From zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au Wed Aug 6 20:28:53 2008 From: zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au (David Adam) Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2008 20:28:53 +0800 (WST) Subject: [ucc-announce] Scheduled downtime tomorrow around 10am Message-ID: Hi all, In order to increase the capacity of our main userbox and fileserver (Martello) we are putting an extra 2GB of RAM into it. This will mean that many UCC services will go away. In particular, with /away already down, most servers will stop accepting logins in a useful way, incoming mail will be stopped, user home directories and webspace will be unavailable, and the snack machine will stop working. The plan is to shut Martello down around 10am, and hopefully everything will be sorted out within half an hour or so. The plan is also to remove a dead hard drive from the disk array and install a SCSI card to allow us to restore some backups of /away and /services, so it might drag on a little bit. To stay up to date, join the IRC channel (#ucc on irc.ucc.asn.au) or watch our Twitter feed at https://twitter.com/ucc_status. Sorry for the late notice, and thanks for your understanding. David Adam UCC Wheel Member zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au From shmookey at ucc.asn.au Tue Aug 26 20:03:50 2008 From: shmookey at ucc.asn.au (Luke Williams) Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:03:50 +0800 (WST) Subject: [ucc-announce] New Clubroom Machines: Call for Donations Message-ID: Hi everyone, The UCC committee is looking to purchase five new PCs to replace some of the aging computers currently in use. As well as being much faster than the current collection of machines, they will also provide us with a clean slate on which to provide better support and standardised configurations, resulting in a better clubroom experience for everyone who uses UCC's computers. Committee has passed approval to spend $3325 on these new machines, of which not less than $2000 shall come from donations and other fundraising activities. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE BETTER MACHINES IN THE UCC CLUBROOM, PLEASE DONATE! We are already a quarter of the way there, with $500 of promised donations, and any amount you can afford will be greatly appreciated. If you would like to donate, add your name and the amount you would like to donate to the UCC wiki at http://wiki.ucc.asn.au.au/NewMachines and we'll come hunt you down when we reach the target amount. Alternatively, just reply to this email and let me know how much you want to contribute. The specifications for the new computers we are looking at are as follows (prices gathered from Austin/Netplus): $199 - Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 $49 - 2GB DDR2-667 RAM $72 - 500GB SATA HDD $200 - ATI Radeon 4850 512MB $50 - Mainboard $70 - Generic case/PSU $25 - DVD Burner Total - $665 These prices are subject to change and there is some flexibility in choice of brands. The current PCs that don't suck will be relegated to permanent Linux machines and the ones that do suck will be retired if no other use can be found for them. We are also developing a standard operating environment for building and installing new machines, and seek your input as users! If there is any software that you think should be installed by default on UCC machines, or have an opinion on how something should be configured, come have your say at http://wiki.ucc.asn.au/StandardOperatingEnvironment. Cheers, Luke Williams UCC President 2008 shmookey@