X terminals off, and possibly scully's base. Beige should be left on, as should mulder, which has a dodgy PSU which won't always allow it to be turned back on. Vending machine: Much progress has been made recently. Both the hardware and the 68HC11 software are close to ready, and the UNIX software should take about three hours' work for at least a basic interface. Frame-grabber: To be played with. Ian McKellar would like the crap docs that Luyer has. Machine Room: We need to buy some appropriate glue to attach the foam to the walls. One section of the roof needs attaching to the frame, and vents need to be fitted to close off the gap. A plank going length-ways may do. We will do without rebuilding the roof completely. LocalTalk should be rerouted through a hole into the machine room - or should it be left alone now that it's up? Some space filling aerosol foam to plug any gaps would be good. Cameron Hall loft: The Muslim Student's Association has been allocated the loft as prayer space. The main function will be at 1pm on Fridays, when they will invite a guest speaker, and have up to 60 people present. Groups of 6-7 students will use it several times a day during the week. Lack of leg-room: The UCC has gotten _extremely_ messy and crowded recently. A serious cleanup is in order - we can make an inventory and attempt to find some lost items (radio door bell, Adobe font pack for the NeXT, for example) in the process. Our Shenton Park storage space needs to have an inventory taken of it, and the space required by each item justified. A trip to it will be organised soon for this purpose - a couple of weeks from now, on a Saturday? Exact date and time TBA on the UCC list RSN. We will find out if the Powerhouse Museum are interested in Ben - which may be unlikely, but it _does_ take a lot of room in Shenton Park. We would be loathe to destroy it completely, but happy to donate it. Extracting it is a _major_ task, requiring careful planning, clearing a path through the Shenton Park warehouse, removal of quite a lot of partitioning, a lot of time, a forklift, and quite possibly oxy-acetylene gear... We will get rid of at least one Vax - minnow, our 11/730 in Shenton Park. It never actually ran anything but diagnostics, and that stopped when there was a head crash on the diagnostics disc... We could sell its 19" racks, and/or the Culler ones. Unsure about what to do with mullet - our 11/750. UCC Fridge: Has had a broken seal for a long time - frosts up at a rate of knots. Microwave: Would we like one? We can put it on blue-1 phase. [AJW] says that the previous one was rarely used, and eventually got stolen. Door group reviews: It was pointed out that removing members from door group in most cases does little to improve security. Games night: It seems likely that we will have one in three weeks - Friday the 17th of May. Confirmation will be posted to the UCC list. Next General Meeting: In about a month, we will consider whether we want another GM. Meeting closed: 7:20pm