UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-11-21
========================================
Attendance:
===========
Present:
--------
Committee:
 - [FVP] -- President
 - [THA] -- Vice-president
 - [CFE] -- Treasurer
 - [MPT] -- OCM
 - [CHB] -- OCM
 - [LCY] -- OCM
 - [GIR] -- Fresher Rep
Non-committee:
 - [NTU]
Late:
-----
 - [042]: 19:03
Mentioned:
----------
 - [TBB]
 - [DIE]
 - [ALI]
 - [BOB]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Meeting opened: 18:05
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-10-31
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- William Corbett of UniSFA is in contact with the charity from Charity Vigil
- Purchased [replacement heating element(s) for Anycubic 3D printer](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/362429981306)
    - Should arrive 2018-11-13
- Also bought some potentially useful [USB-C peripherals](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/142783643425)
- MOTD updated by [CHB]
- Checked the mail
    - Old habits die hard
	- Waiting for 3D printer parts & USB-C things
- Artemis LAN was fun
## Vice President's Report
 - Power supply bought
 	- Still in the machine room
 - Looked at monitors to buy
## Secretary's Report
 - Absent
## Treasurer's Report
Accounts:
	Guild: $2808.08
	Mastercard: $174.25
	Cheque: $6013.66
 - Guild grants aren't in
 - We'll get an email when they come in
*Ask whether Ed team, Soc team, Secretary or OCMs want to make a report*
 
## Fresher Rep's Report
 - Freshers are almost no longer Freshers
## OCM Report -- [CHB]
 - Ran Artemis LAN
   - Was good minus the technical difficulties
   - Events are easy to run!
## OCM Report -- [MPT]
- UWAnime Uncharity Vigil reps selected and added to group chat
    - Have submitted availability on whenisgood, awaiting other responses
 - Machines hate him
## OCM Report -- [LCY]
 - We need to actually send out the dumb terms that were bought
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
 - Actually work
## Network
- UWA IT is planning major core network upgrades on Sunday 2018-11-18 and Sunday 2018-12-09
    - IPv6 services will be impacted
    - Wheel is being kept updated with relevant info
	- External v6 is currently mostly broken
- AD has been broken since Monday, fixed thanks to [CFE] et al.
	- Roaming profiles are probably still borked
## Desktops
- Cobra has had more weird graphics card issues, apparently fixed by reseating
- Clownfish also had strange graphics card issues, started working again by itself
- Cichlid still needs the new power supply to be put in
## Misc.
- Outgoing emails from UCC may be marked as spam by UWA mailservers
- Clubroom port 14 (behind napoli/clownfish) is very dodgy but works with some cable wiggling
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- USB-C chargers
    - Have been placed in tool cupboard for now, should we put them out somewhere more obvious?
	- Reimburse $147.90 to [FVP]
- Power supply for Cichlid
	- Reimburse $94.00 to [THA]
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- Halloween subcommittee still has to decide what to do with the leftover stuff in the machine room.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- Letter for [GOZ]
- 1 membership form from [yautja]
## Guild/SOC
## Other Entities
Events
======
- Any thoughts about doing something for [WACTF](https://capture.tf/)?
	- Saturday-Sunday 1-2 December, held in Bankwest Place (Murray St, Perth)
	- Registration closes 24th November
	- [MPT] did this last year, says it was fun
## Uncharity Vigil - [CHB], [MPT]
- Whenisgood not done by some people
	- They know who they are
## Artemis LAN - [CHB]
- Reimburse for posters
	- $4.20 to [CHB]
		- [FVP] motions to reimburse
			- [CFE] seconds
			- 6-0-1
- Good turn out
- Probably should be run again
## Cameron Hall-oween - [FVP], [GIR]
- Wrapup meeting Thursday 22 November, 11:00
- [FVP] should check the amount that has been gotten by Square and EventBrite
## Anniversary Dinner
- Terminal sales
	- Actually give them out/get money for them
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-10-31
============================
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved. 
- [FVP] to make Square work
    - In progress
    - Nexus 5X from [THA] looks to be the best option for hardware
    - Square reader from [FVP] is $59
    - Peripherals: subject to testing, likely a bunch of cheap adapters from eBay
- [FVP] Purchase suitable USB-C chargers.
    - Done, arrived, labelled & engraved.
    - Would be nice to put something up so people know we have them.
- [FVP] Facilitate dicussion about new monitors.
	- **STOLEN** by [THA]
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door.
    - Done
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops.
- [THA] Get tampons for the first aid box.
	- Done by [LCY] and [042]
- [MPT] Look into clubroom stickers.
	- Looked up prices
	- 75¢ per
- [042] Look into shirts.
	- Sort of done
	- We need to think about colours
- [042] Look into the price of getting keys cut.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Door Applications
  - [ALI] Alistair Langton
	  - [THA] motions to add
		  - [LCY] seconds
		  - 6-0-1
	  - [ALI] to be added to door
- [FVP] Planning, documentation & handover (mostly handover) for events next semester
    - Open day
        - Write/update fresher guide
    - Start of semester events
        - Fresher welcome
    - Workshops & tech talks
        - [ATA] is likely available
        - [FVP] will be running some kind of Linux sysadmin workshops
        - [DOM] has expressed interest in running Unity tutorials
        - Suggest booking in tech talks for at least first 6 weeks of semester ASAP, can go in fresher guide
    - Weekly events
        - Vive nights
			- [GIR] and [MPT] would like to run them
        - Movie nights (possibly w/ UniSFA)
			- [FVP] to look into them
    - Camp
        - Camp Leschenaultia booked for 3 nights, Friday-Sunday 19-21st July 2019
        - Remind about installing eyelets when/if we confirm booking
		- Still waiting on other clubs to figure out if there's somewhere better to go
			- Woodman Point it a no -- we can't book it in time
			- UniGames is looking at something
			- [FVP] to look at things
	- Interclub events
		- Quiz night
			- [CHB] to look at handover
		- Charity vigil
			- Maybe ask [JAS] about a handover documents she's already written
			- [FVP] to forward handover document to Uncharity Vigil reps
		- Uncharity vigil
- Buy some useful USB peripherals - see the wish list
	- [042] arrives -- 19:03
    - [USB to Ethernet (100Mbps)](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/152165605842) - $6.19 each
    - [USB 3.0 to Gigabit ethernet](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/152165605842) - $12.79 each, RTL8153-based
    - USB-C hubs (see President's report)
	- Further discussion is required especially regarding hubs
	- [FVP] Motion to budget $30 to buy USB -> Ethernet adapters
		- [042] Seconds
		- 8-0-0
- Look into setting up committee-only password store for things that shouldn't be in uccpass
- Selling the Suns: who wants to do it?
	- [042] will look into it
- [FVP] Ping other computer clubs to make sure they still exist
    - COMSSA (Curtin), MITS (Murdoch), CASSA (ECU)
    - Can we do anything together? Any ideas for cross-club, cross-uni events in the next 18 months?
    - COMSSA has a server colocated in our machine room, are they actually still using it?
- Room closing checklist poster for door members.
- [FVP] Make eggman say things via dispense (with surcharge)
    - Is it a good idea? How much should it cost?
	- Bad idea
	- Maybe preset options would be alright
- [FVP] Buy a decent benchtop power supply
    - 0-30V 5A regulated power supply - [Jaycar](https://www.jaycar.com.au/0-to-30vdc-0-to-5a-regulated-power-supply/p/MP3840) $179 or [Altronics](https://www.altronics.com.au/p/m8305-powertran-30v-5a-regulated-bench-top-power-supply/) $189 (but possibly down to $155)
	- [BOB] recommends one of [these](https://core-electronics.com.au/rigol-dp-712-single-channel-dc-power-supply.html) for $515
		- Existing benchtop power supply probably just needs to be labelled, it can do fixed voltages fine
	- [0-30V/5A from Element14](https://au.element14.com/tenma/72-2690/bench-power-supply-1-ch-30v-5a/dp/256398201) for $112.84
	- Will be voted on in circular
- [FVP] Get a 10GbE card for Loveday
    - See [email to tech@](https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/tech/2018-November/005032.html)
    - Suggestion: budget $80 to buy a [Mellanox ConnectX-2 SFP+ PCIe card](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/192421526775)
	- Also [10GbE SFP+ direct connect cable](https://www.fs.com/au/products/30856.html) for $17 + $13 shipping/tax = $30
		- Or 2 [10GbE SFP+ generic transceiver](https://www.fs.com/au/products/74668.html) for $22 each + $16 shipping/tax = $60
	- [CFE] thinks might as well update Loveday instead -- maybe put it in Motsugo or buy two?
	- [FVP] motions $240 to buy two SFP+ cards and four SFP+ modules
		- [MPT] seconds
		- 8-0-0
- [333]: Finalise the winners of the glass terminal auction, and discuss the process for contacting them and arranging payment.
	- People can pay by bank transfer, dispense or square (if available)
		- If square, people will have to pay the surcharge
	- We need to make sure door knows about dispense payments
	- After payment is guaranteed, we can send the terms
- [333]: Chase up the original auction sheets from [CFE] with the unique item numbers to avoid any ambiguity (eg. member X won a VT320 - which VT320?)
- [FVP] motion to reimburse [DJF] $270.13 for snack run
	- [042] seconds
	- 8-0-0
- [FVP] motion to reimburse [TBB] $4.75 for paper towels
	- [CFE] seconds
	- 8-0-0
- [FVP] motions to budget $50 for two USB-C cables
	- [042] seconds
	- 8-0-0
  
Meeting closed at 19:45
  
Current Action Items
====================
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved
- [CFE] Do research for oscilliscopes
- [FVP] Send email to tech about AD stuff
- [FVP] Look at [yautja]'s membership application
- [FVP] Forward handover document to Uncharity Vigil reps
- [FVP] Purchase USB -> Ethernet adapters
- [FVP] Send emails to other computer clubs regarding their existence or lack thereof
- [MPT] Send email about WACTF and maybe make a Facebook event
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations
- [CHB] Make new fresher guide
- [042] Look into selling the Suns
- [LCY] Make door closing checklist poster
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 22:06 on 2018-11-21*

Ordinary General Meeting Agenda Tuesday 23rd October
====================================================
Committee after the meeting:
----------------------------
- [FVP] Felix von Perger    [President]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida    [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong           [Treasurer]
- [042] William Leyland     [Secretary]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman        [Fresher Rep]
- [CHB] Alden Bong          [OCM]
- [LCY] Lo Chien Yi         [OCM]
- [MPT] James Arcus         [OCM]
Attendance
----------
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt [Vice President]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger [Secretary]
- [LCY] Lo Chien Yi [OCM]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida [OCM]
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard [Ex-President]
- [MPT] James Arcus
- [SBL] Simon Lawrance
- [ACE] Alaura Evans
- [AVO] Aoibhinn O'Shea
- [BFG] Brett Fielding
- [ADL] Alistair Langton
- [LIB] Edward Kammann
- [DAS] Donald Sutherland
- [WAT] Mitchel Phillips
- [BDB] Bradan Beaver
- [LES] Tom Stevens
- [JOC] Jai Castle
- [DJF] Chris Forbes
- [TBB] Alfred Burgess
- [TFD] Timothy Davies
- [042] William Leyland
- [TAY] Taylor Home
## Late:
- [CFE] Zack Wong [Treasurer]
- [CHB] Alden Bong [OCM]
- [DIA] Nadia Wichmann
- [SPK] Sheldon Kristianopulos
- [JAS] Jasmine Sullivan
-------------------------------------------
*Meeting opened 14:09:26.*
Committee reports
=================
## President's Report
- The position of President is vacant.
## Vice President's Report
- Had the Anniversary Dinner on Saturday, surprisingly good attendance.
- Interesting new regulations.
## Secretary's Report
- Reports were pretty short last time, so I'd like to just say a few words.
- We've hit a few rough patches and people keep resigning but overall things are going reasonably well.
- Engagement and attendance at events has been relatively bad, hopefully we can try to fix that for next year.
- New regulations have been implemented since the last General Meeting, things should be a bit more clearly laid out now.
- It is possible (and has been for a while) to take card payments on behalf of UCC.
    - Ideally we don't have to deal with paper membership forms next year.
## Treasurer's Report
- Absent.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Absent.
## OCM Reports
### [THA]
- Long standing action item to print out spec cards for machines.
    - I'm pleased to announce that it's basically done, only thing left is to print the cards.
- Cichlid still has a dodgy PSU, will be replaced soon, pending confirmation.
### [CHB]
- Helped with Anniversary Dinner, think it went well.
### [LCY]
- Nothing to report.
Election of President
=====================
- Appointment of returning officers.
    - [JWB] I move to appoint [DAS] and [SBL] as returning officers.
        - Seconded.
        - Motion passes.
- [DAS] explains how the `n-1` voting works.
- Standing nominations:
    - [CHB] Alden Bong
    - [THA] Tom Almeida
    - [042] nominates himself.
        - Seconded.
    - [LIB] nominates [GOZ].
        - Seconded, declined.
    - [ADL] nominates [TAY].
        - Seconded, declined.
    - [LCY] nominates [FVP].
        - Seconded, accepted.
- Candidates give their speeches.
    - [CHB]
        - This year's committee didn't have much handover, want to make sure that future committees have a decent handover.
            - We already have a wiki page, want to set up emails to remind committee where to find other documentation.
        - [SPK] arrives 14:34
    - [THA]
        - Been a member of the club for just under 2 years, currently an OCM.
        - I've noticed that committee meetings tend to run off topic very easily.
        - As President I don't want to focus on a particular vision, I want to make sure that committee gets things done efficiently during meetings.
    - [042]
        - I'm here to provide an alternative if you don't want to vote for any of the other candidates.
        - I believe in stocking the fridge (with beef jerky), that's why I come to UCC.
        - I've heard the clubroom isn't the most welcoming space, want to talk about how to make it better.
        - If you hate everyone then vote for me.
    - [FVP]
        - I'm the current UCC secretary, been so since march.
        - Quite a bit of stuff I want to change:
            - UCC should be a place for students to further their interest in computer science and technology, we can do a better job
            - More techy events: tech talks, competitions, etc.
            - Want to engage the next generation of wheel members
            - We should spend some of the term deposit money to make cool things happen - discussion to be had as a committee.
        - I want to lead a committee which supports its members, especially door/wheel
        - I want UCC to be more involved in the Cameron Hall community, and do more collaborative events with other computing clubs on campus
        - Want to increase the diversity of the UCC memberbase, work with members to make clubroom more friendly and welcoming
- Questions.
    - [ACE] In a position of leadership, do you have any experience both mediating and with conflict resolution in both the context of within your committee and in larger organisations (such as interclub events)?
        - [CHB] Not much experience with conflict resolution. Everyone has things that they want, so I would focus on getting what intersects done and not push UCC's agenda too hard.
        - [THA] No experience mediating with other clubs. My conflict resolution strategy involves trying to obtain a balance, make sure everyone stays calm, figuring out what everyone wants so you can solve all the issues at hand.
        - [042] Not as much experience as I'd like, been working in hospitality a lot. Where people want different things you simply evaluate what best benefits the club's interests and then move forward with that.
        - [FVP] Not much experience with conflict resolution as such, would ask other people and the internet. I've had experience with interclub events, would like to run more if I get elected.
    - [TAY] Are you confident that you can deal with members who are being aggressive or bullying within the club spaces or online, and what specific things would you do?
        - [CHB] That behaviour is against the club objectives, this should be clearly communicated, if behaviour continues then steps can be taken according to regulations.
        - [THA] I'm pretty confident, most situations only ever escalate if both sides get heated and I can usually stay calm. I'd ask them to stop, if they don't then take appropriate measures (ie. removing from room / event venue), really depends on the situation.
        - [042] When it comes to conflict resolution, taking action is important. Suss it out, make sure everyone's happy. Clubs are about community, action should be taken against people who don't contribute to that community (ie. temporary clubroom bans, etc).
        - [FVP] I'd first try to talk to the person, ask them to behave appropriately, if not then follow regulations/procedures regarding dealing with that behaviour (ie. calling security, etc. depending on the situation).
    - [DJF] If you become President, will you run for the position again next year?
        - [CHB] Yes, to make sure the handover works.
        - [THA] Yes.
        - [042] I'd run, but for a lower position just to make sure handover goes smoothly.
        - [FVP] Yes.
    - [ACE] Are you in any other committees and would you run for another position in this committee if it became available?
        - [CHB] No and no.
        - [THA] Currently an OCM for Programming Competition Society (PCS), if [FVP] gets elected then I would most likely run for Secretary.
        - [042] Currently on Arts Union Subcommittee and as of next year an OCM for Music Students FacSoc, when I'm not elected President I'll run for any position that I get nominated for.
        - [FVP] No other committees, and depending on the positions that are available I might consider running for them (maybe even Secretary).
    - [DIA] Do you have experience dealing with being an incorporated body, and have you had experience with this outside of UCC?
        - [CHB] It should all be well documented, I have read a lot of documentation in the last few days.
        - [THA] I have read the rules for incorporated bodies, I wanted to make sure our recent regulation changes didn't involve stepping on people's toes.
        - [042] No idea what an incorporated body even is, let's leave it at that.
        - [FVP] I've had a look at how UCC works as an incorporated body, not much else.
    - [ADL] What do you think is the purpose of the funds of the club and how much do you think should be kept stored?
        - [CHB] I think room renovations are in order, that would remove some of the funds. We want to use the funds to fulfil our objectives, and fulfil as many of those objectives as we can.
            - Ideally we keep our funds so that our expenditure matches our revenue.
            - [TAY] Does that mean that things should remain approximately where they are now, or how much do you think should be kept?
                - [CHB] Probably it is a bit high at the moment, should level out over time.
        - [THA] It often feels a little cramped in the room, we will need to replace a few desktops over the next few years.
            - I don't see any need for frivolous spending, it's not bad that the club has a large amount of money in storage which can be used as an alternative source of income.
            - I don't mind if that amount goes up or down, so long as if it is being spent it is to further the club's objectives.
        - [042] Investments in old servers - no. All investments that we make should eventually break even.
        - [FVP] I think we have a very large amount of money, we should spend a reasonable portion of it in the next few years and aim spend most if not all of it within the next 10-15 years.
            - We can't do that all this year, but we can set precedent for spending money on things which are good for the club on a regular basis.
            - Absolute minimum after spending would be around the average for other Cameron Hall clubs.
                - [SBL] Clarification: that varies a lot, $4-10k, amount kept depends on what the club needs.
                - [THA] UCC probably needs more money than the other clubs, computers aren't cheap.
            - Based on my very vague estimations, I'd say we need to spend most of it.
                - [JWB] Do you have anything specific in mind, or are you just saying we are spending money for the sake of spending money?
                - [FVP] We're in an unusual position for a University club, we can do great things with the money if we plan things properly.
    - [ACE] In the scenario of finding important but poorly documented things, how would you approach this problem?
        - [CHB] There's an algorithm to do this online: google it, check forums/manuals, ask wheel members, someone probably knows about it, if not then try with the nearest similar thing and try again.
        - [THA] First I'd try to contact wheel members, then basically google it.
        - [042] I'd ask someone else to help and guide me through it so I can solve similar problems in the future. If all else fails, google and just trying to figure it out myself.
        - [FVP] Depending on the type of problem - for tech I'd start looking on the internet, manuals, asking the person who set it up. Procedural things - ask who set it up, ask how it works (contacting them by _any means necessary_) and then figure it out from there. 
- [JAS] arrives 14:47.
- Candidates leave the room.
- Candidates are called back into the room.
    - [DAS] Introducing the new President, Felix.
- Position of Secretary is now vacant.
Election of Secretary
=====================
- [TAY] Procedural motion to not require seconds.
    - Motion does not pass.
- Nominations for Secretary.
    - [ADL] nominates [042], seconded, accepted.
    - [LIB] nominates [FVP], seconded, declined.
    - [FVP] nominates [THA], seconded, accepted.
    - [ACE] nominates [ADL], seconded, declined.
    - [LCY] nominates [JWB], seconded, declined.
    - [FVP] nominates [LCY], seconded, refused.
- Speeches
    - [042] I can use a voice recorder, take minutes, text to speech is fun of course.
        - I've never done any secretarying before, not sure what the role is but I am keen to help out.
    - [THA] I can type at 130 words per minute with a mechanical keyboard, thank you.
- Questions
    - [DIA] Should we read out the role of Secretary... nope it's 7 dot points, never mind.
    - [TAY] Which forms of communication / social media are you comfortable using and what would you use?
        - [042] I'm comfortable with email, Discord, Facebook, etc and happy to "taylor" [sic] my communications to what is needed/wanted by other people.
        - [THA] I would use Facebook, Discord/IRC, email, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, mumble, text messages, etc.
    - [ACE] Are there any flaws in the current UCC communication system that you see?
        - [042] I don't know, have to make a decision later if I'm elected.
        - [THA] Holy f\*ck the mailing lists are broken.
- [SBL] Welcoming your new Secretary, [THA]!
- [SBL] Now we have one more election...
Election of OCM
===============
- Nominations
    - [TAY] nominates [042], seconded, accepted.
    - [ACE] nominates [MPT], seconded, accepted.
    - [DJF] nominates [JWB], seconded, declined.
    - [LIB] nominates [ACE], seconded, declined.
    - [JWB] nominates [TBB], seconded, declined.
    - [FVP] nominates [JAS], seconded, declined.
- Speeches
    - [DAS] Since [MPT] hasn't spoken yet...
    - [MPT]
        - Prior committee experience with Photography Club, not in Cameron Hall.
        - Interested in making UCC as good as it can be, and would like to see it come to its full potential.
    - [042] has nothing to add.
- Questions:
    - [JAS] Would you be interested in running for an exec position next year?
        - [MPT] Yes, I've got one more year at UWA.
        - [042] Yes. [see previous answer above]
    - [DIA] Are you on any other committees?
        - [MPT] I was OCM on the Photography Club committee, got elected as Vice President but that shouldn't impact on my time.
        - [042] (see above)
    - [TAY] Specific project or event that you would like to take on?
        - [MPT] Interested in helping get the room cleaned up, if money is being spent then I'd be keen to get involved.
        - [042] Just want to support committee and contribute to the general maintenance of the club.
- [DAS] Congratulate your new OCM, [MPT].
    - I believe our job here is done!
    - [SBL] goes and sits down.
- Returning officers return proceedings to the chair.
- Vice President resigns.
    - [SBL] Motion to accept [JWB]'s resignation.
        - Seconded.
        - Motion passes.
- *[JWB] leaves at 15:10.*
- The position of Vice President is now vacant.
Election of Vice President
==========================
- Nominations
    - [ACE] nominates [MPT], seconded, declined.
    - [TAY] nominates [THA], seconded, accepted.
    - [DJF] nominates [JWB], seconded, politely declined.
    - [FVP] nominates [DJF], seconded, declines.
    - [LIB] nominates [ADL], seconded, declines.
    - [TBB] nominates [FVP], seconded, declined.
    - [FVP] nominates [ACE], seconded, declined.
    - [TAY] nominates [GOZ], seconded, declined.
    - [CHB] and [CFE] arrive 15:13.
    - [DJF] nominates [CFE], seconded, declined.
    - [CHB] nominates [LCY], seconded, accepted.
- Speeches
    - [LCY] I have no intention of running for committee next year, I respect and like [FVP] but he has some slightly crazy ideas sometimes which need to be kept in check, which I can do.
        - Vote for me if I'm your last resort and don't trust anyone else to do that.
        - Won't be doing anything anything else otherwise.
    - [CHB] Can you keep [FVP] in check?
        - [THA] Yes.
        - [Will] Probably.
        - [LCY] Yes.
    - [TFD] Can you keep [FVP] in check as OCM?
        - [LCY] Yes, actually.
- Candidates leave the room.
- Candidates enter the room.
    - [DAS] Welcome your new Vice President, [THA].
        - [TAY] Also shortest serving Secretary!
- The position of Secretary is now vacant.
- *[MPT] leaves 15:20.*
"Election" of Secretary \#2
===========================
- [DIA] Now would be a good time to read out the constitutional duties of the Secretary.
        - [DAS] reads out the section of the constitution pertaining to the duties of the Secretary.
- Nominations
    - [DIA] nominates [042], seconded, accepted.
    - [ACE] nominates [TFD], seconded, denied.
    - [AVO] nominates [CHB], seconded, declined.
    - [THA] nominates [LCY], seconded, declined.
- [SBL] Since there is only one standing nomination, please welcome your new Secretary, [042]!
- [TAY] congratulates [CFE] on being the only remaining exec still in the original position.
General Business
================
- [JAS] In terms of updating the UCC constitution, it's hard for incorporated bodies - I have experience working with incorporated bodies so I can work with you.
    - [042] As the new secretary who has no idea what they are doing, I would be more than happy to work with you.
    - [JAS] I can help to make sure the constitution is compliant with legislation, I am on the governance subcommittee of an organisation which updates its constitution yearly.
    - [GOZ] Also consider we should probably rewrite the whole thing, UCC constitution is really old and crummy.
    - [DIA] Something I find quite creepy is the requirement to make member details available to other members -
        - [GOZ] That's actually part of the information required under law.
- [TAY] How are the new regulations going? Good, bad...?
    - [THA] Regarding the regulations which were installed a few weeks ago, there have been some complaints from wheel regarding committee overreaching its powers.
        - We will try to reach an amicable conclusion, possibly involving changing the regulations.
- [DJF] Can someone please fix the Linux computers so you can use Steam?
    - [GOZ] I've figured out how, I have no time!! 
- *Meeting closed at 15:31:23.*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by frekk at 18:48 on 2018-11-07*

 
UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-10-31
========================================
Attendance:
===========
Present:
--------
[FVP]
[THA]
[LCY]
[042]
[MTP]
[CFE]
[CHB]
Apologies:
----------
[GIR]
Meeting Opened at 1332
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-10-24
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- I can has (had) all the keys, put the extras in the safe. Need to go through and figure out who gets which ones.
- Cameron Hall-oween went well, see events
    - Multicoloured fairy lights lying on project bench were broken, so I fixed then and borrowed them. Still don't know to whom they belong.
- Square got its first proper test on Saturday, works really well and I (somehow) haven't managed to break it yet
## Vice President's Report
- Haven't got much done due to down internet
- Will complete after exams
## Secretary's Report
- Working on description for UCC to put in the tav.
## Treasurer's Report
- Cheque: $5046.53
- Mastercard: $286.74
- Guild: $2970.26
- Term Deposits are up for renewal
*Ask whether Ed team, Soc team, Secretary or OCMs want to make a report*
 
