Subject: UCC Committee Meeting Minutes
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 13:09:00 +0800
X-Venue: loft@cameron-hall.gu.uwa.edu.au
X-Present: [JEB] (James Bromberger - Pres.), [NTU] (Nick Bannon -
	Sec.), [DJL] (David Luyer - Vice Pres.), [DGC] (David Chinnery
	- Treas.), [SAF] (Simon Fryer - HWO), [K?Y] (Kym Yeap - Fresher
	Rep.), [SD:] (Sophie Divliaev - OCM), [TDH] (David Manchester
	- HWO), [MTL] (Mark Tearle), [YAK] (Ian McKellar), [MJH]
	(Mikolaj Habryn), [RNS] (Robert Slater), Leighton Heynes.

President's report: There was an auction on today, but nothing resulted
  due to a lack of signatories. All the Labtam X-terminals were
  apparently sold for $50 each - there are some NCD ones left, which will
  be investigated today.

  Several people trapsed off to the Computer Expo - amongst other things
  a few quotes were obtained, notably 16MB SIMMs from Dan Computers at
  $213 ex-tax.

New PC: Well, we said we'd start organising it today...

  RAM prices have been dropping like a stone - we should buy the RAM
  last, and aim for 2x32MB SIMMs.

  Buying a system (without a monitor) may be best - it may save some
  money, as well as allowing it to be checked by the vendor.

  [MJH] lives five minutes from Peter Lingley Enterprises...

  CPU should be a Cyrix P-166+, bought with a MB that it will definitely
  work with. Let's get one.

  [SAF] might be able to get some suitable bits of clear perspex for a
  kewl case.

  A Rhino-9 MB is $280 from City Business Machines. Comes with 256K
  cache, upgradable to 512K - but talking to an upgrade module may be
  slower than talking to onboard chips? Buy one.

Machine reports:
  mulloway: [ECF] (John West) is playing with its serial board.

  mackerel: A disturbing period between log-book entries given its
    unreliability and number of reboots (both deliberate and
    spontaneous)

  marlin: [JEB] is downloading new libraries for it.

  starfish: Nothing new. We have libraries for it.
    We could try booting off CD, and/or installing off NFS. We could
    try using Beige to NFS-export a CD.

    Everything on it will be recompiled.

    Luyer's producing a boot tape for it.

Wheel debate: A heap of discussion has gone on that should really have
  been on the UCC list. [DGC] will summarise and post it. Some may
  have been best suited for the committee alias.

  An influx of 6 possibles has been proposed, including Leighton, [YAK],
  [SAF] and David Basden.

  Motion: [JEB] be excommunicated from wheel for proposing a suid
    script.
  Result: 4 for, 3 against. (with only minor voting irregularities, such
    as non-committee people voting, etc) President vetoes motion. ::-)

  [SGD] (Terry van Heygen) become a webmaster?

  Should we use sudo (or other means...) to do specific jobs? or have
  a large wheel group instead? *nix doesn't really allow for more than
  two levels of access - root and everyone else.

Incoming mail:
  CRR: The Computer Resource Room has moved. What if Unigames got access
    to where it was, put furniture in, and allowed UCC members to use it
    when they weren't, via the joining door, which could be left open?
    We may not want it for ourselves - the machine room is OK. Unigames
    needn't leave valuable stuff in there.

General Business:
  [MJH]: Has a set of 6 Infomagic CDs (but no CD-ROM drive) which he'll
    leave in the toolbox for people to use.

  [RNS]: Has a friend in computer sales who we might get quotes off.

  Cygnus: They'd like an extra support officer who'd be paid $40 for
    each of 20-30 users/month, to go to their homes and set their
    machines up for 'Net access. An answering machine would be provided.

  [TDH]: Do we know how Beige's ROM monitor works?

  Batch FTP: [NTU] may toy with setting up a batch FTP/HTTP/etc. system
    sometime soon, where URLs can be submitted and their contents fetched
    semi-automatically, in a non-volume charged fashion.

  [JEB]: We're getting about FTP 47800 hits/month (about 2/minute) and
    16300 hits/month on our web site.
    ACTION: [JEB]: Work out what this costs us at 10 cents/meg.

  Ethernet transceiver: We need another one.

  Ethernet/case purchase: We now have lots of UTP cable ($30), 6 8-bit
    ethernet cards with software, BNC cables, T-pieces and terminators
    to suit ($30), and a SCSI case/PSU ($15).

Meeting closed: 1:53pm