## OCM Reports
- Got added to a FB chat for uncharity vigil
	- They're still waiting for verything to be sorted out
- [LCY] Put paracetamol in the first aid kit
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Servers are good
- [FVP] has been working on a virtual-new-active-directory with success
- **He turned it off and on again**
## Network
- The UWA Network broke this morning at approx 1am
- Could be due to a power outage - Western Power could've affected a cable somewhere
- Network seems to be back up
## Desktops
- The mouse is being pretty average on corvo [LCY]
- [THA] bought a power supply for cichlid
- Start Menu doesn't work on 2 PCs - probably a profiles issue for [LCY] -  Christmas and Catfish
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- Fairy lights?
- Not ours - if they're still here in 6 months, they're ours
- Should we put fairy lights in common room, undecided.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- Beer and cider is not for sale, see events
- Will probably be done in the next couple of weeks
- [MPT] or [THA] may go for a drinks run
- [GIR] will be reimbursed soon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- [042] Hasn't checked the mail
## Guild/SOC
- Grants have been done
- Meeting isn't until next year
- Recent SOC email is being worked on by [042]
## Other Affairs
- **E N T I T I E S**
- Meeting was arranged with westpac tomorrow - ID Needed
Events
======
## Uncharity Vigil - [CHB], [MPT]
- Pending Sorting out
## Vive Nights [Cancelled]
## Artemis LAN - [CHB]
- Tuesday Evening November 20th
- Email relevant clubs
- Different places for each team planned
- Network needs further testing
- CSSC Will be invited
- [THA] or [GOZ] Will do pizza run
## Cameron Hall-oween - [FVP], [GIR]
- Was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone who helped out
- Leftover soft drinks and unopened alcohol (beer & cider) are being stored in the machine room, subcommittee will decide what to do with it
- UCC's Square account was used to take card payments at the bar during the event using [FVP]'s iPhone and Square reader, was rather useful.
    - Everything had 15c surcharge for card payments, enough to cover processing rates
- Total ticket sales via UCC: $20 (1 ticket)
- Total sales through Square: $118.70 (including surcharges), total revenue $116.38
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- Total 10 tickets sold via dispense
- Results of auction
- Post-event financial report
- Total Cost approx $1100
- Posters approx $6-67
- Profit: $1165.02
- Payments dispense/bank transfer, or square
- Was run at a profit, staff were friendly, venue was good. More pizza next time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-10-24
============================
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.	
	- Not Done
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
	- Not Done
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved.
	- Not Done
- [FVP] Find suitable USB-C chargers to purchase.
	- Found but not purchased
- [FVP] Investigate options for new monitors.
	- [FVP] Has found an option for new monitors but wants to put it up for discussion
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door.
	- Not Done
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
	- Not Done
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines.
	- Not Done
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops.
	- [GOZ] needs to discuss options  with [THA]
- [THA] Send email to tech@ and order power supply for Cichlid.
	- Ordered - Old one is still dodgy
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Term Deposits
	- Will discuss tommorrow
	- Probably renew
- USB-C chargers
    - [Huntkey 60W Type-C charger](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Huntkey-USB-Type-C-60W-Charger/142827078915) - $38.00 each on eBay, free postage from NSW
    - [LINDEN 60W USB C Notebook AC Power Adaptor](https://www.thegoodguys.com.au/linden-60w-usb-c-notebook-ac-power-adaptor-litc60w17) - $69.95 from The Good Guys
		- Favoured Option
		- Can be returned if not compatible
		- [FVP] is worried about plug type and grounding.
		- Two may be nessecary
    - [ALOGIC 60W USB-C wall charger w/ cable](https://www.ple.com.au/Products/632283/ALOGIC-60W-USB-C-Wall-Charger-w-USB-C-Charging-Cable) - $89.00 from PLE
	- EBAY somehow seems less dodgy than The Good Guys
	- Will get 2 from The Good Guys and then return if non-functional
	- [FVP] Motion to budget $150 to purchase 2 60 Watt USB C power adapters from The Good Guys
	- [THA] Seconded
	- Passed Unanimously
- Monitors
    - [ASUS VX24AH 1440p monitor](https://www.ple.com.au/Products/619569/ASUS-VX24AH-24-WQHD-5MS-IPS-LED-Monitor) - $339 from PLE
	-**[THA] Has opinions.**
- [FVP] Buy a Nokia 3 or 3.1 for app development and eventual use with Square
    - or buy a new Mac so we can make apps for [FVP]'s iPhone
    - Also buy a hard plastic case & screen protector
    - Device can be kept in the machine room under view of webcam for time being
    - Budget of $250 would suffice for either model w/ accessories
	- 3.1 Was released this year and has the latest android. Low end devices.
	- This is to ensure that handover goes smoothley.
	- [FVP] Has sent emails to tech app.
	- [FVP] Has done the research and looked into tablets
	- Nokia is currently the best known option.
	- Needs to be in good condition
	- Compatible with android 7
	- Up to [FVP]'s discretion
	- [THA] Motions to budget for a recent andrioid device and a square reader
	- [FVP] Seconds
	- Motion Passes
	- 5:0:2 -  For:Against:Abstain - This. Will. Be. Standard. From. Now.
- [FVP] UCC propaganda material
    - At least get some large-ish stickers with the logo
	-[MPT] Happy to look into it
    - Blank MIFARE Classic 1K cards with logo are also a possibility
	- [TBB] Says we may already have RFID cards
	- [042] Suggests mouse pads.
	- [THA] and [FVP] Want to get larger UCC mouse pads for the clubroom.
	- Are we putting spec cards in the mouse pads.
	- [LCY] Wants to look into it
	- [042] Will look into shirts
- [FVP] Thoughts about planning clubroom renovations
    - What are we aiming for (timing, [very] approx budget, scale of renovations)?
    - Where do we want to start & how do we engage people in the process?
	- [FVP] wants things broken into bite-sized-chunks
	- [CFE] wants room floor layout done.
	- [THA] Wants wiring considered - best possible networking, decent electrical
	- Heritage listing is not an issue.
	- Do the planning over the summer holidays
	- Resurfacing, Furniture, 
	- Make Project Bench more accessible
	- Moving the machine room, rearranging the couches and project bench
	- Look into temporary storage
	- Cleaning up/tidying up events and sale of unwanted items	
	- Look into a **roof**
- Keys
    - [FVP] Can we get more of them? esp for machine room
	- [042] Will look into how much gettings keys cut costs 
	- [MPT] Left 15.07
	- Only treasurer has a machine room key
- [THA] Wants to put tampons in the first aid kit
	- [LCY] wants a bigger first aid box
-Meeting closed at 1519
 
Current Action Items
====================
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.	
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentatio
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved. 
- [FVP] to investigate square  
- [FVP] Purchase suitable USB-C chargers.
- [FVP] Facilitate dicussion about new monitors.
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops.
- [THA] Get tampons for the first aid box.
- [MPT] Look into clubroom stickers.
- [042] Look into shirts.
- [042] Look into the price of getting keys cut.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [042] at 16:20 on 2018-10-31*

 
UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-10-24
========================================
-------------------------------
Meeting Opened: 1.10pm
Meeting Closed: 
-------------------------------
Attendance: 
===========
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [President]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [Vice President]
- [042] William Hazelnutt [Secretary]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [MPT] James Arcus       [OCM]
Present:
--------
Late:
-----
Apologies:
----------
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
Absent:
-------
Mentioned:
----------
========================================
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-10-17
- Minutes are confirmed.
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
 - Ouch. ("ha I'm not secretary any more").
 - Sock meeting had food. Felix is flexing.
## Vice President's Report
 - Now the most overpowered ocm that ever existed. 
 - Egotistical rant about his streamlined process to the top (haha I just rocked up and got sec).
## Secretary's Report
 - Nothing to report.
## Treasurer's Report
 - Absent
 
## Fresher Rep's Report
 - Freshers are alive and breathing (not confirmed). 
 - Confirmed that the freshers "we care about" are alive and breathing.
 - Drink's run. Zack Back attack.
## OCM Reports
- [CHB] Discovered that we own the Oculus Rift in the machine room, we should put that to use.
 - Felix knew we had an oculus. It's only a devkit. It does include the VR headset.
 - NPT: "Committees are fun."
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
 - [THA] isn't on wheel sad reaccs only.
 - [FVP]: Servers are Serving. There's a mysterious machine called gumball that's affecting the email DNS problem due to a misconfiguration.
## Network
 - To resolve the DNS we need to meet with Kelvin and guild. $10 says nothing will get done.
 - Have we gone through certificates for wifi?
 - It's written but hasn't been sent yet. 
 - Push people subscribing to a certain mailing list.
 - The certifcate for wifi has issues with CA certificate - [THA]'s looking into it.
## Desktops
 - Keyboards have been acting up during starcraft for CY - corey doras. It's a lit keyboard.
 - Tom noticed there's issues with either the display port or gpu in cobra - using software rendering.
 - Beanie bro left 1.23pm
## Misc.
 - Nothing to report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
 - Are Committe members equipment?
 - M i n i o n s.
 - Committee members are equipment. Also snaccs.
 - Motion to call secretary minion passes for the remainder of the meeting.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
 - [042] forgot to get a reciept.
 - $162.18 for snacccccs. Motion to reimburse and give them snack money $5. 
 - Motion passes.
 - Regulation checking ensues.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
 - [042] checked the mail.
## Guild/SOC
 - Mega SOC meat - ing. Steaks were high. 
 - Hasn't been a soc meeting since then.
 - Guild is a pain.
 - Before O Day is next meeting.
 - Guild finance was fine with everything
## Other Affairs
Events
======
## Uncharity Vigil
	- Early Feb. People want advertsisng before the summer break. We need a provision sub committee and reps as soon as possible - most of the reps will be away but james and alden are keen beans. 
	- Cameron hall is a charity case. We needa organise just eventy things - could literally be an email and some chill but honestly with the state cameron hall meetings go there'll be tears at least once.
	- Volunteers aren't a thing.
- 30 second recess. 
## Vive Nights[Cancelled]
## Artemis LAN
	- Nothing happened.
## Cameron Hall-oween
	- Everything approved.
	- [LCY]: "The ball is no longer in our park".
	- Jasmine Sullivan loves a good event plug.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
	- Wait til Zack shows up before getting information. Alden is a good salesman.
	- Felix wants common sense details. E.g. Buyer name, amount, payent method, pickup time. 
	
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-10-17
============================
- Committee: Write draft group admission/application guidelines.  
	- Jasmine Sullivan Left 1.48pm
	- Zack was apparently pretty keen. Assuming he's not doing high performance computing. 
	
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.
	- Zac was setting up the technical side of the committee handover - we control cameron hall. We need an area where we can put everything for handover and as a general archive.
	
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
	- Camp has already been booked. Does anyone want to look at venues for camp? Aldin and felix will research. 
	- We will need to communicate wirh unigames for research about the camp.
	- We don't want next year's committee involved with camp.
		- NOTE: This is due to our lack of faith that they would be able to get everything done - it's not a job we feel we should pass on and it's our responsibility to make the changeover as smooth as possible.
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved.
- [FVP] Find suitable USB-C chargers to purchase. [Not Done]
- [FVP] Investigate options for new monitors. [Not Done]
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door. [Probably not done]
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations. *ongoing*
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines. [Almost done]
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops. *ongoing*
- [THA] Send email to tech@ and order power supply for Cichlid. [probably not done I was eating lasagna] 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Jas makes good points - there're clear issues with the consitution 
	- firstly interpretation (committee members cannot be held accountable for their actions through the constitution as they are fit to interpret it however they please) 
	- and also its bits of history left in (e.g. 1975).
- Transition Period is 1st July 2019.
- Tom will take first look at consitution. Then will run it past Jas and [042], then we'll approve it at the AGM.
- People like tampons. Club will keep a box potentially. No condoms.
- If we provide resources to people we need to make sure they're not abused. Teatowels and cups will go missing. Paper towels are going to be too high a cost. I just want coffee from the vending machine but I always forget my keep cup.
- Uncharity vigil reps - MPT and CHB.
Meeting closed at: 2.05pm
  
Current Action Items
====================
- Committee: Write draft group admission/application guidelines.  
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.	
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved.
- [FVP] Find suitable USB-C chargers to purchase.
- [FVP] Investigate options for new monitors.
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops.
- [THA] Send email to tech@ and order power supply for Cichlid.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [???] at 17:20 on 2018-10-24*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-10-17
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
## Late:
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
## Apologies:
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Mentioned:
- [GOZ], [LLL]
- Koha of UniSFA
- UWA IT
- "New" door members: [DIE], [TBB]
- Ex-door members: [osterguard]
*Meeting opened at 13.00:02*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-10-10
- [CHB] was late, not absent
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- No President.
## Vice President's Report
- Very busy with take home tests and assignments.
- Put a thing in Discord about Anniversary Dinner.
- Messaging people asking them to come has been somewhat successful.
## Secretary's Report
- I am disappointed with the behaviour of certain committee member(s).
- Checked the mail.
- Received set of keys from [GOZ].
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
	- Guild: $2970.26
	- Mastercard: $77.74
	- Cheque: $3920.21
- Not had a chance to look at monitors.
- Been murdered by assignments.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Absent.
## OCM Reports
- [THA] I'm being murdered by assignments.
- [LCY] has nothing to report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- UniSFA Koha was down, might not have been fixed.
- Logrotate isn't working on mussel, the disk was full.
## Network
- [THA] Did we ever get a new CA set up for the wifi?
    - [CFE] Nope, been meaning to look into that for a while.
## Desktops
- Cobra's display seems to have started working again...
- [THA] is still working on fixing Steam, probably to be fixed after exams.
- Dodgy power supply in Cichlid (according to BIOS warning).
    - Good idea to order a new one, see general business.
## Misc.
- UWA IT cannot open a generic ServiceNow account for UCC Wheel, such an account would pose problems for Security and Auditing.
    - [FVP] is still working on it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- [FVP] has donated a Type-N to RP-SMA antenna adapter cable.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- We are almost entirely out of soft drinks, except for 1 pack of coke.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- SOC meeting this evening
    - [FVP] can attend.
## Other Affairs
- Electrolux hasn't sent us any further invoices.
Events
======
## Vive Nights
- Dead, to be re-vive-d soon.
## Artemis LAN
- [CHB] is working on it.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Approve proposed budget for event.
- [JWB] Motion to approve the budget as put forward by the Halloween subcommittee.
    - [LCY] seconds.
    - Motion passes unanimously.
## Relay for Life
- Went well, according to [LLL].
- UCC attendance unknown, don't want to know.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- Booking confirmation email from The Royal:
    - Inside venue is preferred.
    - Pizzas will be served in staggered fashion.
    - Wristbands for bar tab will be provided on the evening.
    - *[CHB] arrives 13:09:38.*
    - Bar tab restriction: tap beer, tap cider, wine by the glass, house spirits, "royal mocktails".
    - Reduce pizza order to 20 from 27.
    - TODO: [JWB] Reply to The Royal.
- Discuss auction format & items.
    - [JWB] I'm a huge fan of silent auction.
    - *[JWB] leaves at 13:34:45.*
## Study Events for all CITS units
- It was good, reasonable turnout, thanks to UEC for providing pizza.
    - Would be worth organising more events like this in the future.
## Language Week Stall
- Was fun, went well, event was poorly attended.
- Parabolic 2.4GHz antenna is somewhat set up and can be used for wifi.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-10-10
============================
- Committee: Determine which things are up for auction at Anniversary Dinner - *not done*.
- [GOZ] Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 & ask to install eyelets - *done*.
    - Details have been sent to [FVP].
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive - *not done*.
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation - *not done*.
- [CFE] Buy USB-C chargers - *not done*.
- [CFE] Investigate options for new monitors - *not done*.
    - [FVP] can do this.
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved - *not done*.
- [FVP] Remove ex-door members from door - *done*.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations - *ongoing*.
- [CHB] Follow up / redo Anniversary Dinner EMP - *done*.
- [THA] Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *partially done*.
    - Inventory is complete, just need to make cards.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops - *not done*.
- [GIR] Organise a drink/snack run.
    - TODO: [THA] Coordinate snack run with [GIR].
- [JWB] Forward subcommittee meeting minutes to committee - *done*.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Buy a new power supply for Cichlid.
    - 600W or 700W should be sufficient.
    - [CFE] Motion to budget $100 for a new power supply for Cichlid.
        - [THA] seconds.
        - Motion passes unanimously.
    - TODO: [THA] Send email to tech@ and order power supply.
- Door applications
    - [DIE] Cam Locke
        - [THA] Motion to add [DIE] to door.
            - [FVP] seconds.
            - Motion passes: 5 committee in favour, 2 absent, 1 vacant.
    - [TBB] Alfred Burgess
        - Committee notes that [TBB]'s door application should not be used as an example.
        - [FVP] Motion to add [TBB] to door.
            - [THA] seconds.
            - Motion passes: 5 committee in favour, 2 absent, 1 vacant.
    - TODO: [FVP] Add new door members to door.
- Door removals
    - [osterguard] was removed from door by circular for leaving the room open too often.
- Organise a drinks & consumables run
    - Wide masking tape (someone stole the last roll), more gaffar tape.
    - Methylated spirits.
    - Blutac.
    - UCC Wishlist whiteboard has been reclaimed for actual things to buy.
    - [THA] can probably do a drinks run next week.
    - Woolworths does free delivery on orders over $300.
    - TODO: [THA] Organise a drinks run.
- Group admission guidelines
    - [CFE] For door we should keep (formalise) the existing procedure with LOLCATDOG.
        - [FVP] The current guidelines don't explain explicitly how people should go about applying for groups, this could lead to confusion in the future.
    - [THA] Wheel should still need to nominate members who are on wheel, this should be in the regulations/guidelines.
        - However, not everyone can go to Project Night...
    - [THA] Can we remove the inactive wheel member accounts from the wheel group?
        - [FVP] We have 40+ inactive UCC member accounts who are currently on wheel.
        - [THA] If someone with a locked wheel account comes to UCC and renews their membership, should they immediately have wheel access again?
        - [FVP] Removing wheel members is controversial - I think we should work to gradually transition to a system where wheel memberships are "renewed" in a similar fashion to door (long term).
            - I would like to change the idea that our systems are maintained by people who you've never met.
    - TODO: Committee: Write draft group admission/application guidelines.
*Meeting closed at 14:45:24.*
Current Action Items
====================
- Committee: Determine which things are up for auction at Anniversary Dinner.
- Committee: Write draft group admission/application guidelines.
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved.
- [FVP] Find suitable USB-C chargers to purchase.
- [FVP] Investigate options for new monitors.
- [FVP] Add [TBB] and [DIE] to door.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [THA] Print spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops.
- [THA] Coordinate snack run, and check with [GIR].
- [THA] Send email to tech@ and order power supply for Cichlid.
- [JWB] Reply to The Royal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by frekk at 21:02 on 2018-10-17*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-10-10
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
## Late:
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Apologies:
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
## Absent:
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
## Mentioned:
*Meeting opened at 13:00:09*
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Absent.
## Vice President's Report
- Spoke to Hayden, didn't work out as I wanted.
    - See events.
- Busy writing essays [...] disgusting.
## Secretary's Report
- Checked the mail.
- Contacted about 5 different venues, see events.
- Been busy.
- 3D printer nozzle heating element has a dodgy connection, may need replacing.
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
    - Cheque: $4120.21
    - Mastercard: $77.74
    - Guild: $2970.26
- Semester 2 grants due on 26th October 5pm, need to start working on those.
- Financial reports have been done.
- New chargers are still not being gotten.
- Busy with coursework.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Absent, report delivered late.
- Busy with coursework.
## OCM Reports
### [LCY]
- Forwarded emails from Hayden
- [LLL] is a bit worried about Relay for Life attendance
    - We will probably be losing to Unigames, come along if you want to change that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Complaints about AD...
## Network
- Network works.
## Desktops
- Someone suggested to switch Cobra with Corvo so people can sit next to each other while gaming.
    - [FVP] doesn't like mechanical keyboards, 
    - *[GIR] arrives at 13:11:24.*
    - Argument ensues about the numerous benefits of mechanical keyboards versus membrane keyboards.
    - [Secretary's note: membrane keyboards are still the best.]
    - [LCY] is happy to move machines around after the meeting.
    - Committee does not think that moving it would not be a good idea.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- No new equipment.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- [CFE] Need solo.
    - [JWB] We need more drinks.
- [LCY] People have requested pasito.
- TODO: [GIR] Organise a drink/snack run.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- SOC meeting next Wednesday, 17th October.
    - [JWB] can go but might look a bit like Jesus.
## Other Affairs
- Electrolux has not not sent us any invoices.
Events
======
## Vive Nights
- No vive night tonight.
- Cancelled until exams are done.
## Charity Vigil
- There was a wrapup meeting, [JWB] was at work and did not attend.
- TODO: [JWB] Forward subcommittee meeting minutes to committee.
- We have to donate the money.
    - Cash in the safe, drink sales etc.
- Each club owes Unigames $0.63
- TODO: [CFE] Make sure subcommittee financial matters are resolved.
## Artemis LAN
- [CHB] is not here yet.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- We have posters.
- Posted on Facebook, twice. Sorry [GIR].
## Relay for Life
- See [LCY]'s report.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- The Tavern has replied regarding venue hire and catering
    - It's too expensive.
- Advertising has already gone out, which makes changing the venue more annoying.
- *[CHB] arrives 13:40:21.*
- [JWB] is extremely disappointed in the members of committee who printed and published advertising material before the event details were finalised.
- Options for venues:
    - Chelsea pizza:
        - Did not respond to call, 0893867833
        - Sent booking enquiry by online form
        - Call back from +61431814403 (George)
        - Booking a day in advance is fine
        - Decoration is possible in advance
        - Table service
        - Bill splitting is possible
        - Bar tab
        - Not exclusive booking, up to 80 people in Nedlands restaurant
    - 399 Bar:
        - Paul (Functions): 0420 922 716 – [email protected]
        - "Courtyard" available 20th October, outdoor area
        - No charges, can order food / delivieries
        - BYO food
        - TV & Music available
        - Cheap in house food
        - Large-ish group: selected discounted drinks all night (with arm band)
        - Reserved as of 9/10/2018
    - Miss Mauds CBD:
        - Available on 20th October
        - Not exclusive booking, up to 70 people.
        - Dinner option: 5-9pm, $65 per person on a Saturday
    - The Royal:
        - 60 Royal St, East Perth WA 6004
        - Functions catering / drinks options have been received.
        - Drinks: drinks package with set cost per person per hour or bar tab
- [JWB] 399 Bar drinks "special" pricing is not great.
- Event will be at the Royal (East Perth), 6-9pm
    - [JWB] Ideally we don't want to run this at more than $500 loss.
- 14:23 [FVP] leaves
    - Ticket price is $40pp, food allowance is $25pp, drinks allowance (initial bar tab) $600, will match further additions to bar tab dollar to dollar.
		- [jwb] motions to budget $500 to run aniversary dinner
		- [cfe] seconds
		- passes, all for
## Study Events for all CITS units
- Happening on Thursday 4-6pm.
- Posters were made, Facebook events were put up, no posters have been postered anywhere though.
## Tech talks
- Thanks to [DAA] for presenting yesterday, it was fun.
- Attendance was generally low, nobody knew they were on for some reason.
	- Emails were sent, facebook/discord event made, not really more we could do.
## Language Week Stall
- Will be happening next week.
## Busybee (Saturday 29/09/2018)
- Door members have not been administratively removed from door yet.
- TODO: [FVP] Remove ex-door members from door.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-10-03
============================
- Committee: Determine which things are up for auction after meeting.
- [GOZ] Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 & ask to install eyelets - *not done*.
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive - *in progress*.
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation - *in progress*.
- [CFE] Buy USB-C chargers - *ongoing*.
- [CFE] Investigate options for new monitors - *not done*.
- [CFE] Figure out where we are with spending this year - *done*.
- [FVP] Organise study event with UCC, PCS, CSSC and UEC - *done*.
- [FVP] Organise language week stall - *done*.
- [FVP] Send Halloween party email - *done*.
- [FVP] Send OGM notification email - *done*.
- [LCY] Talk to [thedom102] about repeated doorings. - *done*
- [LCY] Contact potential Relay for Life participants and make them interested. - *done*
- [LCY] Follow up with Anniversary Dinner booking & organise menu. - *done*
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations. - *ongoing*
- [CHB] Follow up with Anniversary Dinner EMP. - *done, need to redo*
- [THA] Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Talk with [GOZ] about how best to install Steam on Linux desktops. 
- [JWB] Investigate possibility of buying new chairs. - *done*
	- current chairs should be fine for now
	- mesh back chairs were looked into, not a great idea for the club
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Door Applications:
    - [DIE]
		- defferred since committee has not read the application yet
- [osterguard] left clubroom door open overnight on Monday
	- exterminator came in and they didn't close the door after the exterminator left
	- [osterguard] was talked to after forgetting.
	- door was left open again the next day again by [osterguard].
	- [jwb] will discuss with [osterguard], further discussion will occur at next meeting.
  
*Meeting closed at 14:50*
  
Current Action Items
====================
- Committee: Determine which things are up for auction at Anniversary Dinner.
- [GOZ] Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 & ask to install eyelets.
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
- [CFE] Buy USB-C chargers.
- [CFE] Investigate options for new monitors.
- [CFE] Make sure Charity Vigil financial matters are resolved.
- [FVP] Remove ex-door members from door.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [CHB] Follow up / redo Anniversary Dinner EMP.
- [THA] Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Figure out how to best install/fix Steam on Linux desktops. 
- [GIR] Organise a drink/snack run.
- [JWB] Forward subcommittee meeting minutes to committee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by frekk at 10:38 on 2018-10-13*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-10-03
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
## Late:
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Apologies:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
## Mentioned:
- [NTU], [LDT], [LLL], [*OX], [thedom102]
- Door members: [DAS], [BJS], [JWB], [THA], [CHB], [GOZ], [CFE], [FVP], [osterguard], [TFD], [AJT], [KAT], [PJA], [DBA], [DJF], [GIR], [JDN], [LDT], [LCY], [DIE], [TPG], [NTU]
- [Ex-door members](#busybee): [TBB], [ROB], [BIG]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Meeting opened at 13:02:21*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-09-26
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Not here.
## Vice President's Report
- Nothing to report.
## Secretary's Report
- Received notice of [GOZ]'s resignation
     - OGM has been organised, see general business.
     - TODO: [FVP] Send OGM notification email.
- Nobody else seems to be able to help out for Languages Week stall :'(
- Sent email about Halloween decorations.
- Policies & procedures page has been updated, doctype grahame is awful.
- Checked the mail.
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
	- Guild: $2970.26
	- Mastercard: $77.74
	- Cheque: $4120.21
- Paper has arrived from Officeworks, chargers have not.
    - Update: Chargers have been refunded, they were out of stock.
- Been doing study.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Made two posters. Yay...
## OCM Reports
- [LCY] Facebook post has been made regarding Panto's discounted tickets.
    - Cleanup: tables were wiped, de-dusted, a surprisingly large soft drink stain was hidden behind Pinball...
        - Also I deep-cleaned one keyboard, only 2 keyboards left that I haven't cleaned properly yet.
        - *[GIR] arrives at 13:07:32*
        - [NTU] was the only person who wanted pizza, so no pizza was ordered.
    - Advice from [LDT]: don't buy purple methylated spirits, it leaves stains on everything.
        - Committee is in consensus that the one remaining bottle is leaking.
- [THA] I have the specs for all desktops apart from Catfish, all that is missing is the actual cards to put specs on.
    - My daemon to run on all the computers is almost complete.
- [CHB] found Artemis, planning to test Artemis when there aren't 2 assessments.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Still serving.
## Network
- Net is working.
## Desktops
- Cobra's screen intermittently fails to power on, seems unrelated to the graphics card being unseated.
- Christmas' mouse and keyboard also exhibits intermittent dodginess.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- Paper.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- Snack machine has been filled, we have no leftover solo.
- [GIR] *might* be able to do a snack/drinks run tomorrow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- No Guild. Still no minutes from latest SOC meeting.
- [LCY] went to the Tenancy busybee meeting.
    - If you smell something funny around Unigames, it's probably the pest exterminators.
## Other Affairs
- EEEWA event was shared on Facebook.
- Still haven't received the transport bill from Electrolux.
- Panto is offering half price tickets to UCC members for their show over the next few days.
Events
======
## Vive Nights
- [GIR] and [CFE] are busy, [JWB] doesn't want to do it, no EMP has been submitted.
- Thursday nights might work better than Wednesdays for committee's availability.
## Charity Vigil
- Followup meeting on Sunday 4pm, [GOZ] is presumed to be attending.
## Artemis LAN
- We have a bridge license supporting up to 6 people for a single ship.
    - Located in /home/other/committee/
    - [Minutes of their purchase](https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/2013/2013-10-11.txt)
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Money for online ticket sales to be deposited into UCC account.
- Posters have gone up.
- TODO: [FVP] send Halloween email.
- TODO: [GIR] make Facebook event.
## Relay for Life
- No news from [LLL].
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- [LCY] hasn't spoken to Hayden yet about menu.
    - Food will be produced in the Tav kitchen, they will produce a custom menu based on our budget ($20 pp)
    - TODO: [LCY] Get a draft menu for the event.
- Posters have gone up, thanks [GIR] and [LCY].
- Decide on exact activities & format of auction for serial terminals.
    - [FVP] has already sent email saying that they will be auctioned at the Anniversary Dinner.
    - A number of members were quite interested in them.
    - The terminals which we are intending to keep are labelled "keep", the rest are candidates for auction.
    - [JWB] Auction the Lego Mindstorms?
    - TODO: Determine which things are up for auction after meeting.
- Bar tab:
    - Suggestion is to have an intial amount on the tab with a predetermined maximum, depending on finances.
    - Matching people dollar-for-dollar as they put money on the tab.
    - TODO: [CFE] Figure out where we are with spending this year.
## Study Events for all CITS units
- Thursday 11th October, 4-6pm.
- Tutors have been found, more volunteers are welcome.
- [JWB] is happy to lecture bash, given times and locations of lectures.
    - I'd like A4 or A5 handouts.
- UEC is probably able to buy pizza for the event.
## Tech talks
- First talk on Tuesday.
    - It went well, thanks [*OX] for coming in.
## Language Week Stall
- Tuesday 16th October 12-2pm, set up a little earlier.
- "Passport" stamps and other equipment will be provided by Language week people.
- Volunteer assistants needed.
    - [FVP] will be there.
## <a name="busybee">Busybee (Saturday 29/09/2018)</a>
- Apologies from [DAS], [BJS], [JWB], [THA], [CHB], [GOZ], [CFE], [FVP], [osterguard], [TFD], [AJT], [KAT], [PJA], [DBA], [DJF], [GIR]
- Remaining door members: [TBB], [LCY], [ROB], [BIG], [JDN], [LDT], [TPG], [NTU], [ROB]
- Attendeed: [JDN], [LDT], [LCY], [DIE], [TPG], [NTU]
- Door members who did not apologies: [TBB], [ROB], [BIG]
- [JWB] Motion to remove [TBB], [ROB] and [BIG] from door for failure to send apologies.
    - [LCY] seconds.
    - Motion passes with 6 committee members in favour, 2 absent.
- [JWB] As an afterthought, the email for the cleanup was not sent to door@ and instead to ucc-announce@ - should people really be removed if they didn't see the email?
    - As a note for future cleanups, send a notification email to door@.
    - On further note, the members who were removed were indeed subscribed to ucc-announce@.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-09-26
============================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *not done*.
    - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Facilitate a meaningful connection between the different clubs involved in the study event - *done*.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *in progress*.
- Continue writing camp network documentation - *in progress*.
- Buy Comsol chargers from Officeworks - *ongoing*.
    - Need to find some other chargers.
- Buy stickers for 3D printer - *done*.
    - Waiting for them to arrive.
- Investigate options for new monitors.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering - *not done*.
    - Action item transferred to [LCY].
- Add Relay for Life to Cerberus - *done*.
- Halloween subcommittee:
    - Send email about halloween decorations & volunteer assistants (RSA / First Aid / Event Managers) - *sort of done*.
- Organise study event with UCC, PCS, CSSC and UEC - *in progress*.
- Organise language week stall - *in progress*.
    - Would like some more volunteer assistants.
- Update UCC website "Policies and Procedures" page - *done*.
#### [GIR]
- Make a poster for CITS study session - *done*.
#### [LCY]
- Talk to [thedom102] about repeated doorings - *not done*.
- Contact potential Relay for Life participants and get them interested - *not done*.
- Go to the Tav and confirm the Anniversary Dinner booking - *ongoing*.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations. *ongoing*
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner in person as hardcopy. *ongoing*
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *almost done*.
- Talk with [GOZ] about how best to install Steam on Linux desktops - *ongoing*.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Organise second OGM for the year.
    - [FVP] "Final call for resignations!"
    - Booked for Tuesday 23rd October 14:00 in GCRM.
    - EMP has been submitted.
    - Notice should be displayed on Cerberus.
- Ratify recent Wheel Group additions: [FVP], [333] and [LE@].
    - [FVP] would motion to approve wheel group additions but has a conflict of interest.
    - Note: By regulation, an absolute majority of committee must vote in favour for door/wheel appointments/removals.
    - [JWB] Since [FVP] was not officially voted in by committee before nominating [333] and [LE@], those nominations are invalid.
        - [FVP] The wheel nomination / approval process has happened anyway, and with the new regs we may consider that wheel has been consulted and no objections have been raised.
    - [LCY] Motion to ratify [FVP]'s addition to wheel.
        - [THA] seconds.
        - Motion passes with 5 committee members in favour, 1 abstains, 2 absent.
    - [LCY] Motion to ratify [LE@]'s addition to wheel.
        - [FVP] seconds.
        - Motion passes with 5 committee members in favour, 1 abstains, 2 absent.
    - [JWB] Motion to ratify [333]'s addition to wheel.
        - [CFE] seconds.
        - Motion passes with 5 committee members in favour, 1 abstains, 2 absent.
- [JWB] Chairs
    - New chairs have been on the wishlist for ages.
    - The link to new chairs on [the wiki](https://wiki.ucc.asn.au/MoneyMoneyMoney) is now broken.
    - We should probably investigate the possibility of buying new chairs.
    - TODO: [JWB] Investigate possibility of buying new chairs.
- [LCY] Motion to ratify all committee discussions between 13:00 and 14:00.
    - [THA] seconds.
    - Motion passes unanimously.
- [JWB] How's the Square payment thing going?
    - [FVP] I need to work on it a bit more, fiddle with hardware etc.
    - [JWB] Basic requirements are:
        - Needs to be permanently plugged into a charger
        - Permanently secured in some manner.
*Meeting closed at 14:40:26 - only an hour and 40 minutes!*
Current Action Items
====================
- Committee: Determine which things are up for auction after meeting.
- [GOZ] Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 & ask to install eyelets.
- [CFE] Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- [CFE] Continue writing camp network documentation.
- [CFE] Buy USB-C chargers.
- [CFE] Investigate options for new monitors.
- [CFE] Figure out where we are with spending this year.
- [FVP] Organise study event with UCC, PCS, CSSC and UEC.
- [FVP] Organise language week stall..
- [FVP] Send Halloween party email.
- [FVP] Send OGM notification email.
- [LCY] Talk to [thedom102] about repeated doorings.
- [LCY] Contact potential Relay for Life participants and make them interested.
- [LCY] Follow up with Anniversary Dinner booking & organise menu.
- [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- [CHB] Follow up with Anniversary Dinner EMP.
- [THA] Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- [THA] Talk with [GOZ] about how best to install Steam on Linux desktops.
- [JWB] Investigate possibility of buying new chairs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by frekk at 15:38 on 2018-10-05*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2015-02-25
Attendees: [BG3], [GOZ], [JDN], [SAS], [HTL], [TJB], [GEE]
[TBB], [SZM], [TPG], [*OX], [TFM], [DJF]
Apologies: [ODF]
Slowpokes: [BLZ]
Meeting opened at 15:27
Confirmation of minutes from previous meeting
- [BG3]: They were done by [GOZ]. They were terrible.
  - There was not actually anything wrong with them.
  - [JDN]: [GOZ] needs to write worse minutes so there is something to complain about.
##President's Report
- O-Day Happened
  - People liked playing with the Leap Motion
  - Ended up with marginally fewer sign-ups then last year
- Medico had proxmox updated
  - For a brief period of time everything was broken
  - I provided moral support to help fix it
- The snack machine was terrible
  - I never knew that the handle was a silver colour
  - I thought it was a browny colour
  - It is clean now
##Vice-President's Report
- Nothing to report
##Treasurer's Report
- We have some money now its okay everyone
- $2151.96 in Westpac
- $40.83 on card
- $404.21 in Guild
- O-Day happened [Citation Needed]
  - I had an adequate number of fans in the stall
  - $725 from signups on the day
  - $200 float from guild also went into Westpac
- Uncharity Vigil money came in
  - $107.80 total
##Secretary's Report
- [BG3]: Despite stating in timetable.py that he was free for this meeting, he is not
##Fresher Rep's Report
- We have freshers now!
- The fresher welcome is this Friday
##Machine Technical Reports
###Servers
- Medico went down Friday night
  - [BOB] was upgrading Proxmox
  - Proxmox upgrade went south when grub tried to update
    - Grub core.img was too big for the space it had
  - [TPG] fixed it the next morning
    - With moral support from both [BOB] and [BG3]
- ucc-adduser broke massively on O-Day and was fixed
  - It really should be rewritten
###Network
- Works
###Desktops
- Have not fallen over
- Cockgrunter is dying hard
  - Basically can't be upgraded
- Napoli is FITH
##New equipment
- Freshers
##Drinks and Snacks
- They exist to some degree
- Only one slot is empty right now and we have refills for it
##External Affairs
###Mail
- Has not been checked
  - [BG3] will check it after the meeting
###Guild/SOC
- Treasurer training happend
  - We did not attend as we do not have our new treasurer yet
- President Summit is on Wednesday 11th March 5pm
###Other Entities
- Form 5 (Department of Commerce form for change of our constitution) will be submitted today
- CSSC exists
  - They want to run events with us this year
##Events
- O-Day
  - Happened
  - Was good
- Camp
  - [SAS] has a meeting with Associate Director of Student Services tomorrow
- Fresher Welcome
  - This friday, 5pm
  - Email going out today
  - Facebook event exists
- ISS/UCC TF2/Other Tournament
  - [TJB] finally managed to contact ISS
  - ISS have promised $2000 funding
  - It can be any team game we want
    - [TJB] has decided on TF2
  - [BG3]: When is this going to start?
    - [TJB]: Sign-ups open next week and close a week or two after
##Action Items
- Purchase four more chairs to replace damaged chairs before ($159 each) when appropriate
  - We finally have the money
  - "When appropriate" is deemed to be equivalent to "now"
  - [BG3] moves that we purchase four more chairs for no more than $700, [SAS] seconds
    - Passes unanimously
    - [BG3] to buy new chairs
    - [post-2018-10-03 edit] $159 https://www.jkhopkins.com.au/p-110-sailor-typist-chair.aspx as on https://wiki.ucc.asn.au/MoneyMoneyMoney
 
- [BG3] to handle League of Legends tournament inquiry
  - Facebook poll
    - Has not been made
  - [BG3] has been too busy to do anything yet
  - Deferred
> [BLZ] arrives
##General Business
- [BLZ]: We should buy some USB game pads
  - [BLZ] to research game pads
- Door Policy
  - We have finished two week's constitution
    - We received two emails
    - Their input has been taken into account
    - The policy now explicitly mentions Wheel's powers to open the door for systems maintenance purposes
  - [SAS] moves to adopt the new Door group policy, [GOZ] seconds
    - 6 for, 1 abstention
Meeting closed at 16:27
##Current Action Item
- [BG3] to buy new chairs
- [BG3] to handle League of Legends tournament inquiry
- [BLZ] to research game pads
Minutes uploaded by [GOZ] at 16:36 on 2015-02-25

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-09-26
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
**Not on committee:**
- [TAY]
## Late:
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
## Apologies:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
## Mentioned:
- [NTU], [TPG], [BOB], [LLL], [thedom102]
- Hayden of the Tavern
- PCS, CSSC, UEC
----
*Meeting opened at "oh for f\*ck's sake Windows..." [sic] (14:17:33)*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-09-19
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- I'm on holiday for a week for the first time since 2015 and I had to come to this meeting.
- Discussed the regs with people, details below.
## Vice President's Report
- Absent.
## Secretary's Report
- Sent (email about charity vigil)[https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/ucc-announce/2018-September/000611.html], waaaay too late.
- "Fixed" the DNS issue causing LMS etc to be inaccessible
    - and accidentally caused an entire long weekend of catastrophic downtime :3
    - Thanks to [NTU], [TPG] and [CFE] for sorting that out
- Charity vigil was fun, spent most of it trying to unbreak the UCCDOMAYNE.
- *[THA] arrives at 14:26:23.*
- I like the way Square sends us occasional emails, it reminds us that we still have it set up.
- Checked the mail.
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
    - Guild: $2970.26
    - Mastercard: $81.23
    - Cheque: $4856.59
- Haven't done much this week, have 2 projects to work on.
    - Plus domain stuff broke.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Made the poster last night.
- Not sure if I am going to run Vive Night tonight, [JWB] might not be coming.
    - Also it's study break.
## OCM Reports
- [LCY] I'll go over what I've done in events.
- [CHB] I'm considering setting up a cron to do my job.
    - [LCY] I appreciate the reminders from [CHB].
- [THA] I am increasingly disappointed with modern software, it's all bloated and sh\*t.
    - My action items kept getting stolen by [FVP].
    - *Technical discussion about Steam on Linux ensues.*
    - TODO: [THA] Talk to [GOZ] about how best to install Steam on Linux desktops.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- New maltair has been racked and firmware upgraded.
    - Set up on Monday by [BOB], it's up and running now.
- [FVP] is making a virtual copy of UCC on VMs running inside a VM on Maltair.
    - [FVP] Nested virtualisation is fun.
## Network
- Everything. Broke. Again.
    - See Secretary's report.
- Mussel and mooneye now use only AD for logins! Yay?
- AD replication went gaga, samurai was wiped and cleanly rejoined to the domain.
    - That didn't work either, so samson was restored from backup and is now our only domain controller.
- Webcam scripts are buggy and vulnerable to exploitation, needs fixing.
## Desktops
- Surprisingly functional.
- The mouse on christmas is occasionally unreliable, might be an issue with the USB ports / drivers / BIOS.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- Replacement "hardware" for Maltair
    - [FVP] Please reimburse me AU $369.65.
    - Budget of $550 was approved earlier, payment will be made shortly.
- [FVP] has donated a Dell wireless mouse, thanks to Guild Student Center.
- Our old aircon has been returned, it is now in a bag on the table in the machine room.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- Nothing to report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- No Guild (if only...)
## Other Affairs
- Electrolux has returned our aircon, it has not been tested and we have not yet been invoiced for the delivery / pickup.
Events
======
## Vive Nights
- Not being run tonight.
## Charity Vigil
- UCC was part of the event and did contribute... somewhat. 
- [GOZ] Between not giving availability informations and not attending meetings, I feel that [JWB] has failed his responsibilities as a subcommittee rep.
- [FVP] Could be better marketed/attended by UCC.
- [TAY] UCC needs to plan its activities and monetisation strategies in advance, otherwise people don't have an incentive to come.
- [FVP] I ended up taking care of the Vive later in the event, that was fine but I didn't really know what was going on.
    - [TAY] It would be a good idea that if a rep can't make it to an event that they delegate their responsibilities to another committee member.
        - Also important to have other committee members involved in the organisation of the event.
- [GOZ] The way that UCC used to motivate members was with LANs, those have been dead for a while now.
    - I'd be keen to run an Artemis LAN at some point, in the future, not right now.
## Artemis LAN
- Problem for the holidays.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Date is confirmed: Saturday 27th October.
- [FVP] needs to contact Hayden and ask about alcohol pricing.
    - [TAY] Try to set up a meeting before the Tav opens.
- Volunteer assistants for First Aid / RSA during the event:
    - [GOZ] can do First Aid and RSA
    - [CHB] can also do both
- Decorations:
    - [GOZ] can bring the most terrifying thing he can think of: Printouts of the UCC constitution.
    - [TAY] can bring garden gnomes, if we want to do a themed room...
## Relay for Life
- Emails were sent out, in the same email as the cleanup.
- No news from [LLL], there are not very many people "interested" in the Facebook event.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- Attendance estimate is 20 people.
    - Will be confirmed with the Tav closer to the event so we can get a more accurate estimate based on ticket sales.
- Tav costs $350 to hire, we shouldn't have to pay for security if the Tav can trust our record.
    - Ticket price of $40 per person should be fine.
    - Suggested budget is $20 per person for food, menu to be confirmed with Guild Catering.
- [GIR] has made a poster, is a good poster.
## Study Events for all CITS units
- Probably want to form a subcommittee if we want to stay "above board"
- PCS committee is keen to be involved, but has not had a meeting since last discussed at UCC.
    - PCS vice president is happy to do the EMP.
- Anna of UEC has replied to email.
- No further news from CSSC but they are presumably still keen.
- TODO: [GOZ] Facilitate a meaningful connection between the different clubs involved in the event.
## Tech talks
- [Tue 2018-10-02 1700--1900](https://www.facebook.com/events/238987390126178) [*OX] Workshop: Contributing to Open Source
- [Tue 2018-10-09 1700--1900](https://www.facebook.com/events/1852078034888302) [DAA] Tech Talk: Dragging Shells into the 90s
- See the [email to ucc-announce](https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/ucc-announce/2018-September/000613.html).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-09-19
============================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *not done*.
    - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *in progress*.
- Continue writing camp network documentation - *almost done*.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering - *in progress*.
- Add Relay for Life to Cerberus - *not done*.
- Halloween subcommittee:
    - Ask about halloween decorations
        - See above.
    - Ask if people with alcohol certifications can help with the Halloween party
        - See above.
- Contact CSSC, PCS and UEC for study event - *ongoing*.
- Organise language week stall - *in progress*
    - Guild hasn't sent out minutes from the recent SOC meeting which might or might not actually include contact information.
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions - *stolen by [FVP]*
    - TODO: [GIR] Make a poster for CITS study session.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner - makes quite the impression - *done*.
#### [LCY]
- Send email for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am - *done*.
- Send email about Relay for Life - *done*.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations - *ongoing*
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner (pending Tav booking confirmation) - *ongoing* see above Events entry.
    - It _was_ submitted, then the Guild website was restored from backup...
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *in progress*.
    - Will occur once I don't have assignment.
- Make Facebook events for tech talks and send emails to [email protected] - *done*.
General Business
================
- Doorings:
    - [thedom102] Ben Zhao
        - Soft drink was spilled on the desk and floor, it was cleaned but the keyboard was found sticky the day later.
        - TODO: [LCY] Talk to [thedom102] about repeated doorings.
        - The dooring lapses.
- [FVP] Buy a USB C charger
    - [PLE has one](https://www.ple.com.au/Products/632283/ALOGIC-60W-USB-C-Wall-Charger-w-USB-C-Charging-Cable) for $89
    - [Storm computers has one](https://www.stormcomputers.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=85_347&products_id=7496) for $45
    - [Officeworks has one](https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/comsol-usb-type-c-universal-laptop-charger-60w-coucpd60) $18 on clearance
    - [GOZ] We can have multiple chargers and put them in the corners of the room.
    - [LCY] Motion to budget $60 to acquire 3 Comsol USB Type C chargers.
        - [THA] seconds.
        - Motion passes unanimously.
        - [CFE] Shipping is free for orders over $55, need to buy something else which is cheap.
        - TODO: [CFE] Buy Comsol chargers from Officeworks.
- Review of feedback and instatement of the [proposed new regulations](https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/2018/2018-09-19.ucc#new_regulations).
    - [NTU]: Incremental replacement/refactor of https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/policies.ucc as separate to Step 1: update as https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/procedures.ucc or similar.
        - [GOZ] That would cause unnecessary confusion and generally be far more complicated than is necessary.
        - [THA] There has not been a clear suggestion as to how these should be best rolled out in stages.
    - [BOB] raised issues with the clause "The Committee in consultation with existing Wheel members may appoint Wheel members"
        - [GOZ] The previous (and current) incarnation of the Group Admission Guidelines state that committee alread had this power.
            - That document is purportedly older than everyone on committee except for [GOZ] and [LCY].
            - The constitution grants Committee absolute power over Wheel anyway.
    - [NTU] pointed out that the ITPA Code of Ethics is perhaps not suitable for Wheel group as all members are volunteers, not professionals.
        - [FVP] I've read through the ITPA code and I haven't seen anything that could be remotely considered problematic in the context of a volunteer organisation.
        - [GOZ] I consider them equivalent but I have added the UCC Wheel Group Ethical Guidelines as an appendix to the proposed regulations to replace the ITPA ones.
            - *[GOZ] reads out the Wheel Group Ethical Guidelines.*
    - [NTU] also suggested the idea of "rough consensus" for the appointment of Wheel Members.
        - *Committee meeting adjourned for a number of minutes at 16:34:41 to renew parking and for various other reasons.*
        - *Meeting resumes at 16:40:21, [GIR] has not yet returned.*
        - [GOZ] has received a parking ticket.
        - *[GIR] returns at 16:42:10.*
        - Following discussion, wording is changed require an "absolute majority" to appoint Door and Wheel Members.
    - [GOZ] Motion to replace all existing regulations with the regulations found [here](https://github.com/ucc/regulations/blob/master/README.md).
        - [THA] seconds.
        - Motion passes unanimously.
    - TODO: [FVP] Update UCC website "Policies and Procedures" page.
*Meeting closed at 16:58:29.*
Current Action Items
====================
  
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
    - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Facilitate a meaningful connection between the different clubs involved in the study event.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- Continue writing camp network documentation.
- Buy Comsol chargers from Officeworks.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering.
- Add Relay for Life to Cerberus.
- Halloween subcommittee:
    - Send email about halloween decorations & volunteer assistants (RSA / First Aid / Event Managers)
- Organise study event with UCC, PCS, CSSC and UEC.
- Organise language week stall.
- Update UCC website "Policies and Procedures" page.
#### [GIR]
- Make a poster for CITS study session.
#### [LCY]
- Talk to [thedom102] about repeated doorings.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner in person as hardcopy (pending Tav booking confirmation).
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- Talk with [GOZ] about how best to install Steam on Linux desktops.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by frekk at 23:15 on 2018-09-26*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-09-19
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
**Not on committee**:
- [TAY], [DIE]
## Late:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
## Apologies:
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Absent:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
## Mentioned:
- [DAS], [\*OX], [DAA]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Meeting opened at 13:10:59*
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Report delivered late.
- Worked on the [new regulations](#new_regulations).
## Vice President's Report
- Absent. [apologies not accepted by committee]
## Secretary's Report
- Checked the mail.
- Organised tech talks.
- Got the receipt for snack run 3 weeks ago.
- Been busy studying.
- Broke everything by fixing molmol, see tech reports below.
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
    - Cheque: $4276.39
    - Guild: $2970.26
    - Mastercard: $81.23
- Reimbursements:
    - [CFE] Motion to reimburse $146.40 for the snack run last week.
        - [CHB] seconds.
        - Motion passes: 4 in favour, 1 abstains.
    - *[GOZ] arrives 13:17:23*
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Absent.
## OCM Reports
### [THA]
- Have been and am being murdered by assignments.
- Joined the Thinkpad master race.
- [THA] and [LCY] did a drink/snack run last week, got lost on the way but now we know where Coles is.
### [CHB]
- Worked on Anniversary Dinner EMP.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- [FVP] "fixed" molmol's IPv6
   - Does not respond to neighbour solicitations unless interface is in promisc mode
   - If it does work, logins break on literally everything
   - IPv6 has since been disabled on molmol pending technical investigation of the problem
   - Might be reverse DNS related (for Kerberos)
- Maltair's replacement motherboard should be arriving this week
## Network
- IPv6 works reliably for anything other than molmol
   - Autoconfiguration is nice.. but kinda scary
- Almost everything needs updating in DNS
- UWA DNS is broken, perhaps more broken than usual.
   - [GOZ]: [DAS], after receiving instructions from me got UWA to fix DNS to access Guild websites internally.
## Desktops
- Corvo had a very weird network setup, v6 was being routed via another part of the world.
## Misc.
- Wifi is still broken for people trying to connect on Windows 10.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- No new equipment.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- See OCM reports.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- [FVP] went to the SOC meeting last week.
- Language week, stalls on Oak Lawn Tuesday 16th October.
    - TODO: [FVP] figure out what to do for Language Week stall.
- Tenancy busybee is 29th September.
    - Looks like most of committee will either be unavailable or attending the PCS competition on the same day.
    - Meeting in the Guild Council Meeting Room at 11am, [LCY] can attend.
## Other Affairs
- No news from Electrolux, they still have our aircon.
- *[THA] leaves 13:45:57.*
Events
======
## Vive Nights
- [CFE] is busy, [JWB] and [GIR] aren't here so probably not happening tonight.
## Charity Vigil
- [JWB] was going send an email, no email has been sent yet.
   - TODO: [FVP] Send Charity vigil email.
- UCC is doing "clubroom activities" and running the Vive in the Loft.
- [GOZ] How do we monetise UCC's events to raise money?
    - [TAY] A good way to make money is to get people to compete.
    - [GOZ] Some kind of buy-in for playing games with eligibilty to win prizes.
    - *[THA] arrives 13:54:36*
    - [GOZ] Steam vouchers as raffle prizes.
        - Motion to purchase 3 * $20 steam vouchers as prizes for the event.
            - [CFE] seconds.
            - Motion passes unanimously.
            - TODO: [GOZ] Buy steam vouchers.
- [FVP] and [LCY] can be there.
- [CFE] can set up the Vive.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Next meeting this afternoon at 4pm.
- [TAY] Given that it's getting to late September, the event needs to go up ASAP.
## Relay for Life
- Not a lot of engagement on the Facebook event.
- Team name is `Narutorun.exe`
- TODO: [LCY] Contact potential participants and get them interested.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- [CHB] EMP is half-written.
- TODO: [LCY] Go to the Tav and try to get the booking confirmed.
## Build-A-3D-Printer
- Dead.
    - [GOZ] You're not getting my 3D printer any more.
## How to UCC
- Next semester.
## Study Events for all CITS units
- CSSC has replied, at last
   - We'd probably book the Purple Room or the Circle in Reid, could get involved with UEC as well
   - [CHB], [CFE], [THA] and [GOZ] can provide tutoring.
   - [GOZ] PCS can probably also get involved.
- Suggested plan of action:
   1. Pick a date
   2. Select UCC reps to coordinate with other clubs ([FVP])
   3. Reply to CSSC & contact UEC
   4. Do EMP and book venue
   5. Advertising
- TODO: [FVP] make sure things happen.
## Tech talks
- [\*OX] is presenting on Tuesday 2nd October
- [DAA] is also presenting on Tuesday 9th October
- [DAA] is happy to present again sometime in November, probably 20th Nov after exams.
- Need to do advertising ASAP: [THA] is onto it.
- Pizza run: [GOZ] should be able to come and so we will have at least 1 car.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-09-12
============================
- [CHB] volunteers as the "Cron-ie", shall remind people of their action items when or before they become overdue.
    - Also help reassign action items if necessary.
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *not done*.
    - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
    - Not going to happen.
#### [JWB]
- Send email for Charity Vigil.
    - To be done by [FVP].
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *in progress*.
- Continue writing camp network documentation - *almost done*.
    - Still don't have a complete floor plan.
    - Been working on network and power setup, going reasonably well.
    - With luck something will be on the wiki by the end of the week.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm tech talk with [\*OX] - *done*.
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering - *in progress*.
- Update cerberus with relay for life and charity vigil - *done*.
    - TODO: [FVP] Add Relay for Life to Cerberus.
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
#### [LCY]
- *[DIE] walks in, looks vaguely horrified, and walks out again at 14:30:43*
- Send email for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am.
- Send email about Relay for Life.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
    - Ongoing.
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner (pending Tav booking confirmation).
    - Pending Tav booking confirmation.
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *in progress*.
    - [CFE] First is making an inventory, next is printing physical cards.
- Organise a drinks run - *done*.
- Make Facebook events for tech talks and send emails to [email protected] - *ongoing*.
    - [THA] has now been added as admin to the Facebook page and group
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- [TAY] I'm unhappy with the results of last week's committee meeting effectively going against the spirit of the motion at the recent OGM to re-vote existing "policies" [sic].
    - "Procedural motion to delay discussion of any changes to regulations and guidelines of door and wheel within 15 days, and that an email outlining said changes of regulations and guidelines shall be sent to the UCC members to which the regulations and guidelines pertain within 5 days." - that actually doesn't mean anything
    - I am actually exceptionally disappointed with this, honestly this has gone on for too long.
    - I've been on committees for years but I don't think I have seen a committee like this with nobody willing to take on jobs.
    - The committee gets to decide regulations, you don't need to have everyone provide feedback on them before being approved.
    - [GOZ] I believe that committee should approve the regulations before they are sent out, if people want to provide feedback they can do so and we can change the regulations next week.
    - [THA] The motion was to re-vote and re-approve regulations but not necessarily to change them.
    - [GOZ] The regulations as approved last meeting are inconsistent with themselves and invalid.
    - [LCY] The idea of the procedural motion last week was to ensure they got emailed out first...
    - [GOZ] Honestly there is no reason why we can't approve the regulations this meeting.
    - *[GOZ] requests that committee read through the [proposed regulations](#new_regulations).*
        - *[GOZ] reads out the regulations and committee discusses line by line.*
- Motion for committee to endorse the [proposed regulations](#new_regulations) as a candidate to supersede all current regulations and guidelines with the intent to approve at the next committee meeting, subject to feedback from members.
    - [LCY] seconds.
    - [GOZ] We also didn't remember to approve the subcommittee regulations last week, let's quickly do that now since those are referenced in the new regs.
        - [GOZ] Motion to approve the [Joint Event Subcommittee Regulations](subcommittee_regulations_20180918.pdf).
            - [CFE] seconds.
            - Motion passes unanimously.
    - Motion passes unanimously.
- New sticker for 3D printer surface
    - We don't know how much it will cost, it can be reimbursed later.
    - TODO: [CFE] Buy sticker for 3D printer.
*Meeting closed at 15:33:32*
  
Current Action Items
====================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
    - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *in progress*.
- Continue writing camp network documentation - *almost done*.
    - Still don't have a complete floor plan.
    - Been working on network and power setup, going reasonably well.
    - With luck something will be on the wiki by the end of the week.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering - *in progress*.
- Add Relay for Life to Cerberus.
- Send email about Charity Vigil.
- Add link to OGM minutes on website - *done*.
- Halloween subcommittee:
    - Ask about halloween decorations
    - Ask if people with alcohol certifications can to help with the Halloween party
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
#### [LCY]
- Send email for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am.
- Send email about Relay for Life.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner (pending Tav booking confirmation).
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *in progress*.
- Make Facebook events for tech talks and send emails to [email protected] - *ongoing*.
-----
Appendix: Proposed UCC Committee Regulations 2018 <a name="new_regulations"></a>
=================================================
This document constitutes a proposed complete list of all necessary UCC Committee Regulations. These regulations are intended to expire and be replaced during the first meeting of a new Committee immediately following an Annual General Meeting. Included are appendices for any technical details or guidelines pertaining to club operations that are not appropriate as regulations.
- The Committee shall make every reasonable effort to clearly communicate all responsibilities and tasks to the members to whom they apply
	- The Committee may require a member sign a statement that they are aware of their responsibilities
	
- Members wishing to apply to join any group are ecouraged to contact committee in writing
- Members shall adhere to the [Club Service Usage Guidelines](#usage_guidelines)
- There shall be a group known as 'Door'
	- The Committee may appoint Door members
	- Door members have the following responsibilities:
		- To act in good faith towards the club
		- To represent the club to current and prospective members
		- To open and oversee the use of the room
		- To maintain a welcoming and helpful atmosphere in the room
		- To ensure the safety and security of club members and property in the room
		- To ensure the club and its members adhere to club, Guild, and University rules and standards including but not limited to:
			- The [Club Service Usage Guidelines](#usage_guidelines);
			- The [Guild Tenancy policies](https://myuwastudentguild.com/clubs-societies/resources/tenancy/); and
			- The [University Codes of Ethics and Conduct](https://www.hr.uwa.edu.au/policies/policies/conduct/code)
		- To accept money from members on behalf of the club
	- The Committee will afford powers to Door members so that they may fulfil these responsibilities
	- The Committee may remove Door members or call for their reapplication as they see fit
	- See the [Door Group Manual](#door_manual) for technical details about Door
- Committee and Door members may temporarily evict and ban individuals from the room (known as 'dooring' or 'being doored')
	- The dooring may be conditional, for example on time or behaviour
	- Doorings lasting a significant amount of time should be reported to Committee and Door
	- The maximum duration of a dooring is until the next Committee or General Meeting, at which the dooring will be reviewed, and either extended or lifted
- There shall be a group known as 'Wheel'
	- The Committee in consultation with existing Wheel members may appoint Wheel members
	- Wheel has the following responsibilities:
		- To act in good faith towards the club
		- To maintain the functionality and security of club systems and services
		- To ensure the club and its members comply with University network access policies
		- To adhere to the [ITPA Code of Ethics](https://www.itpa.org.au/code-of-ethics/)
	- The Committee will afford powers to Wheel members so that they may fulfil these responsibilities
	- The Committee may remove Wheel members or call for their reapplication as they see fit
- Wheel members shall have administrator access to all club machines, and are responsible for administering such access
- Wheel members may lock and unlock member accounts
	- Accounts may be locked if:
		- It is requested by the Committee; or
		- There is, in the opinion of the Wheel member, a technical or security reason to do so; or
		- The user of the account is no longer a member of the club
	- An attempt should be made to notify the user of the account of any locking
	- An account should remain locked only so long as there is reason for it to be
- A club member may be rewarded with dispense credit for performing certain services for the club
	- Emptying a full bin: 96c
	- Restocking the coke machine: 128c
	- Driving a food run: 512c
- Donations to the club must be reported to the Committee, and are considered to remain the property of the donor until they are accepted by the Committee, at which point they become the property of the club
- The club shall abide by the [Joint Event Subcommittee Regulations](subcommittee_regulations_20180918.pdf).
Appendix A: Club Service Usage Guidelines <a name="usage_guidelines"></a>
-----------------------------------------
Any services provided by the club are provided with the understanding that the user will behave in a responsible manner. These guidelines are in addition to the conditions of any external services accessed using the club's services. Ignorance of any guideline or rule is not considered adequate excuse for the violation of that guideline or rule. Account security and activity is considered the responsibility of the holder of that account.
Fundamental guidelines include but are not limited to:
- Not attempting to break or weaken security measures in any way without prior and continued permission from the administration of all systems and networks concerned
- Not making excessive, inappropriate, or abusive use of any club services as defined by the administration of that service
- Treating the services, systems, users, and administrators of any club service with respect and common courtesy
- Not participating in any illegal activities
- Obeying the guidelines and rules of all systems, services, and networks accessed
- Not using club services in such a way that hinders their more appropriate or club-related use
- Not sharing account access or other security credentials with another entity without the permission of the administration of the service in question
In general the following uses are considered to have priority corresponding to their order:
1. Club work
2. University work
3. General education
4. General computing including gaming
Appendix B: Door Group Manual <a name="door_manual"></a>
-----------------------------
The following is intended as a quick reference guide for Door members
- Contact numbers
	- Security (Emergency): (6488) 2222
	- Security (Non-emergency): (6488) 3020
	- UWA Medical Centre: (6488) 2118
	- Note: 6488 prefix is not required on campus landlines
- See the [Instructions for Signing Up New Members](https://wiki.ucc.asn.au/HowToCommittee/NewMembers)
- Dispense cheat sheet:
	- `dispense username +1000 "money in safe bag 14"` will add 1000 cents ($10.00) to the account 'username' with a note saying that the cash has been put in the safe in money bag number 14
	- `/home/other/coke/cokelog` or `~coke/cokelog` contain logs of dispense activity
		- Browse the file with `less ~coke/cokelog`, press q to quit the less program
		- See the bottom (most recent) few lines with `tail ~coke/cokelog`
		- Search for occurrences of "mytext" using `grep "mytext" ~coke/cokelog`
	- `dispense refund username coke:3` will refund the account 'username' for a purchase of the item in slot 3 of the coke machine, and similarly for `snack:` and `pseudo:`
	- `dispense slot snack:23 120 "tiny teddies"` will rename slot 23 of the snack machine to "tiny teddies" and set its price to 120 cents ($1.20)
	- `man dispense` or `dispense --help` will show full documentation of the `dispense` command
- Door members are able to dispense the 'door' item and so unlock the electronic door lock by:
	- Logging into the snack machine and entering item code 55
	- Logging into any club machine with 'dispense' installed and running the command `dispense door`
- If you are the last Door member leaving the room and closing up:
	- Bin any litter
	- Make sure all members and their property are out of the room
	- Turn off:
		- Lights
		- Fan
		- Soldering iron
	- Close and lock:
		- Tool cupboard
		- Machine room
		- Windows
		- Room door
	- If Cameron Hall is empty close the fire escape and lock the doors at the top and bottom of the front stair well
- In the event of a fire or other emergency, evacuate in accordance with [University Emergency Procedures](https://www.safety.uwa.edu.au/incidents-injuries-emergency/procedures), closing the room if it is empty and safe to do so
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 21:03 on 2018-09-19*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-09-12
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
## Late:
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
## Apologies:
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Mentioned:
- Hayden of the Tav
- Finn Murphy of UniSFA
- [PJA], [AJT], [DBA], [*OX], [DAA], [BOB], [LLL]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Meeting opened at 13.01*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-09-05
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Report delivered late.
- Nothing to report.
## Vice President's Report
- Saw some network things, [CFE] fixed them, so that's good.
- Lot of assessments last week.
- How awesome a person is is inversely proportional to [redacted].
   - Our committee is therefore very awesome.
- *[CHB] arrives 13:04.*
## Secretary's Report
- Been busy.
- Organised a bunch of tech talks, see events
- Sent emails about things
   - Tavern (halloween & anniversary dinner)
      - Spoke to Hayden, see events
   - Maltair replacement (see general business)
   - OGM minutes (for committee review)
   - Square stuff (see general business)
- Updated guide for new members, added door group to AD so door can now add users directly
- There _is_ a technique for loading things into the snack machine so they don't get stuck
- Got a refund for overcharged items at coles, please reimburse me $277.30 for snack run last week.
   - Don't have the receipt yet.
   - [CHB] Motion to reimburse [FVP] $277.30 upon receipt of the receipt.
      - [THA] seconds.
      - Motion passes: 4 in favour, 1 abstains.
- Checked the mail.
## Treasurer's Report
- Absent.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Absent.
## OCM Reports
- [CHB] Thinking of things to 3D print for possible charity vigil tutorial, taking suggestions.
    - [JWB] Suggestion: mini pokemon.
    - Am told by [GOZ] that anything printable in spiral vase mode will go much faster.
- [THA] I've been working on inventorying stuff.
    - Going to write a daemon which sends periodic reports of hardware/usage stats.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Servers are serving.
## Network
- Walnut (newish 10G switch) died again yesterday, broke our network, fixed by rebooting it.
   - Walnut is still under warranty, if firmware upgrade doesn't fix it then we can get a replacement.
- [PJA] is having connection issues with the UCC wifi on Windows 10.
   - [FVP] Windows 10 is broken, certificate validation issues and recent updates removing options from Network & Sharing Centre make things more painful than they should be.
   - *[GOZ] arrives and [JWB] leaves at 13:18.*
   - Can be fixed on a per-computer basis either by adding the connection manually and disabling certificate verification, or by manually installing the UCC CA certificate.
## Desktops
- Porcupine is now functional, graphics cable was the problem.
   - Pending SOE setup?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- Generous "donation" of a wooden toolbox by [DBA].
   - Could be used as a lost property box?
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- We are out of a bunch of drinks, including coke zero.
   - We have a lot of normal coke but not much else.
   - [THA] Could we just swap the coke slots with coke zero, since we sell more of it?
- TODO: [THA] Organise a drinks run.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- Memes.
- [Secretarial note: SOC meeting this evening at 18:00, was not discussed during meeting.]
## Other Affairs
- No news from Electrolux. They still have our aircon.
Events
======
## Movie nights
- [LCY] Spoken to the real Finn Murphy, contact has been made.
- UniSFA isn't running movie nights at this point in semester, people are just too busy.
## Vive Nights
- Not happening this week, everyone who normally runs them is not here.
## Charity Vigil
- Event is on Facebook.
- Subcommittee meeting next Thursday 5pm.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- No meeting planned yet.
- [FVP] has spoken to the Tav, things seem in order.
## Relay for Life
- [LCY] has published the UCC Facebook event, UWAnime hasn't published it yet.
   - Need to invite friends so people know about it.
- To register, speak to [LLL] from UWAnime.
- TODO: [LCY] Send email about Relay for Life.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-20)
- [FVP] spoke to Hayden at the Tav, next available date was Saturday 20th October, weekend before last week of semester.
- Need to write an EMP, the Tav has a standing RMP.
   - TODO: [FVP] Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October.
   - TODO: [CHB] Write the EMP once Tav is booked.
## Build-A-3D-Printer
- [GOZ] I am not going to have time for the forseeable future.
- [AJT] seems to know how it works, [GOZ] can respond to questions about how to print things.
## How to UCC
- [CHB] Decided that it would be best done next semester.
## Study Events for all CITS units
- No reply from CSSC to email last month.
## Tech talks
- [*OX] - "Contributing to Open Source", Tuesday 18th September (?)
   - Prereq: 1+ CS unit or equivalent
- [DAA] - "Dragging shells into the 90s", Tuesday 2nd October
- [DAA] - (undecided, probably UCC infrastructure related), Tuesday 16th October
- TODO: [THA] Make Facebook events and send emails to [email protected].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-09-05
============================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *not done*.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event - *not done*.
#### [JWB]
- Send email & make facebook event for Charity Vigil - *partially done*.
   - Still need to send emails.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- Continue writing camp network documentation.
#### [FVP]
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner - *done*.
   - sent an email on the weekend
- Organise tech talk with [*OX] - *done*
   - and another with [DAA], see events
- Send email about Square proposal to tech@ - *done*.
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
#### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life - *done*.
- Make graphics for Cerberus (4:3) and Facebook for Relay for Life - *done*.
   - TODO: [FVP] Update cerberus with relay for life and charity vigil.
- Send email & make facebook event for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am - *partially done*.
   - Still need to send email.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations - *ongoing*.
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *in progress*.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Review and re-vote rules, regulations and guidelines (some of which have been previously called policies)
    - Constitutional policies are not committee matters, they can only be changed at a general meeting.
    - [GOZ] Rewriting the current regulations is much better than reapproving them as-is.
        - Network account usage guidelines: should be made clear on the membership form.
        - Account locking guidelines: accounts should not be for disciplinary reasons, needs a rewrite.
        - Coke group and door group are now one group, I've rewritten the guidelines.
        - Winadmin & sprocket have no guidelines.
        - Webmaster has not been used according to guidelines in years, it can just die.
        - [GOZ] presents a draft of updated policies he has written.
           - Essentially a 5-line set of door regulations accompanied by a set of guidelines.
           - Something similar for wheel.
    - *[JWB] arrives 14:11.*
    - *Heated discussion about nature of regulations/guidelines ensues.*
    - [THA] Procedural motion to delay discussion of any changes to regulations and guidelines of door and wheel within 15 days, and that an email outlining said changes of regulations and guidelines shall be sent to the UCC members to which the regulations and guidelines pertain within 5 days.
        - [LCY] seconds.
        - [GOZ] Can we cut it down to 1 week, 2 weeks is excessive.
        - [JWB] Anything less than 1.5 weeks is far too short notice, at least 13 days is better?
        - [THA] We should be able to email members in advance so that people have time to discuss things.
        - Motion passes: 5 in favour, 1 against.
    - [FVP] Motion to approve the [existing and unmodified] Wheel Group Ethical Guidelines, "Group Guidelines" (specifically including wheel and door guidelines), Network Account Usage Guidelines, Group Admission Guidelines, Account Locking Guidelines and Door Group "Policy" (henceforth renamed to Regulations), as listed on https://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/policies_.ucc.
        - [THA] seconds.
        - [GOZ] I am voting against this motion because I believe that blanket approval of regulations is not in line with the spirit of the motion made at the recent general meeting.
        - Motion passes: 5 in favour, 1 against.
    - Documents which committee considers outdated but have been approved as-is:
        - Group guidelines document (coke, door, ftpmaster, webmaster, wheel)
        - Account locking guidelines
        - Door group regulations
        - Network account usage guidelines
        - Group admission guidelines
    - Documents which have been instated by committee and are considered up to date without modification:
        - Wheel Group Ethical Guidelines
- Door applications
   - [osterguard]
      - [FVP] Motion to add [osterguard] to door.
         - [LCY] seconds.
         - Motion passes: 4 in favour, 2 abstain.
   - [GIR]
      - [GOZ] Motion to add [GIR] to door.
         - [THA] seconds
         - Motion passes unanimously.
- Budget for replacement maltair.
   - [FVP] Looks like [this ebay item](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/IBM-X3550-M4-SERVER/282841269738) is the best option for replacement parts.
   - Costs $500 upfront, would essentially be a replacement motherboard for Maltair
   - [BOB]'s offer of $200 was rejected, [FVP] has offered $320, results pending.
   - [THA] Motion to budget $550 for replacement [parts for] Maltair.
      - [LCY] seconds.
      - Motion passes: 5 in favour, 1 abstains.
- *Meeting closed at 15:05.*
  
Current Action Items
====================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
#### [JWB]
- Send email for Charity Vigil.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- Continue writing camp network documentation.
#### [FVP]
- Confirm tech talk with [*OX].
- Confirm booking of the Tav for 20th October & Tav catering.
- Update cerberus with relay for life and charity vigil.
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
#### [LCY]
- Send email for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am.
- Send email about Relay for Life.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- Submit EMP for Anniversary Dinner (pending Tav booking confirmation).
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- Organise a drinks run.
- Make Facebook events for tech talks and send emails to [email protected].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 18:27 on 2018-09-15*

Ordinary General Meeting minutes Tuesday 4th September
======================================================
**Meeting opened 14:10.**
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [EED] Alistair Mcleod
- [NTU] Nick Bannon
- [THA] Tom Almeida
- [krish36] Tristan Hancock
- [jimbo] James Arcus
- [jsullivan] Jasmine Sullivan
- [ASS] Chase Houghton
- [DOC] Vincent Dalstra
- [TAY] Taylor Home
- [DAS] Donald Sutherland
- [PJA] Peter Allnutt
- [TBB] Alfred Burgress
- [DBA] David Adams
## Arrived late:
- [GIR] Caira Bayman [Fresher Rep]
- [beejay98] Braden Thorne
- [guilren] Chris Scherini
- [JDN] Jordan Meerwald
Committee reports
=================
## President's Report
- Thankfully not much on the agenda today.
- *[JDN] arrives 14:11.*
- I'm not going to report anything so I don't waste anyone's time.
   - UCC is somewhat better. Go UCC!
## Vice President's Report
- I continue to be disappointed by the clubs that get affiliated.
## Secretary's Report
- Things are going in the right direction.
## Treasurer's Report
- Accounts:
   - Guild: $2970.26
   - Mastercard: $81.23
   - Cheque: $4266.58
- *[GIR] and [beejay98] arrive 14:13.*
- [TAY] Who is the biggest spender right now?
   - Question is not answered since details are not available.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Nothing to report.
## OCM Reports
- [LCY] has nothing specifically to report.
- [CHB] has nothing to report.
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
- [GOZ] There are machines, we are a technical club, this is not usually on the agenda.
Election of Ordinary Committee Member
=====================================
- [GOZ] explains what happened; [KAT] retired, and a new OCM must be elected.
- Appointment of returning officers.
   - [GOZ] nominate [NTU] as returning officer.
      - [TBB] seconds.
      - [NTU] accepts.
      - Motion passes.
   - [GOZ] nominates [DAS] as returning officer.
      - [PJA] seconds.
      - [DAS] accepts.
      - Motion passes.
   - [TAY] Procedural motion to no longer require seconds on motions in the meeting.
      - [GOZ] seconds.
      - Motion passes.
   - *Chris arrives 14:24.*
- Standing nominations:
   - [TFD] has nominated for the position
   - [PJA] nominates [TBB], accepts.
   - [JWB] nominates [THA], accepts.
   - [TAY] nominates [DBA], accepts.
- Candidates give their speeches
   - [TFD], speech delivered in absentia by [GOZ]
      - Tim is a recent graduate from the university
      - Has been around UCC for 6 years and will be around until at least halfway through next year.
      - Has a lot of time.
      - Has taken interest in rearranging the room and selling off some of our old sun machines.
   - [TBB] I've been around the club for a long time.
      - Has committee experience, including at UCC, and is on committees of other clubs.
   - [THA] I'm Tom, in 3rd year doing software engineering.
      - Been a part of the club since coming to UWA.
      - Currently on door and winadmin/sprocket, so apparently I'm considered reliable by most of committee, and went to the same school as rest of committee as well.
   - [DBA] David Adams
      - *Conversation about TLAs ensues, [DBA] chooses the TLA [DBA].*
      - Going to keep it short & sharp.
      - I'm a fresher, I think it is one of the best clubs at UWA and want to get involved in running things.
- Questions
   - [LCY] Question for nominees: Do you have a car?
      - [TBB] I have a nice car.
      - [DBA] has a license but not a car.
      - [THA] has both a car and a license.
      - [TFD] has not yet got a learner's permit.
   - [jsullivan] Will you be planning to hold the position until the next AGM?
      - [TBB] Yes.
      - [DBA] Yes.
      - [THA] Yes.
      - [TFD] Yes.
   - [GOZ] What other committee positions do you currently hold?
      - [TBB] Tenancy and JapSoc, both OCM.
      - [DBA] Fresher rep for SPACE, OCM for Makers.
      - [THA] OCM for Programming Competition Society (PCS).
      - [TFD] is not on any other committees.
   - [GOZ] Do you plan to run for an executive position next year?
      - [TBB] No.
      - [DBA] No.
      - [THA] Maybe.
      - [TFD] No.
- [NTU] and [DAS] explain the voting procedure.
- Candidates leave the room.
   - Votes are called for the candidates.
   - Candidates are called back into the room.
   - [DAS] Please welcome your new OCM, [THA]!
   - Returning officers return proceedings to the chair ([GOZ]).
General Business
================
- [TAY] First thing of many things I've written down: Decision earlier this year by committee to interpret "policy" in committee.
   - Right now, a "Policy" [constitutional] must be voted by a majority in a general meeting.
   - This means that standing policies could be in place and effective between committee years.
   - [GOZ] explains the constitutional context behind the discussion.
      - Constitution is ambiguous about whether or not committee is able to create policies which are binding for future committees.
      - Committee has sole power of interpretation over the constitution.
      - Committee thus interpreted the constitution such that the existing "standing policies" were able to continue to be valid.
   - [NTU] Constitutionally-defined "Policy" is not a recent modification to the constitution.
      - Some documents that had previously been called "guidelines" were updated, and ambiguously referred to as "policies".
   - [TAY] What is generally considered good practise is to let the existing standing policies expire at the AGM, and then re-approve them as necessary.
      -  - [NTU] Point of order: until recently, there were no well documented Constitutional Policies. Other things are "guidelines", "rules", "regulations", etc.
   - [TAY] Essentially this decision means that committee can create standing committee regulations for an indefinite amount of time and these are virtually the same as a Constitutional Policy.
	  - [JWB] No, that is wrong, they have never been the same and have entirely different restrictions.
   - [TAY] We should make sure that these policies get properly re-approved at every AGM.
      - [GOZ] Last year's committee thought that policies needed to be reinstated and never actually got around to it themselves.
   - [TAY] Motion to require committee to do a re-vote of any current regulations / whatever is called a "policy" within a next 10 days.
      - [NTU] There is nothing that would force us to do this, but it is a good practise and it improves documentation.
	  - Motion passes, 2 abstentions and 1 against.
- [TAY] With the whole door regulations shenanigans, there have been new door regulations in the works. Any progress?
   - [JWB] At the last committee meeting, I said that it was in progress and I am fairly sure I shared it with committee.
      - [TAY] It's been a semester and I think that this is kind of important, something should be happening.
         - Door members as a group of people should be keeping the clubroom good and welcoming.
         - Review of door members is important to make sure that they are doing their job.
      - [JWB] Summary of changes to the standing regulation:
         - Want to make it easier for door members to keep control of the room
         - Short term doorings (without having to send an email) were unofficially a thing but now they are part of the "policy" [sic].
      - Only having to attend 2 or 3 cleanups.
   - *[LDT] arrives 14:55.*
   - [TAY] A lot of discussion in the past about how strict door regulations should be, what constitutes being on door and so on.
      - IMO, having been a president in the past, it's good to have a small set of regulations accompanied by some more detailed/helpful guidelines.
   - [NTU] Clearly names do make a difference especially when it comes to rules lawyering.
      - "Door group" is defined as a set of members that are formally trusted to make good judgement calls about the guidelines.
      - Pre-incorporation, these things were called "guidelines", now they are called something else.
	   - If door members don't make good judgement calls, then committee can remove them from door.
	   - [GOZ] I would prefer to see "spirit of the law" guidelines.
         - [TAY] explains how the Unigames "gatekeepers" use this kind of system.
   - [jsullivan] Do you have a "how to door" type document anywhere?
      - You can't expect people to know what is appropriate and what is not.
      - [GOZ] The "policy" [sic] document is the only documentation currently.
      - [JWB] There is a "Door Group Handbook" as appendix A to the Door "policy" [sic].
   - [TAY] LOLCATDOG is more geared around the technical requirements of being on door and not so much about the social requirements.
      - It is important to ensure that UCC maintains a welcoming atmosphere and follows university guidelines, ethical, social etc.
      - Being more open to freshers, women, people you don't know, and so on.
   - [GOZ] I am of the opinion that we should purge the door group every semester, and hold a "welcome to door" event so people know what to do.
   - [PJA] Door members should be required to to come to committee meetings after application so that committee can ask them questions.
   - [TAY] Cull of door members is one of the things that people don't like to do because they're lazy;
      - But this is an OGM so may as well do a motion of some sort...
      - [krish36] Once you get added to door, do you stay on forever?
         - [GOZ] You generally only get removed if you mess up (ie. missing cleanups) and get caught.
      - [NTU] We could postpone any purge of door until the next AGM or some time with sufficiently long notice.
      - [JWB] There are no practical reasons to need to purge and reappoint door, we do not function like Unigames or UniSFA.
      - [jsullivan] This process allows a distinction to be made in people's motivation for being on door;
         - Some people really want to be on door to help the club and there are also those who simply want to be on door for the sake of it and don't take their responsibility seriously.
      - [LDT] For the other clubs, being on "door" is an issue of whether or not the club continues to trust a person.
         - For UCC, however, the position of being on door is actually quite technical, and to be a good door member requires a reasonable amount of skill.
      - [jimbo] I wouldn't agree that asking someone to reapply once and maybe occasionally going forward can be considered "treating them like sh\*t".
      - [TAY] I agree with [jimbo], when people sign up there is an understanding that there are certain requirements for the position.
         - I don't think anyone would argue that gatekeepers or CCC are treated badly when asked to reapply.
         - Maybe UCC needs to reevaluate whether or not a technical quiz should be the only way to apply - perhaps they should get socially competent people onto door and then teach them the technical side of things.
      - [PJA] Change the reapplication process so people only have a short interview rather than a full application.
      - [JWB] There are people on door that are important for the club who feel like they are being treated like sh\*t.
      - [GOZ] rejects further input as meeting is going overtime, proceeding to motion.
      - [TAY] Motion to do a full wipe and reappointment of the door group within the next 20 days.
         - Committee can choose to reappoint door members who have recently sent in a reapplication.
         - Motion fails: 10 in favour, 8 against and 3 abstain.
- [TAY] There really should be a regulation that says that Wheel exists and what their rights and responsibilities are.
   - *[jimbo] and [krish36] leave at 15:22.*
   - [NTU] The group guidelines for door, wheel, etc are on the website.
   - [THA] We should discuss this in the future, at the next AGM perhaps, since we are running out of time.
   - [FVP] As a new wheel member myself, I would agree that the documentation about wheel is hard to find and isn't in a format readily accessible for non-wheel or non-technical members.
   - [TAY] The general perception is that wheel is some kind of illuminati and its operations are quite opaque.
   - [GOZ] Meeting is running overtime, need to close the meeting now, unless we have a motion then meeting is closed.
      - No formal motion is presented;
- **Meeting closed at 15.25**
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 22:14 on 2018-09-11*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-09-05
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
- [THA] Tom Hill Almeida  [OCM]
## Late:
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
## Apologies:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
## Mentioned:
- [*OX], [strax], [PJA], [osterguard]
*Meeting opened at 13.14*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-08-29
- OGM minutes have yet to be pushed, pending committee review
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Not here.
## Vice President's Report
- Still continue to be disappointed in clubs that get affiliated, incredibly disappointing.
   - Very little has changed since yesterday.
   - *[LCY] arrives 13:15*.
## Secretary's Report
- Did snack run with [strax], snack machine is now full.
- Sent an email to new door members, added to mailing list.
- Bought a square reader and did some experiments
   - The app becomes extremely fussy about security shenanigans when you process actual card transactions, but it works fine and is pretty cool when tested with an iPhone.
   - In other words, using any custom Android device would be totally impractical, we have to use a phone or tablet running stock Android/iOS
   - Suggested device is Nokia 3.1 phone (Android 8) for under $250 or older version for a little cheaper.
      - [Nokia 3](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/BNIB-Nokia-3-TA-1020-Single-Sim-White-Unlocked-AU-STOCK-5-OFF-w-PENNY5/273437586843) - $155
      - [Nokia 3.1](https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/BRAND-NEW-NOKIA-3-1-2GB-16GB-DUAL-SIM-SIM-FREE-UNLOCKED-WHITE/332724479845) - $209
   - TODO: [FVP] Send Square stuff to tech.
- Got a reply from the Tav, it is already booked on Oct 5th, need to find another venue
- Sent emails about tech talks
   - [*OX] can do one about "Contributing to Open Source", sounds pretty cool
       - Suggested dates Tuesday 18/07/2018 or Thursday 20/07/2018, late afternoon to early evening
- Made a rudimentary handover checklist at https://wiki.ucc.asn.au/HowToCommittee/#Handover
## Treasurer's Report
- Money is the same as yesterday.
- Accounts:
   - Guild: $2970.26
   - Mastercard: $81.23
   - Cheque: $4266.58
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Sent in a door application, 5 seconds ago!
## OCM Reports
- [CHB] thought about events, see events.
- [LCY] has no report.
- [THA] got elected.
   - Put coke zero into the machine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Serving.
- New domain controller `samurai` is functional.
## Network
- Net works.
## Desktops
- Porcupine has been built, operating system needs to be installed.
- Napoli has been squeezed onto the desk next to Pinball.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- We have a new OCM.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- Somewhat functional 3D printer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- Nothing.
- TODO: [LCY] Send email & make facebook event for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am.
## Other Affairs
- No news from Electrolux.
- Email about graduate opportunities.
Events
======
## Movie nights
- Finn Murphy from UniSFA is their movie night representative.
- [LCY] has attempted to contact them, yet to receive further info.
## Vive Nights
- Not happening tonight, nobody available to run it.
## Charity Vigil
- First weekend of midterm break, 22-23 September
- TODO: [JWB] Send email & make facebook event for Charity Vigil.
- UCC volunteers needed to run things on the day.
    - [FVP] can come.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Need to plan the next meeting, no further news.
## Relay for Life
- Still need to make an event / email etc.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-05)
- Tav is booked Friday 5th October.
   - Find out when the Tav is available during October to find an alternative date.
   - If Tav not available then try Hackett Cafe.
## Build-A-3D-Printer
- [GOZ] isn't here.
## How to UCC
- [CHB] Remind me, or anyone else interested, to run a How to UCC event.
    - I don't have time to organise this week.
		- Intended to be a tutorial style event using practical applications to teach our members how to read man pages and use the wiki.
		- Possibly 1 free drink or some similar prize for attendees, provided they work out how to dispense it.
		- Likely covers same content as Learn2Linux.
		- Should run this every semester.
    - [JWB] Too late to run it this semester.
## Study Events for all CITS units
- Starting at 5, going until late.
- In the Loft.
- After study break before assignments are due.
   - CITS1402 assignment due week 10.
## Tech talks
- [*OX] can do one about "Contributing to Open Source"
   - Tuesday 18/07/2018 or Thursday 20/07/2018, late afternoon to early evening
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-08-29
============================
### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
### [JWB]
- Finalise updated door regulations - *done*
- Make a Facebook event for Charity Vigil - *not done*.
### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *not done*.
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *not done*.
   - [JWB] That's been an action item since the beginning of the year, can [THA] do it?
   - TODO: [THA] Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
- Write camp network documentation - *in progress*.
### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
### [FVP]
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner.
- Organise tech talk with [*OX] - *in progress*.
   - See events.
- Add [THA] and [PJA] to door - *done*.
### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions - *in progress*.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner - *not done*.
   - Don't really have time.
### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life - *not done*.
- Make graphics for Cerberus (4:3) and Facebook for Relay for Life - *not done*.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Door applications
   - [osterguard] Jade Howett
   - [GIR] Caira Bayman
   - Both applications were submitted less than 48 hours ago and so will be delayed until next week.
- All policies must be reviewed by next week.
*Meeting closed at 14:04.*
  
Current Action Items
====================
#### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
#### [JWB]
- Send email & make facebook event for Charity Vigil.
#### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- Continue writing camp network documentation.
#### [FVP]
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner.
- Organise tech talk with [*OX].
- Send email about Square proposal to tech@.
#### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions - *in progress*.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
#### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life.
- Make graphics for Cerberus (4:3) and Facebook for Relay for Life.
- Send email & make facebook event for busybee on 29th September, starting at 11am.
#### [CHB]
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
#### [THA]
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 22:15 on 2018-09-06*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-08-29
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
## Late:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
## Mentioned:
- [BOB], [*OX], [TPG], [THA], [PJA], [KAT]
- Wine Appreciation Club (WAC)
- Computer Science Students Club (CSSC)
- UniSFA
- UWA Tavern
----
*Meeting opened at 13.03*
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Absent, report delivered late.
## Vice President's Report
- Miserably sick.
- Did admin stuff for Vive Night
    - EMP was submitted last night, probably hasn't been approved yet but that's fine.
    - Loft booking for next week.
    - Game we are going to play on 
- Sent the email to WAC
## Secretary's Report
- Did a bunch of crate sorting
   - Found some arcane and ancient "multiplier boards" on the shelf
     - Now placed on top of wooden Alpha box under desk in antistatic bags 
   - Tempted to resurrect "What is that?" email series
   - Note we have an entire crate full of old/broken keyboards.
   - 2 Logitech headsets found and added to collection in audio/mice/controllers crate
   - Only one "misc bits" box which includes stuff like SATA and PSU cables, among much else.
   - Would be nice to have another large cupboard to replace 3rd rack in machine room.
   - Would also be nice to have another 4 or so crates to store papery things currently decaying in cardboard boxes
- Want to bring back Napoli with a new SSD and a fresh install of OS X
   - Budget for new SSD? Or I just use one of 2 spare 120G SSDs lying around...
   - Already installed OS X using an old SSD (which works)
   - We don't seem to have any apple mice apart from one particularly ugly USB ball mouse.
- Sent email asking about tech talks
   - [\*OX] can do talks on just about anything between 08/09/2018 and 08/10/2018 (probably Julia programming)
      - TODO: [FVP] organise tech talk with [\*OX].
- Doing a snackrun with Tom later.
- Emailed CSSC
- Talked to UniSFA, no news yet
- No reply from Tav yet.
- Checked the mail, no new mail.
## Treasurer's Report
- Broke my email, so I have a week worth of emails to read through.
- *[GOZ] arrives 13:11.*
- Accounts:
   - Guild: $2970.26
   - Cheque: $5310.46
   - Mastercard: $81.23
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Was sick last week, like dying sick.
- Still need to coordinate CITS study sessions.
- Next CITS1402 project is due week 11.
   - [GOZ] contacted CITS coordinator about information sharing for teaching purposes, was denied.
- Running vive night tonight, and ran one last time.
## OCM Reports
- CHB is absent.
### [LCY]
- All the things I haven't done since last week I will do very shortly.
- Following UniSFA on Facebook, looking for news about movie nights.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- [CFE]'s email is broken, everything else should be fine.
- [GOZ] VM hosting at UCC is getting super dodgy, PCS VM was running out of memory.
- *[CHB] arrives 13:17*.
## Network
- Walnut to Bitumen LACP link (between our two primary network switches) died on the weekend, splitting the network in half.
   - That was not fun, a lot of stuff broke.
   - Thanks to [TPG] for coming in and fixing it.
## Desktops
- Porcupine has been stripped in preparation for new parts.
   - [BOB] has ordered new parts.
- Napoli is setup working with latest version of OS X (High Sierra).
   - Also connected to the domain but home directories are likely broken.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- 2 sets of headphones (technically not new) found in the machine room somewhere.
   - [GIR] We should get some *nice* headphones for the Vive.
      - [GOZ] There is an official audio head strap for the Vive.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- [FVP] is doing a snack run later.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- Next busybee has been set, week after Charity Vigil.
## Other Affairs
- No news from Electrolux.
- No response from Wine Appreciation Club.
Events
======
## Movie nights
- Remain dead for now, pending news from UniSFA.
## Vive Nights
- Alive.
## Charity Vigil
- Next meeting on Friday.
- Proposed regulations did not pass, no votes in favour.
- Charity is "Youth Focused".
- New representatives from Panto.
- $5 entry price, door purchases only.
- [KAT] has made some draft graphics for posters.
- TODO: [JWB] Make a Facebook event.
- Subcommittee agreed to budget up to $30 for printing posters.
- Activities:
   - Space timetable has been produced so we can plan who needs what space when.
   - [GOZ] may be able to bring their Vive so we can play multiplayer.
- Need to look for sponsors and prizes.
   - [GOZ] will go to PLE at some point and try to get a sponsorship.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Last meeting was on Saturday, [GIR] attended
- Can't do any solid planning yet because the Tav hasn't replied.
- Storage for decorations: Panto doesn't want to store them so alternative locations are required.
- Seems to be going well.
## Relay for Life
- Pre-event needs to be sorted out.
   - [GOZ] Getting nerds to run is hard, getting them to play games and donate money is easier.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner (2018-10-05)
- Waiting on email from Tav.
- Need to make advertising material and EMP.
- TODO: [GIR] Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
## Build-A-3D-Printer
- UCC's printer has been built, works quite well.
- [GOZ] would like to bring their 3D printer along to run an event.
- Filament costs: Until it becomes a significant expense for the club ($100+ per year) it will remain free to encourage people to try using it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-08-22
============================
### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *not done*.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event - *not done*.
- Coordinate snack run at some point - *done by [FVP]*.
- Purchase new computer bits - *done by [BOB]*.
### [JWB]
- Finalise updated door policy.
- Figure out how to fix Facebook group and do so.
   - From next year, start a "UCC Freshers" and an overarching UCC group.
### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *ongoing*.
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *very not done*.
   - If you put things somewhere in /home/other/committee, they will eventually end up on the web.
- Write camp network documentation - *in progress*.
### [FVP]
- Make some graphics material for Relay for Life advertising - *not done*.
   - TODO: [LCY] Make graphics for Cerberus (4:3) and Facebook.
- Send emails asking about tech talks - *done*.
- Contact CSSC about running collaborative study events - *done*.
   - [GOZ] talked to CSSC, found out that most of them don't know about UCC, we might see some of them around sometime.
   - [FVP] sent an email to [email protected], maybe we will get a response eventually.
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner.
   - Still no reply from the Tav, seems Hayden (Tav events person) is very busy.
### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- Discuss moving the machine room.
   - [GOZ] Meetings are probably the most inefficient way to discuss this.
   - **Suggestions are welcome.**
   - TODO: [CHB] Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
- New aircon has yet to be named.
   - [JWB] wants to call it "Patagonia".
   - Committee is in consensus.
- Door applications
   - [THA] Thomas Hill Almedia
      - Previously was on door, was kicked off because apologies were sent directly to secretary as opposed to committee@ by email.
      - [GOZ] Motion to add [THA] to door.
         - [JWB] seconds.
         - Motion passes unanimously.
   - [PJA] Peter Allnutt
      - *[GOZ] grills [PJA] about "bad responses" in door application.*
         - 20 minutes later, grilling intensifies.
         - *[GOZ] grills [CFE] about Active Directory.*
      - *[GOZ]'s grilling finishes at 14:03.*
      - [JWB] Motion to add [PJA] to door.
         - [LCY] seconded.
         - Motion passes unanimously.
   - TODO: [FVP] Add [THA] and [PJA] to door.
- Deepthought (UniSFA computer) should have wheel keys installed and/or be joined to the domain.
   - [GOZ] It was installed with the understanding that it could be disconnected from the network at any time.
      - Worst case, we disconnect it from the network if we notice that UniSFA has violated network terms of usage.
   - [JWB] We should have the ability to do things to the computers on the network 
- tpg: Discuss a policy for other clubs using UCC network (related to Deepthought), should require UCC have a suitable level of control over the target machine (and potentially MAC-based hardware lockdown)
   - [GOZ] MAC based lockdown makes sense.
   - [GOZ] There is no more reason for us to have access to it than for UWA to have access to our systems.
- UWA Sport wants to coordinate with us to organise more eSport events.
   - [JWB] There's not a lot you can do which matches their criteria of 15-20 minute games.
      - Rocket league is pretty much one of the only good optinos.
   - [GOZ] A lot of effort for not much gain.
- Buy airhorn.
   - [JWB] Motion to budget $20 to buy an airhorn.
      - [FVP] seconds.
      - Motion passes, 4 in favour, 3 against.
*Meeting closed at 14:12.*
  
Current Action Items
====================
  
### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
### [JWB]
- Finalise updated door policy.
- Make a Facebook event for Charity Vigil.
### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive.
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines.
   - If you put things somewhere in /home/other/committee, they will eventually end up on the web.
- Write camp network documentation.
- Facilitate discussions about machine room renovations.
### [FVP]
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner.
- Organise tech talk with [*OX].
- Add [THA] and [PJA] to door.
### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
- Make a poster for Anniversary Dinner.
### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life.
- Make graphics for Cerberus (4:3) and Facebook for Relay for Life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 14:49 on 2018-08-29*

UCC Committee Meeting Minutes 2018-08-22
========================================
Attendance:
===========
## Present:
- [CFE] Zack Wong         [Treasurer]
- [FVP] Felix von Perger  [Secretary]
- [LCY] Chien Yi Lo       [OCM]
- [CHB] Alden Bong        [OCM]
## Late:
- [GOZ] Andrew Gozzard    [President]
## Apologies:
- [JWB] William Chesnutt  [Vice President]
- [GIR] Caira Bayman      [Fresher Rep]
## Mentioned:
- [BIG], [KAT], [LDT], [AJT], [BOB], [TFD]
- Nadia from Unigames
- UWA Tavern
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Meeting opened at 13:24:03*
## Confirmation of minutes from 2018-08-15
- Minutes seem good.
Committee Reports
=================
## President's Report
- Report delivered late.
- Parking is some kind of nonsense.
- Spent a lot of time doing *stuff*.
## Vice President's Report
- Not here.
## Secretary's Report
- Checked the mail yesterday, nothing in the mail.
- Sent email to UWA Tavern about catering & venue hire, no response so far.
- Tried to installed Android on a bunch of things, somewhat successful.
- Busy and sick.
## Treasurer's Report
- If we have more than $3000 in Guild account then we earn interest, need to deposit another $30.
- Accounts:
   - Cheque: $5151.80
   - Mastercard: $81.23
   - Guild: $2970.26
- Had tests this week and another one next week, have not had time to do much.
- Been working on automating dispense log parsing, considerable progress has been made.
## Fresher Rep's Report
- Not here.
## OCM Reports
- [CHB] contacted UWAnime, see "/Events/Relay for Life".
   - No Facebook event link has been posted yet.
- [LCY] Sent 2 emails to ucc-announce now!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Technical Reports
=========================
## Servers
- Maltair is still dead.
## Network
- Net is working.
## Desktops
- Group policy _seems_ to work on Cobra, Catfish, Corvo and Cichlid (but not Corydoras...?)
    - Need to have a look at it, seems like it has auth / firewall issues.
	- [BIG] tried rejoining Corydoras to the domain, still not working.
- *[GOZ] arrives at 13:29:54.*
## Misc.
- Audio on eggman keeps turning itself off because people set it to AUX and not back to Eggman.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New equipment
=============
- Nothing new.
- [CFE] still needs to look for new monitors.
- Porcupine: Suggestions by [BOB] seem decent.
   - *[FVP] reads out [BOB]'s email*
   - *Committee discusses technical details.*
   - [CFE] Motion to budget $1200 for a new desktop.
      - [LCY] seconds.
	  - Motion passes unanimously.
   - TODO: [GOZ] Purchase new computer bits.
      - [GOZ] needs to go past PLE at some point.
	  - [GOZ] can also ask about sponsorship.
Drinks and Snacks
=================
- We have a fair amount of drinks, except for pasito.
- Some snacks in the machine room but we need to get some more variety.
   - TODO: [GOZ] Coordinate snack run at some point.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
External Entities
=================
## Mail
- No mail.
## Guild/SOC
- SOC meeting was last week, [JWB] attended on behalf of UCC but is presently absent
   - *[GOZ] rattles off a bunch of things that happened during the meeting.*
   - New SOC Treasurer
   - Alumni fund grant focused on things that "enhance student experience"
   - UWA School Engagement Team wants to work with clubs to provide activities for High School students
   - New club was affiliated: Telethon Kids UWA
   - SPACE had a stargazing talk.
   - Someone had a speech/rant about UWA moving to 12-week semesters.
   - Multicultural week: opportunities for collaborations between clubs.
   - Fringe festival is in aid of Relay for Life.
   - 96 second video of the "Fringe Afterparty"
- *[GOZ] walks out at 13:57:47, arrives 13:58:21.*
## Other Affairs
- Nothing worth discussing yet.
Events
======
## Movie nights
- UniSFA seems interested in joint movie nights
- Tips from Simon from [KAT]:
   - Book the loft during movie nights to we can make sure people stay quiet.
- Assign UCC representative for movie nights.
- [LCY] is assigned as UCC representative.
## Vive Nights
- Last week's event went well.
- [CFE] will run another one this week.
## Sysadmin "Tech-talk" workshop
- [FVP] No way I'm going to have time for anything fun this semester, not going to happen.
- [CFE] Maybe first semester next year, we can use the summer break to get things working.
## Camp
- [FVP] has the annotated floor plan.
## Charity Vigil
- Discuss agenda'd items.
- Picking a charity
   - Committee is in consensus that Charity Vigil representatives can determine an appropriate charity on behalf of UCC.
- Ticket price: UCC is not concerned about ticket price.
   - Float: UCC can provide a float, we just need to make sure we do the paperwork properly.
- Prizes
   - Clubs have historically donated all revenue from fridge/snack sales to the event.
   - UCC is happy to uphold this tradition.
- Activities
   - Charity Vigil LANs have been dead for a while.
   - Jackbox / party games (which use a monitor) can work well.
   - Vive can be set up in a corner of the Loft.
   - Spare projector can also be set up in the Loft.
   - **Suggestions for activities are welcome, let [GOZ] know so subcommittee allocate space.**
- Pantomime Society wants to modify the subcommittee regulations so that clubs have equal representation even if representatives cannot make it to a meeting.
   - *[GOZ] shows the updated regulations to committee*.
   - [GOZ] The changes may set a precedent that means that there is no purpose of clubs sending 2 representatives to subcommittee meetings if only one rep can vote for both.
   - Discussion continues regarding goodness of intention and consequences of approving regulations.
   - [FVP] If we approve it now we can avoid potential back-and-forth with subcommittee next meeting and make things go more smoothly.
   - [FVP] Motion to approve updated subcommittee regulations.
      - No second.
## Cameron Hall-oween
- Next meeting Saturday 4pm
- Subcommittee wants clubs to run hype events: maybe we could run a Halloween LAN.
   - [GOZ] Sounds like a good way to make people bored of coming to events.
   - [GOZ] Halloween-themed normal operations could be more useful.
## Relay for Life
- Figure out date for tie-in ASAP
	- Waiting for UWAnime to post the link to the team.
	- Fundraising events planned for the future, eg. Smash Tournament.
	- They've got initiative for this unless we want to take it back.
## 44th Anniversary Dinner
- No response yet for the Tav.
## Build-A-3D-Printer
- The 3D printer has been fully assembled and works
   - Thanks to [AJT] for debugging g-code issues causing autolevelling problems.
   - Printer can print quite fast.
- Event details to be discussed later; need to coordinate with people.
   - [LDT] can definitely help run an event.
   - [GOZ]'s printer is still in a box at home.
   - [AJT] can also help out.
- TODO: [GOZ] Coordinate 3D printer event.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action Items from 2018-08-15
============================
### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019 - *delayed*.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
   - Delayed pending figuring out exactly where we want eyelets.
- Ensure subcommittee regulations can be published and publish them accordingly - *done*.
   - See https://github.com/gozzarda/subcommittee_regulations
### [JWB]
- Send a reply email to Wine Appreciation Society - *done*.
- Finalise updated door policy - *in progress*.
- Figure out how to fix Facebook group and do so - *in progress*.
### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *ongoing*.
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *very not done*.
   - [GOZ] Spec cards should also have priority of use.
- Pay invoices, including camp lesch - *done*.
- Write camp network documentation - *in progress*.
   - Waiting for [GOZ] to do the floor plan.
### [FVP]
- [FVP] and [CFE]: Organise sysadmin workshop for semester 2 - *cancelled*.
- Make some graphics material for Relay for Life advertising - *not done*.
- Send emails asking about tech talks - *not done*.
- Book Guild Council Meeting Room for OGM - *not done*.
   - *[GOZ] screams in [FVP]'s general direction.*
- Contact CSSC about running collaborative study events - *in progress*.
   - [GOZ] talked to CSSC, found out that most of them don't know about UCC.
- Contact Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner *done*.
   - Might have to go see them in person.
- Write other camp documentation.
   - It will happen at some point.
### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life.
### [CHB]
- Contact UWAnime and find out what we need to do for Relay for Life.
   - [CHB] remains contact person for UWAnime.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General Business
================
- [CHB] Discuss project bench / moving the machine room
   - [GOZ] Not enough time to discuss now, already late for meeting.
   - [TFD] is also interested in this.
   - More details to be discussed later.
*Meeting closed at 14:39:35*.
  
Current Action Items
====================
  
### [GOZ]
- Book camp at Camp Leschenaultia for 19th to 22nd July 2019.
   - Ask Camp Lesch to install some eyelets.
- Coordinate 3D printer event.
- Coordinate snack run at some point.
- Purchase new computer bits.
### [JWB]
- Finalise updated door policy.
- Figure out how to fix Facebook group and do so.
### [CFE]
- Implement committee handover documentation archive - *ongoing*.
- Finish inventorying and make spec cards for machines - *very not done*.
- Write camp network documentation - *in progress*.
   - Waiting for [GOZ] to do the floor plan.
### [FVP]
- Make some graphics material for Relay for Life advertising.
- Send emails asking about tech talks.
- Contact CSSC about running collaborative study events.
   - [GOZ] talked to CSSC, found out that most of them don't know about UCC, we might see some of them around sometime.
- Follow up with Tav about bookings and catering for Anniversary Dinner.
### [GIR]
- Coordinate with [JWB] about running CITS first year unit study sessions.
### [LCY]
- Make Facebook event for Relay for Life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Minutes uploaded by [FVP] at 16:19 on 2018-08-22*

I'm fixing another (I know I know) TS-430S for a friend. Yes, this means I'm returning it back to them. After all of the repairs I had to do to get the thing up and going reliably I did an RX carrier calibration. It was a little bit off - a combination of using WWV at 10MHz and the scope to calibrate CW, USB and SSB.

However, the AM and FM carriers didn't at all meet the expectations of the service manual. Notably, the AM carrier is seemingly the same as the USB carrier on transmit and there isn't one on receive. The FM carrier just didn't appear during receive or transmit. But .. it's transmitting FM.

Now, I need to go get the TS-430Ses I've fixed and compare the carrier behaviour to the other rigs, but .. well, they work on AM/FM receive and transmit. So ok, let's figure it out.

The AM carrier matches the USB carrier. It's weird because the circuit has an AM/FM carrier crystal however.. yeah, AM carrier here is linked to the USB carrier. I need to figure that out. And the FM transmit has no power control - it's 100W carrier only. So the only way to do it without dumping 100W out into the finals whilst adjusting it is to remove the RF drive output on the RF board (which feeds the finals with RF), attach a 50 ohm resistor across it and check the final RF carrier signal on the scope. This worked mostly OK but since there's no ALC feedback, the output is .. very distorted. Now, I don't know if these rigs were supposed to output a clean sine wave at all carrier output settings but .. well, they're very loud signals on lower bands, sometimes more than 8V peak-to-peak, which is almost triple what you need to feed the finals to get 100W out. So I got it in the ballpark - because well, the thing is not outputting a true sine wave here because the carrier output is way too high - and then had to resort to checking using a directional coupler and the scope.

Now, this isn't too bad - I was in the rough right spot for the FM carrier frequency anyway, and I can key down for a few seconds at a time without making things sad. But, this step was delayed until I verified the finals were working and that took a lot of work to get right. It turns out it was on the nose anyway after all of that and FM modulation now works great.

So - if you're aligning a TS-430S, the AM/FM carrier bit in the service manual may not be entirely correct.

I recently acquired a TS-430S HF transceiver. The seller claimed the FM board and full complement of filters worked, but no display, buttons/LEDs or sound. He said it worked until he sent it in to have filters added. I figured it was going to be something simple. Boy was I both right and wrong.

These rigs have a habit of dry joints everywhere. So, I powered it up to see - yes, no display. Ok - step 1 - check power rails. I discovered there was no 5v line. The IF board has the 7805 regulator, so it is time to check for dry joints.



Oh look! Some very dry joints. I bet these were marginal until the tech installing the filters jostled it about. I fixed these any anything else I could find on the IF board.

I then powered it up. One digit showed up - the optional 10Hz digit - but all the lights and buttons worked.

Now, this rig has a separate PLL board for the main VFO which exports a signal that blanks the VFO output and the display. Amusingly it doesn't blank the final digit though. Ok, so it's likely PLL unlock. The PLL board was getting power, but ... no stable 36MHz base oscillator. That's on the control board. I pulled that out to find more dry joints around that circuit and its connector - so, fixed that.

I fired it up again. The PLL board was still unlocked even though the 36MHz oscillator was now working. I spun the dial and measured the other VFO feeding the PLL board - this is the fine grain frequency selection that gets mixed in to the PLL boards four VFOs to output the final VFO signal. It was moving OK - so the control board and the other PLLs were OK. Next - check the four VCO selection lines - nothing.

The PLL board has four varicap diode based VCOs and a PLL loop. The control board outputs the band select data to the RF board which decodes it and drives the PLL VCO, the relay based LPFs and the receiver HPFs. There were multiple issues - the control board bandpass lines were wrong and the VCO select lines were wrong.

Next - the RF board. Dry joints everywhere. Here is one of many that linked ground planes together.


And this one was on the VCO output connector.


I removed the TTL IC that did the BCD to output line demuxing because it was dead and fixed the dry joints. But the control board was still outputting the wrong band info. It turns out the IO expander IC that drives those four lines had two dead IO lines. So, that needed replacing too.

At this stage the control board was OK, the band select lines and VCO select lines are OK, but no PLL lock. Time to diagnose the PLL board.

First up - the varicap VCO was working. Wrong frequency but working. The circuit takes the output of that, buffers it though a transistor amplifier, shapes it into a square wave and divides it down via a pair of TTL chips and feeds it into the PLL control IC.

Next - the 5v line on the PLL board was ... suspiciously low. 5v was coming in OK, but something was dragging it down to 3.8v in places. That is too low for TTL. I checked each chip and... the 75S112N flip flop chip was running hot. Ok, so that needed replacing. Note it is S and not 74LS - the PLL loop runs from 45 to 75MHz, so it needs speed. With that chip replaced the 5v rail was again at 5v. But, no PLL lock.

So I then traced the PLL loop. VCO was OK. VCO though the buffer amp wasn't. I pulled out the transistor there and it was open circuit. I didn't have an equivalent so I found a close enough one for now and ordered a replacement. But then it was sill not working right - the signal level into the TTL NAND chip was super low. I figured either the transistor I replaced it with wasn't biased right or the TTL chip was pulling its input low. Indeed it was the latter - the input side was shorted to ground. I replaced that chip and the rig sprung to life!

I recalibrated the four VCOs now that I had replaced some parts. It was locking OK on all bands.

But - the receive signal was low. I checked the attenuator switch - no go. I disconnected the attenuator control cable to the RF board - RX sprung to life! A little solder reflow on the switch board and that fixed that.

After that I just did the obligatory filter and finals board check and reflow.





One LPF relay clean procedure and finals alignment later and it's all ready to go. The SWR foldback protection needs fixing and I need a 150 ohm dry load to do that, so that's my next week project.

As to how those parts all failed, likely at once? My guess is stray RF fried a path somehow. I'm glad this was the extent of the part damage!

I get asked all the time why I don't backport my patches into stable FreeBSD release branches. It's a good question, so let me explain it here.

I don't get paid to do it.

Ok, so now you ask "but wait, surely the users matter?" Yes, of course they do! But, I also have other things going on in my life, and the stuff I do for fun is .. well, it's the stuff I do for fun. I'm not paid to do FreeBSD work, let alone open source wireless stuff in general.

So then I see posts like this:

https://www.anserinae.net/adventures-in-wifi-freebsd-edition.html

I understand his point of view, I really do. I'm also that user when it comes to a variety of other open source software and I ask why features aren't implemented that seem easy, or why they're not in a stable release. But then I remember that I'm also doing this for fun and it's totally up to me to spend my time however I want.

Now, why am I like this?

Well, the short-hand version is - I used to bend over backwards to try and get stuff in to stable releases of the open source software I once worked on. And that was taken advantage of by a lot of people and companies who turned around to incorporate that work into successful commercial software releases without any useful financial contribution to either myself or the project as a whole. After enough time of this, you realise that hey, maybe my spare time should just be my spare time.

My hope is that if people wish to backport my FreeBSD work to a stable release then they'll either pay me to do it, pay someone else to do it, or see if a company will sponsor that work for their own benefit. I don't want to get into the game of trying to backport things to one and potentially two stable releases and deal with all the ABI changes and support fallout that happens when you are porting things into a mostly ABI stable release. And yes, my spare time is my own.

I've been homebrewing digital hookups between my amateur radios (HF, VHF, UHF) and a FreeBSD PC. It all ... mostly works. There's one or two FreeBSD hiccups though, which are summarised thusly:

The default package selection for audio paths is .. suboptimal. Some can be configured to use OSS and that is nice. Some provide ALSA but FreeBSD's "ALSA" implementation doesn't provide full ALSA device emulation so we don't get a list of ALSA devices by default. You have to put your devices into asound.conf with names for things. However ..

.. FreeBSD doesn't currently make it easy to hard-code say, USB device paths to serial port names or sound devices to something predictable. So every time I reboot or mess with the setup it goes pear shaped.

Then there's a bug where I can run three USB audio devices, but I can't do mic input on the last one. Output works fine. That's going to be amusing to diagnose.

So I do have my TS-440S, TS-711A and TS-811E all doing digital modes. They're just all .. subtly different.

The TS-711A and TS-811E have an accessory jack (ACC2) that has input and output. There's a PTT control line and a mic mute line. The line levels of those signals is a couple hundred millivolts, so it's good enough to build a little resistor divider with a potentiometer to get the computer output down to the right level. I'm using mic input on the USB audio devices, so that also works fine at a couple hundred millivolts.

The TS-440S also has a similar accessory jack, however the audio input in that jack seems to be quite a big higher than a couple hundred millivolts. It looks like it needs to be around 4-5v peak-to-peak for it to be at the right level internally on the IF board. The ACC2 path has a couple of resistor attenuators so it looks like this was intentional - after asking around it looks like it's expecting professional line audio output levels (~4v peak-to-peak) instead of consumer grade levels (~1.5v peak-to-peak.) I'll go dig into it some more. This path bypasses the microphone pre-amplifier entirely and goes straight into the Mic Gain control pot.

The TS-440S also has AFSK input/output RCA jacks on the back. The audio output is at the same level as the ACC2 jack, however the audio input side is routed via the microphone input side so it gets preamp'ed and processed appropriately. That's what I've been using for digital modes - I can divide down the input side to a couple hundred millivolts to keep it all kosher. However - and here's the really annoying part - the mic mute input on ACC2 also mutes the AFSK input line.

Then there's what happens if you leave the microphone connected. If you do leave it connected, even in a quiet room, it seems to present some load that requires a lot more signal on AFSK input to do its thing. If you tune it all up to the right signal levels and then disconnect the microphone, you'll be really overdriving the RF section. Ugh.

So - I don't have to do any of this for the TS-711 and TS-811 - their input values are a lot lower and grounding the mic line actually just quietens the mic input.

If I can score a slightly different radio - like a TS-680S for example - then I can do this stuff with a much lower level line input value. It'll be tricky to get it down to the TS-680S level (it wants it at 10mV!) but at least I can do that with passive, well shielded bits.

On the plus side - yes, this means I at least can do digital modes on my TS-440S. I just have to keep unplugging the microphone line for now. What I may end up doing for now though is adding another switch to the desktop microphone I have to turn /its/ microphone input off so it is fully disconnected. Hopefully that'll be enough to do digital modes without constantly screwing and unscrewing things.

If you're at all curious - https://www.pskreporter.info/pskmap?callsign=kk6vqk&search=Find

Here's another point along my quest for amateur radio on FreeBSD - bring up basic APRS support. Yes, someone else has done the work, but in the normal open source way it was .. inconsistently documented.

First is figuring out the hardware platform. I chose the following:

• A Baofeng UV5R2, since they're cheap, plentiful, and do both VHF and UHF;
• A cable to do sound level conversion and isolation (and yes, I really should post a circuit diagram and picture..);
• A USB sound device, primarily so I can whack it into FreeBSD/Linux devices to get a separate sound card for doing radio work;
• FreeBSD laptop (it'll become a raspberry pi + GPS + sensor + LCD thingy later, but this'll do to start with.)

The Baofeng is easy - set it to the right frequency (VHF APRS sits on 144.390MHz), turn on VOX so I don't have to make up a PTT cable, done/done.

The PTT bit isn't that hard - one of the microphone jack pins is actually PTT (if you ground it, it engages PTT) so when you make the cable just ensure you expose a ground pin and PTT pin so you can upgrade it later.

The cable itself isn't that hard either - I had a baofeng handmic lying around (they're like $5) so I pulled it apart for the cable. I'll try to remember to take pictures of that.

Here's a picture I found on the internet that shows the pinout:


Now, I went a bit further. I bought a bunch of 600 ohm isolation transformers for audio work, so I wired it up as follows:

• From the audio output of the USB sound card, I wired up a little attenuator - input is 2k to ground, then 10k to the input side of the transformer; then the output side of the transformer has a 0.01uF greencap capacitor to the microphone input of the baofeng;
• From the baofeng I just wired it up to the transformer, then the output side of that went into a 0.01uF greencap capacitor in series to the microphone input of the sound card.

In both instances those capacitors are there as DC blockers.

(I'd draw up a circuit diagram but for some reason there's no easy tool here in blogger to do that in-line! Sigh.)

Ok, so that bit is easy.

Then on to the software side.

The normal way people do this stuff is "direwolf" on Linux. So, "pkg install direwolf" installed it. That was easy.

Configuring it up was a bit less easy. I found this guide to be helpful:

https://andrewmemory.wordpress.com/tag/direwolf/

FreeBSD has the example direwolf config in /usr/local/share/doc/direwolf/examples/direwolf.conf . Now, direwolf will run as a normal user (there's no rc.d script for it yet!) and by default runs out of the current directory. So:

$ cd ~
$ cp /usr/local/share/doc/direwolf/examples/direwolf.conf .
$ (edit it)
$ direwolf

Editing it isn't that hard - you need to change your callsign and the audio device.

OK, here is the main undocumented bit for FreeBSD - the sound device can just be /dev/dsp . It isn't an ALSA name! Don't waste time trying to use ALSA names. Instead, just find the device you want and reference it. For me the USB sound card shows up as /dev/dsp3 (which is very non specific as USB sound devices come and go, but that's a later problem!) but it's enough to bring it up.

So yes, following the above guide, using the right sound device name resulted in a working APRS modem.

Next up - something to talk to it. This is called 'xastir'. It's .. well, when you run it, you'll find exactly how old an X application it is. It's very nostalgically old. But, it is enough to get APRS positioning up and test both the TCP/IP side of APRS and the actual radio radio side.

Here's the guide I followed:

https://andrewmemory.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/setting-up-direwolfxastir-on-a-raspberry-pi/

So, that was it! So far so good. It actually works well enough to decode and watch APRS traffic around me. I managed to get out position information to the APRS network over both TCP/IP and relayed via VHF radio.

I've been teaching myself HF electronics and antennas lately. I thought I'd go write down some of the things I came across whilst tinkering with this hardware.

First up - I decided to choose the Kenwood TS-440S.


https://www.rigpix.com/kenwood/ts440s.htm

It's a mid 1980's solid state rig with only a few components hidden away in custom ICs. There are some parts that you just can't buy new anymore (mostly these custom parts and stuff in the final RF amplifier section) but by and large it's all a big set of interconnected single-sided PCBs covered in cables and discrete components. There's the occasional bit of 74LS logic too.

It has some pretty clean and sensitive RX paths and TX is supposed to be very good for hours and hours of work. However, these devices are pretty old, and 30+ year electronics can have a large amount of wear and tear.

There are some pretty well known crappy issues too. One of them is the SonyBond compound used in the VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) sections - it's hydroscopic and degrades over time. This ends up throwing the VCOs way off and you end up having to clean it off of the PLL/RF boards. This is pretty well documented and although time consuming, it's not impossible to fix yourself.

I'll try to do a follow-up post with some pointers on tuning the TX path behaviour because I found a lot of really inconsistent suggestions on tuning things. The service manual is also a bit confusing at times on what voltages you should see where.

There are also issues with broken connectors and a lot of dry joints. I found a lot of dry joints in my 440s, which required a lot of tidying up.

Next up in the TODO list for me is tuning the RX sensitivity to make sure it's optimal.

So, what I found with the first rig I fixed up! I wish I had taken more photos; I'll do that soon just for demonstration purposes.

• There were lots and lots of dry joints. Everywhere.
• Sonybond needed cleaning up - and when you do that, you have to tune VCO1 - which is the VCO generating the primary RF frequency for first stage mixing. This is used for both transmit and receive.
• The IF board was putting out a nice, clean 8.83MHz carrier, so that was nice.
• The transmit path hadn't been aligned in a long while, so the waveform on the output of the RF board was splatting overly large signals (> 3v peak to peak) into the finals, and this caused the finals to get very upset.
• .. and then ALC wasn't adjusted, so the filter board was overly aggressively asserting ALC.
• The transmit power control was very touchy - 100% carrier level at like 5% turning of the carrier level knob. Once the transmit path on the RF board was properly aligned, the RF drive output was properly putting out around 2.5v ptp -> 3.0v ptp and ALC was re-aligned on the filter board, the finals were behaving much better and the TX power control was much more linearly controllable.
• Then you have to re-do the finals bias level controls. Careful though, the alignment process says "turn to minimum first" before you re-bias things, but the board is mounted upside down so you may be biasing them to max. :)

I'll go into some more detail later with pictures!

This is one of those articles that I write specifically to, you know, not forget it the next time.

I picked up a v3 RTL-SDR dongle from https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-blog-v-3-dongles-user-guide/ a few weeks ago. It's a solidly looking aluminium can dongle with a much more useful RF connector. But, it still only tunes down by default to the same RTL-SDR limits as .. well, the rest.

So I go digging. I bought this thing because on Windows you're supposed to be able to tune down to a couple hundred KHz. I found out some useful stuff after a bit of google abuse:

• it's called "direct sampling mode";
• it's supported by the rtl_sdr driver/library that you normally use;
• you have to configure things up in a special way to get GQRX, etc to actually do the right thing;
• There's a specific thing called "Q-Branch" that you have to care about.

Ok, so the actual details.

Firstly, the NIC needs to go into direct sampling mode. So instead of being mixed with a VCO, you're bypassing all of that and just acting as a really fast ADC. Which, yes, will alias signals everywhere.

Secondly, you have to tell it to only give you "Q" samples, rather than both I and Q. If it's direct sampling, mixing doesn't come into it, so the hardware is just giving you ADC samples.

Then, you just tell GQRX, etc to ignore enforcing tuning limits (tick "No limits") and you're golden.

The specific string to add to the device string when you set up which rtl_tcp instance to talk to is:

direct_samp=2

(0 = no direct sampling; 1 = direct sampling on I, 2 = direct sampling on Q.)

Ok, so does it work? I'm still testing it. I will need to acquire some RF filters to try and filter out bands of HF frequencies to avoid aliasing as there is limited to on actual passband filtering going on here. But it did tune to AM radio and I picked up some data transmissions in 3MHz.

Baby steps!

I'm still tinkering with my own SDR code in C, but I decided I'd give gqrx a go. It sports a simple UI to visualise things as well as a simple control network protocol.

FreeBSD has packages for it, so it really was as simple as:

# pkg install gqrx

I already have the rtl-sdr bits installed, so that was pretty easy:

# rtl_tcp

.. to bring up the network service for it.

But running gqrx .. didn't work. It just stood there and did nothing when I ran it - no UI, no useful log output, nothing.

So out came truss. Step one in the "what is going on" showed no useful logging. Step 2 is "ok, what syscalls is it making." It turns out it was trying to connect to the IPv6 localhost address - but rtl_tcp defaults on FreeBSD to IPv4 localhost. gqrx doesn't handle connect() errors gracefully, so it was just stuck in an infinite connect() loop.

So I cleared the config, started gqrx again, and ensured this time it was set to '127.0.0.1' instead of 'localhost'. Voila! It worked!

Now - I need an SDR unit that can go down closer to DC so I can pick up shortwave. This RTL dongle I have doesn't tune below 27MHz.

I've been chipping away at bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD. I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but you know, life got in the way.

I sat down recently to figure out how to get dynamic WDS working on FreeBSD-HEAD. It's been in FreeBSD since forever, and it in theory should actually have just worked, but it's extremely not documented in any useful way. It's basically the same technology in earlier Apple Airports (before it grew into what the wireless tech world calls "Proxy-STA") and is what the "extender" technology on Qualcomm Atheros chipsets implement.

A common question I get from people is "why can't I bridge multiple virtual machines on my laptop and have them show up over wifi? It works on ethernet!" And my response is "when I make dynamic WDS work, you can just make this work on FreeBSD devices - but for now, use NAT." That always makes people sad.

So what is it?

With normal station / access point setups, wireless frames have up to three addresses. In the header it's "address 1", "address 2", and "address 3".

Depending upon the packet type, these can be a variety of addresses:

• SA - source address - source of the packet (eg the STA address)
• TA - transmitter address - STA/AP that transmitted the frame
• RA - receiver address - immediate destination of the packet 
• DA - finally recipient of the data
• BSSID - BSS ID (ie, AP mac address)

There are a lot of addresses. There are, in fact, more than the number of address fields in a normal 802.11 frame.

Now, if you want to understand when each of these are used in which frames, you can totally find blog posts from people which describe things (eg https://80211notes.blogspot.com/2013/09/understanding-address-fields-in-80211.html) will fill you in. But the TL;DR for normal AP/STA traffic is:

• From an AP, the frame has BSSID, SA of the MAC (eg ethernet behind the AP bridge) sending data, and DA is the STA MAC address
• From a STA, the frame has BSSID, TA is the STA that transmits, and DA is the final destination of the frame (eg ethernet behind the AP bridge.)

The big note here is that there's not enough MAC addresses to say "please send this frame to a station MAC address, but then have them forward it to another MAC address attached behind it in a bridge." That would require 4 mac addresses in the 802.11 header, which we don't get.

.. except we do. There's a separate address format where from-DS and to-DS bits in the header set to 1, which means "this frame is coming from distribution system to a distribution system", and it has four mac addresses. The RA is then the AP you're sending to, and then a fourth field indicates the eventual destination address that may be an ethernet device connected behind said STA.

If you don't configure up WDS, then when you send frames from a station from a MAC address that isn't actually your 802.11 interface MAC address, the system would be confused. The STA wouldn't be able to transmit it easily, and the AP wouldn't know how to get back to your bridged ethernet addresses.

Ok, so how does this work with WDS? The above from/to-DS mode is actually the technical hilarity behind "Wireless Distribution System",  which is a fancy way of saying "an AP connects to another AP and can relay frames for you." It's what was used for extending wireless networks before true meshing solutions came into existence.

The original WDS was a statically configured thing. You'd configure up a particular device as a WDS extender, and both sides would need configuring:

• The central AP would need to know the MAC address of a WDS master, so it would know that frames from/to that particular AP needed the four-address frame format, and
• The extender AP would need to be configured to talk to the central AP to act as a WDS master - it would then associate as a station to that central AP, and would use 4-address frames to relay traffic to it.

 So for static configurations, this works great. You'd associate your extender AP as a station of the central AP, it'd use wpa_supplicant to setup encryption, then anything between that central AP and that extender AP (as a station) would be encrypted as normal station traffic (but, 4-address frame format.)

But that's not very convenient. You have to statically configure everything, including telling your central AP about all of your satellite extender APs. If you want to replace your central AP, you have to reprogram all of your extenders to use the new MAC addresses.

So, Sam Leffler came up with "dynamic WDS" - where you don't have to explicitly state the list of central/satellite APs. Instead, you configure a central AP as "dynamic WDS", and when a 4-address frame shows up from an associated station, it "promotes" it to a WDS peer for you. On the satellite AP, it will just find an AP to communicate to, and then assume it'll do WDS and start using 4-address frames. It's still a bit clunky (there's no beacon, probe request, etc IEs that say "I do dynamic WDS!" so you'd better make ALL your central APs a different SSID!) but it certainly is better than what we had.

(Yes, one of the things I'll be doing to FreeBSD now that this works is adding that concept of "I'm a DWDS primary!" node concept so satellites can just "find" a DWDS primary enabled AP to associate to. Baby steps..)

But, I tried it - and ... let's just say, the documentation didn't say very much. So I couldn't really get it to work.

Then a friend pointed out he figured it out. (Thankyou Edward!)

Firstly, there are scripts in src/tools/tools/net80211/ - setup.wdsmain and setup.wdsrelay. These scripts are .. well, the almost complete documentation on a dynamic WDS setup. The manpage doesn't go into anywhere near enough information.

So I dug into it. It turns out that dynamic WDS uses a helper daemon - 'wlanwds' -  which listens for dynamic WDS configuration changes and will do things for you. This is what runs on the central AP side. Then it started making sense!

• For dynamic WDS, there are no WDS interface types created by default
• net80211 will post a routing socket message if a 4-address frame shows up on a "dwds" enabled interface, which is the signal to userland to plumb up a DWDS interface for that particular peer
• wlanwds is then responsible for creating that virtual interface with the right configuration
• Then it runs a shell script that you provide which lets you do things like assign it to a bridge group so it can bridge traffic
• Finally, if the station goes away, wlanwds will get another notification from net80211 saying the station has gone, and wlanwds will destroy the virtual interface for that peer.

So far, so good. I followed that script, modified it a bit to use encryption, and .. well, it half worked. Association worked fine, but no traffic was passing.

A little tcpdump'ing later showed what was going on!

• 4-address frames from the extender side was successfully being encrypted and transmitted to the central AP
• 4-address frames from the central AP were being send, but unencrypted
• .. so the station dropped them as well, unencrypted when they should've been encrypted.

A little more digging showed the actual problem - the dynamic WDS example scripts are for an open/unencrypted network. If you are using an encrypted network, the central AP side needs to enable privacy on the virtual interfaces so traffic gets encrypted with the parent interface encryption keys. So adding this:

ifconfig $DEV wepmode mixed

.. to the shell script for when an interface was created made everything work.

Now, I've only done enough testing to show that indeed it is working. I haven't done anything like pass lots of traffic via iperf, or have a mix of DWDS and normal STA peers, nor actually run it for longer than 5 minutes. I'm sure there will be issues to fix. However - I do need it at home, as I can't see the home AP from the upstairs room (and now you see why I care about DWDS!) and so when I start using it daily I'll fix whatever hilarity ensues.

https://theducks.dreamwidth.org

Sorry brad, it's not you, it's the ФСБ.

I have a confession. Sometimes I reuse passwords. Not for anything that “matters”, but I’ve ended up using a couple of passwords a lot of times. And inevitably some of those sites get hacked. But where did I use them?

Chrome remembers all my passwords but unfortunately doesn’t seem to offer a straightforward API to get at them. Conveniently they do sync my passwords to my computer’s password store and there’s an API for that.

I wrote a little script and I’ve been going through generating unique passwords for all the unimportant sites and turning two-factor authentication on where it’s offered. The Secret Service database (and Chrome) seem to sometimes end up with multiple entries for a single site, and Chrome doesn’t seem to sync my updates immediately, but I’ve found this a helpful start.

There’s an American election on Tuesday. Whatever the outcome of the races, the partisan polarization is disturbing. Roughly 40% of the electorate considers each presidential candidate to be unqualified to even run. I don’t have the right to vote but my perspective is just as absolute. I’m right, but I’d say that wouldn’t I.

Each party chose a candidate that was dismissed out of hand by half the country as even a valid choice to offer. The core of the debate has not been over policy or even really a vision of the future of the country, but of the fatal personal flaws of the other candidate.

Where do we go from here? If America elects Trump on Tuesday then I and half the country won’t just feel defeated and disappointed, worried about next four years and the country our children will inherit, but we’ll be skeptical of the president elect’s eligibility to hold the office to which he was democratically elected. If Clinton prevails the other half of the country will feel the same way.

Perhaps more disturbingly support for the candidates break heavily along gender, ethnicity and class lines. Whoever wins, whole communities will not only feel unrepresented in the White House, they’ll feel that its occupant is illegitimate. And for all their various skills, neither candidate has demonstrated skill in uniting the nation.

Now that I'm trying to use more userland services, there are some obvious shortcomings which need addressing.

The first is a lack of real service management. FreeBSD doesn't have a service management daemon - the framework assumes that daemons implement their own background and monitoring. It would be much nicer if init or something similar to init could manage services and start/restart them where appropriate. Yes, this is one of those arguments for systemd. Eg, maybe I want to only start telnetd or dropbear/sshd whenever a connection comes in. But I'd also like to be able to add services for monitoring, such as dnsmasq and hostapd.

The next is a lack of suitable syslog daemon. Yes, I'd like to be able to log some messages locally - even if it's only a couple hundred kilobytes of messages. I'd also like to be able to push messages to a remote service. Unfortunately the FreeBSD syslog daemon doesn't do log rotation or maximum log file sizes itself - it's done by "newsyslog" which runs out of cron. This isn't any good for real embedded systems with limited storage.

Then yes, there's a lack of a cron service. It'd be nice to have that integrated into the service management framework so things could be easily added/removed. I may just use cron, but that means cron is also always running which adds memory footprint (~1.3 megabytes) for something that is almost never actually active. When you have 32MB of RAM, that's quite a bit of wasted memory.

Finally, there's a lack of some message bus and notification mechanism for device changes. For example, openvpn-client creates a tunnel device - ok, so what should then check to see if a NAT configuration needs updating? Or updated firewall rules? It can be done with shell scripts (which I'll write tomorrow) but ideally there'd be something like dbus (a dirty word, I know) where these systems could push updates to and events could be triggered from them. I'd like to be able to run ntpdate whenever an interface comes up, because yes, there is no RTC on this hardware.

With all of the above in mind, I'll start working on some of it tomorrow. Hopefully I can automate the openvpn NAT configuration a little bit more so I can optionally have wifi NAT or openvpn NAT, depending upon the current requirement. Fixing ntpdate to run out of dhclient as part of the 'up' script may be helpful. I'll see what else I can do to tidy things up before I start the process of merging all of this back into freebsd-wifi-build.

At least this year I can now use the defcon wireless with all of my devices.

FreeBSD has run on these MIPS routers for quite some time, but it was limited to what ships in base. There's not been any cross-built packages as part of the image building, which means we can't easily have third-party functionality.

Now, some of this third-party functionality is pretty important these days. Relying on telnet sucks; I'd like to have dropbear as an SSH server so we at least have SSH. Not having a DNS relay or DHCP server also sucks; dnsmasq would solve this problem. I'd also like some VPN services, so openvpn would be nice.

So, I eventually snapped a few months ago and started integrating some external toolchain compiler use with the freebsd-wifi-build scripts. bapt@freebsd did a whole lot of work to build ports of cross-compilers to be used by the FreeBSD ports and base system so I'm leveraging that for doing MIPS cross compiling. A bit of hacking later, and I'm cross compiling dnsmasq, dropbear, openvpn and lua.

Then I needed to integrate things. I wrote up a bunch of simple startup script wrappers to generate suitable config files for these services. Everything except the openvpn server/client configuration is in the rc.conf file, which will eventually make it much easier to turn into a configuration database.

OpenVPN was the most amusing. It cross compiled fine, save needing liblzo for compression (so that's disabled for now.) However, FreeBSD's openvpn package is version 2.3 but the easyrsa component is actually from 3.0 - which means all the documentation is out of date.

I used this for the OpenVPN config:

https://airvpn.org/topic/15096-verify-error-depth1-errorcertificate-is-not-yet-valid-using-router-with-tomato-shibby-firmware/

And this for easyvpn:

https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/EasyRSA3-OpenVPN-Howto

And digitalocean have a writeup for how to convert the config file into a combined config file and certification bundle:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-and-connect-to-a-private-openvpn-server-on-freebsd-10-1

A few things tripped me up:

• as mentioned before - the lack of freebsd openvpn documentation that works with easyvpn 3.0 made things frustrating;
• openvpn really wants valid system time, so I am going to have to run ntpdate when the WAN comes up;
• there's no RTC on many of these router boards, making time keeping very much reliant on NTP;
• kernel NAT works pretty well, but it needs interfaces to be up before you can add them. I'll have to add some scripts to openvpn-client to setup the NAT state once the link comes up so this stops being a problem;

I'll go into a little more detail about the details in a future post. But, hi from being behind an openvpn-client LAN gateway!

I do some work on fish shell, a command-line shell for UNIX-like platforms including Linux, OS X and Windows.

Although we don't have a release manager, as such, I've done the bulk of the work for the last couple of releases which include an urgent security release and a major update. I also babysit the continuous delivery of "nightly" builds.

This is an attempt to snapshot our current distribution process. I spent a long car ride trying to explain this to a friend and it is testament both to his brilliance and the size of Australia that he understood it.

Like most open source projects, we distribute a source tarball. Everyone⁺ who distributes software eventually comes to the conclusion that having every computer in the world compile from source is not terribly efficient, so we also try and get compiled binary packages into the hands of our users.

Linux platforms

I've been a Linux sysadmin in earnest since about 2005, when I joined the Wheel group of the University Computer Club, so I have a reasonable amount of experience with various distributions.

Most Linux distributions do not make it easy to distribute your own software. This isn't necessarily a criticism - projects like Debian specifically promise to their users that they will make software available in a secure and well-maintained way, and they certainly do their best with this Sisyphean task.

As an "upstream", you can just wait for the maintainers of the distribution to pick up your source tarball, massage it into the highly variable requirements of the distribution and get it shipped. Our most awesome maintainers join the mailing list, chime in on GitHub and do their best to get any required patches upstream. The bigger distributions try and help us to help them by providing documents like Debian's upstream guide and Fedora's packaging guidelines.

Unfortunately there are other maintainers who don't have the time to get fully involved, and often the first we hear of fish being available in a distribution is when we get a problem report from a downstream user. The one thing I would love distribution maintainers to do is to email the mailing list (or edit our wiki) when they start packaging fish. That way we can get in touch when new versions are released (or forewarn them), keep an eye on patches that need to go upstream, and even directly ask if we have a question about their distribution.

However, relying our distribution maintainers isn't enough. For many big distributions, the latest and greatest release can't or won't be shipped, but there are still users who are keen to use it.

There are two key challenges in this area: package formats and distribution channels.

As far as I can tell, the process of starting a new distribution goes like this:

1. Decide to start a new distribution.
2. Write a new package manager.

If you are thinking of making a Linux distribution, I implore you, please don't write a new package manager. The existing frontends are incredibly mature but still have problems, and it is unlikely that you will not run into issues that Debian or RedHat solved in 1997.

If you are determined to write a new package manager, please consider at least using the existing package formats (dpkg or RPM) and just writing your own frontend. Both formats are versatile and have a lot more depth than you might realise.

We ship both dpkg and RPM packages. It's definitely a lot easier to create a control file for RPMs, although somewhat hampered by a lack of an up-to-date authoritative reference.

Creating dpkgs is very intimidating at first, because there are about a thousand files to edit before anything works, but this becomes more straightforward with practice. The other problem is that a Debian-based system is basically mandatory for the various Perl scripts and debhelper packages that are required for sane building, which is why most of our release management is done from a Debian machine.

The days of the holy wars between dpkg and RPM seem to be over, and really there's only one thing I've found that you can do with dpkg that you can't do with RPM: substitute dependencies - that is, marking a package as requiring X or Y. We need this because we try and use the same package metadata for all our target platforms, which is irritating when some provide the hostname program in the net-tools package and others split it out into a package of its own. Although you can use filesystem paths, there's also some distributions that ship it as /bin/hostname and others as /usr/bin/hostname, which runs into the same problem.

The second problem is distribution channels. Most distributions require a repository reachable over HTTP with packages cryptographically signed and with a whole bunch of metadata available. Here, we are enormously lucky to have two free services available.

openSUSE's Open Build Service (OBS) makes this much easier. It allows you to upload a source package and will build binary packages in dpkg and RPM formats for all the most popular distributions, as well as a repository hosting service and a reasonable front-end for helping users to install them.

We also use a Launchpad Personal Package Archive to ship similar dpkgs for Ubuntu. This seems like overkill - after all, OBS can generate and host Ubuntu packages - but the user experience for Ubuntu users is much better with Launchpad and generally more familiar.

However, installing using either of these methods still require cut-and-paste of relatively complex command lines into a superuser shell (except on openSUSE, which has a one-click install link). This isn't ideal - fish is supposed to be attractive to people who aren't comfortable at the shell. We could ship an installer package that understands how to add the distribution channel, mark it as trusted, update the package lists and download the new package (Chrome does this), but I've always been nervous - we don't really have the resources to test this correctly. There's probably room for a framework or similar project to automate this and get it right.

One distribution we don't do our own packages for is Arch Linux. This is deliberate; OBS can produce Arch packages, but some Arch users told me a couple of years ago not to bother, as they have an active maintainer and are committed to always shipping the newest release. I'd be happy to turn the Arch switch back on at some stage, but there hasn't been any demand.

OS X

Unlike Linux, I am not comfortable with OS X. This is not for a lack of trying - I've been using OS X since 10.0. I bought my first Mac last year and it had beachballed, requiring a hard reset, within ten minutes of being powered up. I don't know what happens but whenever I get near OS X it stops working. Coupled with the fact that Apple "hate sysadmins" (according to the professional Mac sysadmins I know) and certainly seem to have some disdain for backward compatibility and we are off to a bit of a rocky start. Luckily we have a few committed and brilliant contributors who do most of the wrangling for OS X.

We ship two kinds of packages for OS X, and we actively promote Homebrew as a third option.

The first kind is the self-contained .app format. This drag-and-drop install distribution is the greatest strength of the OS X ecosystem and entirely self-contained. However, it gives users minimal control over the way the shell is launched (forcing the use of Apple Terminal rather than the better iTerm) and doesn't allow for third-party integration with shared or standard paths.

The second package is a .pkg installer. This is a genuine Windows 3.1 experience - no way to uninstall, no way of seeing what's installed, no sensible update mechanism. I believe that's partly our fault, although being relatively new to OS X I haven't managed to look into it further.

Finally, through Homebrew, the dominant free software installation tool for OS X. Homebrew's history is a great example of the dangers of reinventing the wheel, but it is moving impressively fast. Five years ago it was at the level of FreeBSD ports circa 2002; with the addition of binary packages and an increasingly sensible approach to repository management there are fewer and fewer features I miss from APT.

Homebrew's maintenance model is a little unusual - there is no designated maintainer for a given formula, which means that we have had a couple of issues with less experienced packagers submitting updates that then don't work as intended, leading to confused users. I'm trying to be more proactive in having the changes to Homebrew submitted as soon as I publish the release, which will hopefully avoid this problem in the future.

Other UNIXen

We don't release official packages for platforms like FreeBSD or its cousins, although fish is available in repositories for FreeBSD, OpenCSW for Solaris, DragonFly BSD, and NetBSD. Partly this is just down to a lack of resources - OBS doesn't support any of these platforms, none of the fish committers use them on a daily basis in anger, and it's not immediately obvious how to support a third-party repository for them.

I don't think fish even builds properly on Solaris at the moment, and since it went x86-only I've really lost all interest.

Windows

Various versions of Windows have technically been POSIX-compliant over the years, but really the only option for getting fish working was through Cygwin, a terrifying reimplementation of large parts of Linux into Windows. The fact that it works at all is amazing, and we are blessed with an active and knowledgeable maintainer, but Cygwin continuously produces odd edge cases, will probably never work properly with Unicode and requires a lot of fallback implementations in fish. Once again, there's no obvious way for us to build and ship our own packages for Cygwin should the maintainer ever disappear.

The landscape is changing enormously with the arrival of the bizzarely-titled BashOnWindows implementation. Despite the name, fish works basically perfectly from the Ubuntu packages that we are alreay committed to producing, and I suspect that will become the dominant method of installing fish on Windows in the future.

The ideal world

"Complaining is what I do."

"Complaining is all you do."

(Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country)

There are a number of factors at play in getting our software into the hands of users and I recognise that there's no easy answer.

In terms of the user experience, what we'd like is a one-click install method. Whether we build the binaries or not is largely a moot point, although I think it's clear that we can't expect our downstream maintainers to be constantly on the ball.

However, being able to provide an alternative distribution channel is important as we can also ship beta and continuous-delivery builds via the standard package manager, and I'd definitely encourage platform developers to consider how they can help users to understand the implications of adding a third-party software source, and then to proceed in a straightforward fashion.

Of course, if you're interested in helping us make fish integrate into your platform of choice, we'd be glad to hear from you!

So, it turns out that TDMA didn't work on the AR9380. I started digging into it a bit more with AR9380's in 5GHz mode and found that indeed no, it was just transmitting whenever the heck it wanted to.

The first thing I looked at was the transmit packet timing. Yes, they were going out at arbitrary times, rather than after the beacon. So I dug into the AR9380 HAL code and found the TX queue setup code just didn't know how to setup arbitrary TX queues to be beacon-gated. The CABQ does this by default, and the HAL just hard-codes that for the CAB queue, but it wasn't generic for all queues. So, I fixed that and tried again. Now, packets were exchanged, but I couldn't get more than around 1mbit of transmit throughput. The packets were correctly being beacon gated, but they were going out at very long intervals (one every 25ms or so.)

After a whole lot of digging and asking around, I found out what's going on. It turns out that the new TX DMA engine in the AR9380 treats queue gating slightly different versus previous chips. In previous chips you would see it transmit whatever it could, and then be gated until the next time it could transmit. As long as you kept poking the AR_TXE bit to re-start queue DMA it would indeed continue along transmitting whenver it could. But, the AR9380 TX DMA FIFO works differently.

Each queue has 8 TX FIFO descriptors, which can contain a list of frames or a single frame. For the CABQ I just added the whole list of frames in one hit and that works fine. But for the normal data paths it would push one frame into a TX DMA FIFO slot. If it's an A-MPDU aggregate then yes, it'd be a whole list of frames, but still a single PPDU. But for non-aggregate traffic it'd push a single frame in.

With this in mind, the TX DMA gating now works on FIFO slots, not just descriptor lists. That is, if you have the queue setup to gate on something (say a timer firing, like the beacon timer) then that un-gating is for a single FIFO slot only. If that FIFO slot has one PPDU in it then indeed it'll only burst out a single frame and then the rest of the channel burst time is ignored. It won't go to the next FIFO slot until the burst time expires and the queue is re-gated again. This is why I was only seeing one frame every 25ms - that's the beacon interval for two devices in a TDMA setup. It didn't matter that the queue had more data available - it ran out of data servicing a single TX FIFO slot and that was that.

So I did some local hacks to push more data into each TX FIFO slot. When I buffered things and only leaked out 32 frames at a time (which is roughly the whole slot time worth of large frames) then it indeed behaved roughly at the expected throughput. But there are bugs and it broke non-TDMA traffic. I won't commit it all to FreeBSD-HEAD until I figure out what's going on

There's also something else I noticed - there was some situation where it would push in a new frame and that would cause the next frame to go out immediately. I think it's actually just scheduling for the next gated burst (ie, it isn't doing multiple frames in a single burst window, but one every beacon interval) but I need to dig into it a bit more to see what's going on.

In any case, I'm getting closer to working TDMA on the AR9380 and later chips.

Oh, and it turns out that TDMA mode doesn't add some of the IEs to the beacon announcements - notably, no atheros fast-frames announcement. This means A-MSDUs or fast-frames aren't sent. I was hoping to leverage A-MSDU aggregation in its present state to improve things, even if it's just two frames at a time. Hopefully that'd double the throughput - I'm currently seeing 30mbit TX and 30mbit RX without it, so hopefully 60mbit with it.)

In my life I’ve been lucky enough to visit some brutal military dictatorships. From Suharto’s Indonesia as a child to Mubarak’s Egypt more recently, they’ve been really pleasant to visit. My impression is that most citizens of these countries were fairly unencumbered by the political system they lived under. Some people had terrible time – Islamists in Egypt, Timorese and Papuans in Indonesia – were tortured and murdered, their languages and beliefs suppressed. But for most people this wasn’t an issue.

Thinking about technology we have a similar situation. Most people are happy to rely on a proprietary operating system like MacOS or Windows because even though it takes away some freedoms, for them these freedoms aren’t as important on a day-to-day basis as the convenience that the platform provides.

Even though they’ve done a terrible job of protecting women and marginalized minorities from abuse, Twitter is a really convenient conversation platform for me. Facebook too with its real names policy excludes many people from honest, safe expression, but for a white cis man like me it’s really convenient.

On the other hand I run Linux on my personal computers because software freedom is morally important to me and the practical benefits for my fringe use case (programming) are significant.

If we’re going to build and promote Free technology – both FLOSS and a decentralized web, we need to accept that the pure principle of freedom isn’t enough to kick-start change. Enough people need to suffer enough discomfort to trigger a revolution.

I’m at the Decentralized Web Summit today and it’s all very interesting. There are some big picture ideas of how the future should be. There are all sorts of interesting disparate technologies filling all kinds of holes. But I have a thought experiment that I’ve used to understand where we need to go and what we need to build to get there.

Uber. Or Lyft or AirBnB, or even Etsy.

This new sharing economy supposedly shakes up traditional businesses by harnessing the distributed power of the internet, but when you ignore shiny apps these businesses look a lot like traditional rent-seeking middlemen.

It feels like a bug that we are making new businesses that look like such old businesses. Ride sharing shouldn’t need  middleman. Prospective passengers and drivers should be able to discover each other, agree on a transaction, go for a ride and then make payment.

We have a lot of the pieces already, but reputation is the big challenge I see in all this. Even centralized systems struggle with reputation but we don’t have a good way to know if we should trust that a driver is competent or a guest won’t trash my apartment. I don’t know how to solve this, but I sure hope someone is thinking about it.

In Part 1, I described updating the FreeBSD bwn(4) driver and adding some support for the PHY-N driver from b43. It's GPL, but it works, and it gets me over the initial hump of getting support for updated NICs and initial 5GHz operation.

In this part, I'll describe what I did to tidy up RSSI handling and bring up the BCM4322 support.

To recap - I ported over PHY-N support from b43, updated the SPROM handling in the bus glue (siba(4)), and made 11a OFDM transmission work. I was lucky - I chose the first 11n, non-MIMO NIC that Broadcom made which behaved sufficiently similarly to the previous 11abg generation. It was non-MIMO and I could run non-MIMO microcode, which already shipped with the existing firmware FreeBSD builds. But, the BCM4322 is a 2x2 MIMO device, and requires updated firmware, which brought over a whole new firmware API.

Now, bwn(4) handles the earlier two firmware interfaces, but not the newer one that b43 also supports. I chose BCM4321 because it didn't require firmware API changes and anything in the Broadcom siba(4) bus layer, so I could focus on porting the PHY-N code and updating the MAC driver to work. This neatly compartmentalised the problem so I wouldn't be trying to make a completely changed thing work and spending days chasing down obscure bugs.

The BCM4322 is a bit of a different beast. It uses PHY-N, which is good. It requires the transmit path setup the PLCP header bits for OFDM to work (ie, 11a, 11g) which I had to do for BCM4321, so that's good. But, it required firmware API changes, and it required siba(4) changes. I decided to tackle the firmware changes first, so I could at least get the NIC loaded and ready.

So, I first fixed up the RX descriptor handling, and found that we were missing a whole lot of RSSI calculation math. I dutifully wrote it down on paper and reimplemented it from b43. That provided some much better looking RSSI values, which made the NIC behave much better. The existing bwn(4) driver just didn't decode the RSSI values in any sensible way and so some Very Poor Decisions were made about which AP to associate to.

Next up, the firmware API. I finished adding the new structure definitions and updating the descriptor sizes/offsets. There were a couple of new things I had to handle for later chip revision devices, and the transmit/receive descriptor layout changed. That took most of a weekend in Palm Springs (my first non-working holiday in .. well, since Atheros, really) and I had the thing up and doing DMA. But, I wasn't seeing any packets.

So, I next decided to finish implementing the siba(4) bus pieces. The 4322 uses a newer generation power management unit (PMU) with some changes in how clocking is configured. I did that, verified I was mostly doing the right thing, and fired that up - but it didn't show anything in the scan list. Now, I was wondering whether the PMU/clock configuration was wrong and not enabling the PHY, so I found some PHY reset code that bwn(4) was doing wrong, and I fixed that. Nope, still no scan results. I wondered if the thing was set up to clock right (since if we fed the PHY the wrong clock, I bet it wouldn't configure the radio with the right clock, and we'd tune to the wrong frequency) which was complete conjecture on my part - but, I couldn't see anything there I was missing.

Next up, I decided to debug the PHY-N code. It's a different PHY revision and chip revision - and the PHY code does check these to do different things. I first found that some of the PHY table programming was completely wrong, so after some digging I found I had used the wrong SPROM offsets in the siba(4) code I had added. It didn't matter for the BCM4321 because the PHY-N revision was early enough that these SPROM values weren't used. But they were used on the BCM4322. But, it didn't come up.

Then I decided to check the init path in more detail. I added some debug prints to the various radio programming functions to see what's being called in what order, and I found that none of them were being called. That sounded a bit odd, so I went digging to see what was supposed to call them.

The first thing it does when it changes channel is to call the rfkill method with the "on" flag set on, so it should program on the RF side of things. It turns out that, hilariously, the BCM4322 PHY revision has a slightly different code path, which checks the value of 'rfon' in the driver state. And, for reasons I don't yet understand, it's set to '1' in the PHY init path and never set to '0' before we start calling PHY code. So, the PHY-N code thought the radio was already up and didn't need reprogramming.

Oops.

I commented out that check, and just had it program the radio each time. Voila! It came up.

So, next on the list (as I do it) is adding PHY-HT support, and starting the path of supporting the newer bus (bhnd(4)) NICs. Landon Fuller is writing the bhnd(4) support and we're targeting the BCM943225 as the first bcma bus device. I'll write something once that's up and working!

If you're watching the FreeBSD commit lists, you may have noticed that I .. kinda sprayed a lot of changes into the broadcom softmac driver.

Firstly, I swore I'd never touch this stuff. But, we use Broadcom (fullmac!) parts at work, so in order to get a peek under the hood to see how they work, I decided fixing up bwn(4) was vaguely work related. Yes, I did the work outside of work; no, it's not sponsored by my employer.

I found a small cache of broadcom 43xx cards that I have and I plugged one in. Nope, didn't work. Tried another. Nope, didn't work. Oh wait - I need to make sure the right firmware module is loaded for it to continue. That was the first hiccup.

Then I set up the interface and connected it to my home AP. It worked .. for about 30 seconds. Then, 100% packet loss. It only worked when I was right up against my AP. I could receive packets fine, but transmits were failing. So, off I went to read the transmit completion path code.

Here's the first fun bit - there's no TX completion descriptor that's checked. There is in the v3 firmware driver (bwi), but not in the v4 firmware. Instead, it reads a pair shared memory registers to get completion status for each packet. This is where I learnt my first fun bits about the hardware API - it's a mix of PIO/DMA, firmware, descriptors and shared memory mailboxes. Those completion registers? Reading them advances the internal firmware state to read the next descriptor completion. You can't just read them for fun, or you'll miss transmit completions.

So, yes, we were transmitting, and we were failing them. The retry count was 7, and the ACK bit was 0. Ok, so it failed. It's using the net80211 rate control code, so I turned on rate control debugging (wlandebug +rate) and watched the hilarity.

The rate control code was never seeing any failures, so it just thought everything was hunky dory and kept pushing the rate up to 54mbit. Which was the exact wrong thing to do. It turns out the rate control code was only called if ack=1, which meant it was only notified if packets succeeded. I fixed up (through some revisions) the rate control notification path to be called always, error and success, and it began behaving better.

Now, bwn(4) was useful. But, it needs updating to support any of the 11n chipsets, and it certainly didn't do 5GHz operation on anything. So, off I went to investigate that.

There are, thankfully, three major sources of broadcom softmac information:

• Linux b43
• Linux brcmsmac
• https://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/

The linux folk did a huge reverse engineering effort on the binary broadcom driver (wl) over many years, and generated a specification document with which they implemented b43 (and bcm-v3 for b43legacy.) It's .. pretty amazing, to be honest. So, armed with that, I went off to attempt to implement support for the first 11n chip, the BCM4321.

Now, there's some architectural things to know about these chips. Firstly, the broadcom hardware is structured (like all chips, really) with a bunch of cores on-die with an interconnect, and then some host bus glue. So, the hardware design can just reuse the same internals but a different host bus (USB, PCI, SDIO, etc) and reuse 90% of the chip design. That's a huge win. But, most of the other chips out there lie to you about the internal layout so you don't care - they map the internal cores into one big register window space so it looks like one device.

The broadcom parts don't. They expose each of the cores internally on a bus, and then you need to switch the cores on/off and also map them into the MMIO register window to access them.

Yes, that's right. There's not one big register window that it maps things to, PCI style. If you want to speak to a core, you have to unmap the existing core, map in the core you want, and do register access.

Secondly, the 802.11 core exposes MAC and PHY registers, but you can't have them both on at once. You switch on/off the MAC register window before you poke at the PHY.

Armed with this, I now understand why you need 'sys/dev/siba' (siba(4)) before you can use bwn(4). The siba driver provides the interface to PCI (and MIPS for an older Broadcom part) to probe/attach a SIBA bus, then enumerate all of the cores, then attach drivers to each. There's typically a PCI/PCIe core, then an 802.11 core, then a chipcommon core for the clock/power management, and then other things as needed (memory, USB, PCMCIA, etc.) bwn(4) doesn't attach to the PCI device, it sits on the siba bus as a child device.

So, to add support for a new chip, I needed to do a few things.

• The device needs to probe/attach to siba(4);
• The SPROM parsing is done by siba(4), so new fields have to be added there;
• The 802.11 core revision is what's probe/attached by bwn(4), so add it there;
• Then I needed to ensure the right microcode and radio initvals are added in bwn(4);
• Then, new PHY code is needed. For the BCM4321, it's PHY-N.

There are two open PHY-N implementations - brcmfmac is BSD licenced, and b43's is GPL licenced. I looked at the brcmfmac one, which includes full 11n support, but I decided the interface was too different for me to do a first port with. The b43 PHY-N code is smaller, simpler and the API matched what was in the bcm-4 specification. And, importantly, bwn(4) was written from the same specification, so it's naturally in alignment.

This meant that I would be adding GPLv2'ed code to bwn(4). So, I decided to dump it in sys/gnu/dev/bwn so it's away from the main driver, and make compiling it in non-standard. At some point yes, I'd like to port the brcmfmac PHYs to FreeBSD, but I wanted to get familiar with the chips and make sure the driver worked fine. Debugging /all/ broken and new pieces didn't sound like fun to me.

So after a few days, I got PHY-N compiling and I fired it up. I needed to add SPROM field parsing too, so I did that too. Then, the moment of truth - I fired it up, and it connected. It scanned on both 2G and 5G, and it worked almost first time! But, two things were broken:

• 5GHz operation just failed entirely for transmit, and
• 2GHz operation failed transmitting all OFDM frames, but CCK was fine.

Since probing, association and authentication in 2GHz did it at the lowest rate (CCK), this worked fine. Data packets at OFDM rates failed with a PHY error of 0x80 (which isn't documented anywhere, so god knows what that means!) but CCK was fine. So, off I went to b43 and the brcmfmac driver to see what the missing pieces were.

There were two. Well, three, but two that broke everything.

Firstly, there's a "I'm 5GHz!" flag in the tx descriptor. I set that for 5GHz operation - but nothing.

Secondly, the driver tries a fallback rate if the primary rate fails. Those are hardcoded, same as the RTS/CTS rates. It turns out the fallback rate for 6MB OFDM is 11MB CCK, which is invalid for 5GHz. I fixed that, but I haven't yet fixed the 1MB CCK RTS/CTS rates. I'll go do that soon. (I also submitted a patch to Linux b43 to fix that!)

Thirdly, and this was the kicker - the PHY-N and later PHYs require more detailed TX setup. We were completely missing initializing some descriptor fields. It turns out it's also required for PHY-LP (which we support) but somehow the PHY was okay with that. Once I added those fields in, OFDM transmit worked fine.

So, a week after I started, I had a stable driver on 11bg chips, as well as 5GHz operation on the PHY-N BCM4321 NIC. No 11n yet, obviously, that'll have to wait.

In the next post I'll cover fixing up the RX RSSI calculations and then what I needed to do for the BCM94322MC, which is also a PHY-N chip, but is a much later core, and required new microcode with a new descriptor interface.

It’s only through abstraction that we’re able to build the complex software systems that we do today. Hiding unimportant details from developers lets us work more efficiently and most importantly it allows us to devote more of our brain to the higher-level problems we’re trying to solve for our users.

As an obvious example, if you’re implementing a simple arithmetic function in assembly language you have to expend a lot of your brain power to track which registers are used for what, how the CPU will schedule the instructions and so on, while in a high level language you just worry about if you’ve picked the right algorithm and let the compiler worry about communicating it correctly and efficiently to the processor.

Lo-fi

More abstraction isn’t necessarily good though. If your abstractions hide important details then the cognitive burden on developers is increased (as they keep track of important information not expressed in the API) or their software will be worse (if they ignore those details). This can take many forms, but generally it makes things that can be expensive feel free by overloading programming language constructs. Here are some examples…

Getters and Setters

Getters and setters can implicitly introduce unexpected, important side effects. Code that looks like:

foo.bar = x;
y = foo.baz;

is familiar to programmers. We think we know what it means and it looks cheap. It looks like we’re writing a value to a memory location in the foo structure and reading out of another. In a language that supports getters and setters that may be what’s happening, or much more may be happening under the hood. Some common unexpected things that happen with getters and setters are:

• unexpected mutation – getting or setting a field changes some other aspect of an object. For example, does setting person.fullName update the person.firstName and person.lastName fields?
• lack of idempotency – reading the same field of an object repeatedly shouldn’t change its value, but with a getter it can. It’s even often convenient to have a nextId getter than returns an incrementing id or something.
• lack of symmetry – if you write to a field does the same value come out when you immediately read from it? Some getters or setters clean up data – useful, but unexpected.
• slow performance – setting a field on a struct is just about the cheapest thing you can do in high level code. Calling a getter or setter can do just about anything. Expensive field validation for setters, expensive computation for getters, and even worse reading from or writing to a database are unexpected yet common.

Getters and setters are really useful to API designers. They allow us to present a simple interface to our consumers but they introduce the risk of hiding details that will impact them or their users.

Automatic Memory Management

Automatic memory management is one of the great step forwards for programmer productivity. Managing memory with malloc and free is difficult to get right, often inefficient (because we err on the side of simple predictability) and the source of many bugs. Automatic memory management introduces its own issues.

It’s not so much that garbage collection is slow, but it makes allocation look free. The more allocation that occurs the more memory is used and the more garbage needs to be collected. The performance price of additional allocations aren’t paid by the code that’s doing the allocations but by the whole application.

APIs’ memory behavior is hidden from callers making it unclear what their cost will be. Worse, in weirder automatic memory management systems like Automatic Reference Counting in modern versions of Objective-C, it’s not clear if APIs will retain objects passed to them or returned from them – often even to the implementers of the API (for example).

IPC and RPC

It’s appealing to hide inter-process communication and remote procedure calls behind interfaces that look like local method calls. Local method calls are cheap, reliable, don’t leak user data, don’t have semantics that can change over time, and so on. Both IPC and RPC have those issues and can have them to radically different extents.  When we make calling remote services feel the same as calling local methods we remove the chore of using a library but force developers to carry the burden of the subtle but significant differences in our meagre brains.

But…

But I like abstraction. It can be incredibly valuable to hide unimportant details but incredibly costly to hide important ones. In practice, instead of being aware of the costs hidden by an abstraction and taking them into account, developers will ignore them. We’re a lazy people, and easily distracted.

When designing an API step back and think about how developers will use your API. Make cheap things easy but expensive things obviously expensive.

I run my web site off a Debian server on GCE. I like tinkering with the configuration. I hear that HTTP 2 is the new hot thing, and that’s going to mean supporting ALPN which means upgrading to OpenSSL 1.0.2 and nginx 1.9.5 or newer. But they isn’t supported in Debian 8.

I used apt pinning to bring in versions of nginx and OpenSSL from testing into my jessie server. I first added sources for testing by creating a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/testing.list:

deb https://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main non-free contrib

Then I configured my pin priorities by creating /etc/apt/preferences with:

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 700
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 650
Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600

After an apt-get update I could install the version of nginx from testing, bringing in the appropriate version of OpenSSL: apt-get -t=testing install nginx-full

Then it was just a matter of changing:

listen 443 ssl;

to:

listen 443 ssl http2;

wherever I wanted it.

Now it looks like I’m serving over HTTP/2. Not that it makes a whole lot of obvious difference yet.

Reposted here so those not on Facebook can access and link to it if they want.

OK, I've had this discussion enough times that I should just make a post to refer people to. This is a giant rant about copyright law debate, so most of you should feel free to skip over it.

Australian authors, please stop freaking out about the copyright term discussion in the Productivity Commission report on copyright. The bit you should be concerned about is the recommendation to lift parallel import restrictions, and arguments about the copyright term distract from your point and make you easier to dismiss.

You should not worry about the copyright term discussion because it was not a recommendation, just a part of the discussion. The PC recognises that copyright term is the subject of multiple international treaties, and we can't just change it without massive consequences, so all they actually recommended was that we stop being one of the countries that argues that copyright term should increase, and start recommending it be reduced. As we are currently one of the minority of countries that has (and actively argues for internationally, because DFAT are jerks) Death +70 years, effectively they are just arguing that we should try to return to Death +50 years as an international norm and then maybe think about where we should go from there. Given the first part would require rejecting the TPP and renegotiating the free trade agreement with the US, this isn't likely to result in drastic change soon.

I agree that their copyright term analysis is not a very good finding, and their economic analysis is badly flawed in ways that could easily be demolished by a good grad student, but that doesn't matter, because the sole recommendation they drew from it IS reasonable, because the current copyright term is much longer than you need it to be, and vastly longer than their economic analysis suggests it should be. If you are a writer and you are middle aged or younger and your life is not cut short, your copyright will not expire until the 22nd century, probably after your children are dead, possibly your grandchildren too. It matters a lot to Disney, but even optimistic analysis says it might change your income by 0.03% - and statistically, it just means that after you die your books will become orphan works. Most authors I know who have expressed an opinion on term length directly would be happy with Death +50 or even Death +25, which means that while they might dispute the PCs analysis, they are actually OK with their recommendation.

The other copyright law recommendation they made is fair use replacing fair dealing. This is irrelevant to the income of most professional writers, and helps the few that it is directly relevant to (such as historians and biographers, satirists, security researchers, etc). And it makes a huge difference to other industries (eg Google have stated Internet search engines would be legally unfeasible in Australia). and our current laws are clunky and unfit for the modern world (for example, did you realise it was illegal to record a TV program to watch later until 2006?). And the arguments that I've seen authors organisations make against fair use are straight from the movie and record industry lobby groups, and really not relevant to the book industry. Please stop opposing fair use. The US has it, and their publishing industry is doing a lot better than ours.

Argue against parallel importation by all means (it will hurt the Australian industry, and the evidence that it works as the PC say it will is limited - eg didn't work in New Zealand). Argue against it hard. You will need to, because the economic argument for it is strong, even if it has not worked elsewhere. Argue for the cultural value of Australian writing, argue that a vital industry is badly lacking in other forms of support, etc. Argue that the government is gutting other forms of support (such as literary grants) at the same time when they should be increasing them, paint the government as literary vandals and philistines only interested in supporting big highbrow art for the top end of town etc.

But please, stop making bad or irrelevant arguments about copyright. It's not helping your cause, and it's putting you in conflict with groups that should be supporting you, like libraries, universities and free speech organisations.

I like modern JS features. I’ve been using some like const and let for a long time in specific contexts like Gecko chrome (when I worked on Flock & Songbird). Recently I’ve been playing with the features that have been standardized as ES6.

I tried a bunch of different build-system and transpiler approaches but I found them all unsatisfying. Even with automatic transpilation on save, even with source maps, I felt that I was missing too much of the edit/reload cycle that makes web JS programming such a pleasure. Even with low latency I couldn’t take advantage of things like being able to edit my source code inside the Chrome developer tools debugger.

Luckily stable Chrome supports a lot of ES6. Just restricting myself to that quite large subset gives me a great set of features to work with, without losing the development flow I like. Every six weeks I get more features to play with as a new Chrome release launches. When I want to deploy to older browsers I can transpile (Closure Compiler is great) and polyfill, but it’s part of the release / deployment flow rather than obstructing development.

So what am I using? Mostly:

• Classes
• Arrow functions
• let and const
• New collection types – Map, Set, etc

It’s pretty nice.

My FreeBSD-HEAD laptop runs very warm when running firefox, but even warmer when it's doing something simple - like say, streaming from pandora.

So, I decided to take a bit of a look.

Firstly, 'vmstat -a' - a good top level peek.

procs  memory       page                    disks     faults         cpu
r b w  avm   fre   flt  re  pi  po    fr   sr ad0 cd0   in    sy    cs us sy id
3 0 0  21G  180M 30403   0   2   0 21520  976  27   0  598 462567 10061 25 31 44
1 0 0  21G  174M 10389   0   0   0  3320  980   0   0  913 1203071 11892 15 24 61
3 0 0  21G  192M  4028   0   0   0  4763  983  14   0  563 1246314  8166 15 23 62
1 0 0  21G  192M  2305   0   0   0   334  988   1   0  390 1165396 10784 18 20 62
2 0 0  21G  202M 30493   0   0   0  3154  983   4   0  340 1072100 13287 28 23 49
2 0 0  21G  202M  8440   0   0   0   646  979   1   0  391 1071166  8802 32 20 48
1 0 0  21G  204M  3608   0   0   0  1841 1954  31   0  516 1041635 11319 33 21 46
3 0 0  20G  212M 67782   0   0   0  2895  973   1   0  387 1053575 10995 28 26 46
2 0 0  21G  187M 25368   0   0   0  2483  989   7   0  475 1047031 12056 29 23 48

.. ok, a million syscalls a second. Fine.Let's ask dtrace what's going on:

root@victoria:/home/adrian # dtrace -n 'syscall:::entry { @[probefunc] = count(); }'
dtrace: description 'syscall:::entry ' matched 1082 probes
^C

  gettimeofday                                                    305
  lstat                                                           336
  kevent                                                          598
  recvfrom                                                       1018
  __sysctl                                                       1384
  getpid                                                         2158
  sigprocmask                                                    5189
  select                                                         5443
  writev                                                         6215
  madvise                                                        6606
  setitimer                                                      6729
  recvmsg                                                       17556
  _umtx_op                                                      40740
  ppoll                                                        853940
  read                                                        1152896
  poll                                                        1158669
  write                                                       2159990
  ioctl                                                       2170830

root@victoria:/home/adrian # dtrace -n 'syscall::read:return /execname == "firefox"/ { @["rval (bytes)"] =
quantize(arg1); }'
dtrace: description 'syscall::read:return ' matched 2 probes
^C
  rval (bytes)                                     
           value  ------------- Distribution ------------- count  
              -2 |                                         0      
              -1 |                                         1      
               0 |                                         0      
               1 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 496294 
               2 |                                         5      
               4 |                                         0      
               8 |                                         0      
              16 |                                         0      
              32 |                                         0      
              64 |                                         0      
             128 |                                         0      
             256 |                                         0      
             512 |                                         0      
            1024 |                                         0      
            2048 |                                         0      
            4096 |                                         6      
            8192 |                                         0      
           16384 |                                         0      
           32768 |                                         36     
           65536 |                                         0       

root@victoria:/home/adrian # dtrace -n 'syscall::write:return /execname == "firefox"/ { @["rval (bytes)"] = quantize(arg1); }'
dtrace: description 'syscall::write:return ' matched 2 probes
^C
  rval (bytes)                                    
           value  ------------- Distribution ------------- count  
              -2 |                                         0      
              -1 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@                     875025 
               0 |                                         0      
               1 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@                     876075 
               2 |                                         0      
               4 |                                         0      
               8 |                                         0      
              16 |                                         14     
              32 |                                         1      
              64 |                                         0      
             128 |                                         15     
             256 |                                         8      
             512 |                                         8      
            1024 |                                         29     
            2048 |                                         563    
            4096 |                                         0      
            8192 |                                         0      
           16384 |                                         0      
           32768 |                                         14     
           65536 |                                         0       

... ok, so read and write is doing single byte transactions, and write is actually failing as often as it's succeeding.

so, what's actually going on? I decided to run truss briefly, and I get a lot of this:

_umtx_op(0x82efa2e80,UMTX_OP_MUTEX_WAIT,0x0,0x0,0x0) = 0 (0x0)
ioctl(68,SNDCTL_DSP_GETOPTR,0xce0c5ac0)         = 0 (0x0)
_umtx_op(0x82b16fb70,UMTX_OP_MUTEX_WAIT,0x0,0x0,0x0) = 0 (0x0)
_umtx_op(0x8d6a57e58,UMTX_OP_NWAKE_PRIVATE,0x1,0x0,0x0) = 0 (0x0)
write(158,"x",1)                 ERR#35 'Resource temporarily unavailable'
_umtx_op(0x8006bd4b8,UMTX_OP_WAIT_UINT_PRIVATE,0x0,0x18,0x7fffbde44c88) = 0 (0x0)

So I'm guessing there's a lot of inefficient single byte read/write syscalls to wake up a remote thread, along with a lot of inefficient use of the sound API.

For sound ioctls:

ioctl(68,SNDCTL_DSP_GETOSPACE,0xd7d54e10)     = 0 (0x0)
ioctl(68,SNDCTL_DSP_GETOPTR,0xd7d54e00)         = 0 (0x0)
ioctl(68,SNDCTL_DSP_GETOSPACE,0xd7d54df0)     = 0 (0x0)
ioctl(68,SNDCTL_DSP_GETOPTR,0xd7d54d50)         = 0 (0x0)

.. so i'm guessing it's doing it every thread wakeup or something stupid, even if it doesn't need to yet.

If you work in software, you've likely heard of the latest hilarious bug - Linux glibc getaddrinfo() stack buffer overflow (https://isc.sans.edu/diary/CVE-2015-7547%3A+Critical+Vulnerability+in+glibc+getaddrinfo/20737). It was jointly found by redhat and google (https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.ca/2016/02/cve-2015-7547-glibc-getaddrinfo-stack.html), and it's been under investigation for a while. There are also some proof of concepts out there (eg https://github.com/fjserna/CVE-2015-7547).

I'm not sure if Android or OpenWRT devices are vulnerable - they don't use glibc out of the box, but they may use the relevant pieces of the NSS resolver library. But anything based on a linux distribution (centos, debian, ubuntu, redhat, etc) - ie, web services, docker installs, virtual machines, a heck of a lot of firewall/email/web gateway appliances, even some router management planes (hi Cisco?) may be vulnerable to this attack.

This means, well, most of the internet is likely vulnerable. I'm glad it's not an obvious bug in openwrt/android, as that'd also mean tens/hundreds of millions of devices are vulnerable. But it's a good study case - if you own something that has this bug, but there's no longer software updates available, you're short of luck. You may have working software on a perfectly working hardware, but since you (or some third party) can't fix it, it's effectively a paperweight.

But there may be devices which use glibc that I haven't covered. There may be set top boxes, televisions, cable modem / DSL gateways that are affected by this. There's likely a whole bunch of medical kit and control systems out there with this bug. Millions of potential consumer and industrial devices are impacted by this bug and it's likely never going to be patched. And since it's DNS, it's totally unencrypted/unauthorized, so anyone can hijack/spoof DNS to control what's going on.

So this is why I'm a big fan of open source software and being able to reflash your own devices. There's likely millions (or more!) devices this affects that is perfectly fine hardware but will never get software updates. This exposes a lot of people, with no easy fix besides "buy a replacement" and hope that it also isn't impacted. Heck, look at your home, office, workspace, outdoors - look at all those little electronic devices and think that at least some of them run Linux with this vulnerability and will be network connected. Any of them could be vulnerable to this and any of them may be owned by someone now.

This is "Hollywood" level of exploit. This is like, watching an episode of "Person of Interest" and realising all of those drive-by hacks are actually possible. This is like, anyone everywhere can do this - not just governments, but anyone with the minimum technical ability needed to run the exploit. Yes, this includes your internet connected fridge and your Internet-Of-Things lightbulbs.

Oh, and FreeBSD isn't vulnerable. Heh.

Photo credit: Finn Pröpper

I really like Australia. I was born there, I grew up there, my parents brothers and sisters all live there. I don’t have a single national identity, but ‘Australian’ is the one I put above the others. It’s a physically beautiful and inspiring country. At their best its people are generous, open, welcoming, relaxed and funny. At its strongest Australian nationalism is self-critical. The story of the first European settlers arriving as British criminals  and founding a free nation is inspiring.

On the other hand, our country was founded on the lie of terra nullius which continues to pervert many Australians’ understanding of their country. Indigenous Australians suffer incarceration and ill health at rates that are hard to comprehend, relative to the prosperous, free image we have of ourselves. Explicit genocide, dispossession, unequal treatment and paternalism has been replaced by active neglect and disrespect. Stan Gran’s speech is a must-watch:

Australia’s attitude to immigration has been troubled for a long time. A set of White Australia policies restricted non-European immigration persisted into the 1960s. Even then, non-English Europeans, especially Catholics were looked down on and politically and economically marginalized. During the Second World War, unlike the United States, we interned not only Japanese Australians, but Australians of Italian and German descent – as I like to say, “our racism was colourblind”. Subsequent waves of Southern European, East Asian, and now South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants are attacked verbally by politicians and physically by thugs.

Finally in the treatment of asylum seekers by Australia since the 1990s has been a stain on our reputation and our moral standing. Governments of all parties have imprisoned men, women and children, in awful conditions, exposing them to horrible abuse – simply for arriving in Australia after escaping persecution – but without their paperwork in order. It’s a continuation and escalation of our history of xenophobic immigration policies.

So January 26th doesn’t get me that excited, but it does make me reflect. I’m glad my employer decided to use our home page the occasion to highlight the historic oppression of our indigenous brothers and sisters. In four months time there will be National Sorry Day, a national day of atonement and reconciliation. That recognizes where we’ve come from, how far we have to go to achieve the standards we set ourselves. That celebrates the aspects of Australian culture that I most identify with.

When I started with this Atheros MIPS 11n stuff a few years ago, my first test board was a Routerstation Pro with a pair of AR9160 NICs. I could get ~ 150mbit/sec bridging performance out of it, and I thought I was doing pretty good.

Fast forward to now, and I've been bringing FreeBSD up on each of the subsequent boards. But the performance never improved. Now, I never bothered to look into it because I was always too busy with my day job, but finally someone trolled me correctly on the FreeBSD embedded IRC channel and I took a look.

It turns out that.. things could've benefitted from a lot of improvement.

First up - I'm glad George Neville-Neil brought up PMC (performance counters) on the MIPS24k platform. It made it easier for me to bring it up on the MIPS74k platform and it was absolutely instrumental in figuring out performance issues here. No, there's no real ability to get DTrace up on these boards - some have 32MB of RAM. Heck, the packet filter (bpf) consumes most of a megabyte of RAM when you first start it up.

My initial tests are on an AP135 reference design board from Qualcomm Atheros. It's a QCA9558 SoC with an AR8327 switch on board. Both on-chip ethernet ports (arge0, arge1) are available. I set it up as a straight bridge between arge0 and arge1 and then I used iperf between two laptops to measure performance.

The first test - 130mbit bridging performance. That's terrible for this platform.

So I fired up hwpmc, and I found the first problem - packets were being copied in the receive and transmit path. Since I'm more familiar with the transmit path, I decided to look into that.

The AR7161 MAC requires both transmit and receive buffers to be both DWORD (32 bit or 4 bytes) aligned. In addition, all transmit frames save the last frame are required to be a multiple of DWORD in length. Plenty of frames don't meet this requirement and end up being copied.

The AR7240 and later MAC relaxed this - transmit/receive buffers can now be byte-aligned. So that particular workaround can be removed. It still needs to do it for multi-descriptor transmits that aren't DWORD sized (eg if you just prepend a fresh ethernet header) but that doesn't happen in the bridging path in the normal case.

Fixing that got bridging performance from 130mbit to 180mbit. That's not a huge difference, but it's something.

Next up is the receive path.  This was more .. complicated. The receive code copies the whole buffer back two bytes in order to ensure that the IP payload presented to the FreeBSD network stack is aligned. This is a problem in FreeBSD's network stack - it assumes the hardware handles unaligned accesses fine. So if your receive engine is DWORD aligned, the 14 byte ethernet header will result in the start of the IP payload being non-DWORD aligned, and .. the stack blows up. Now, I have vague plans to start fixing that as a general rule, but I did the next worst hack - I grabbed a buffer, set its RX start point to two bytes in, so the ethernet header is unaligned but the IP header is. Now, the ethernet stack in FreeBSD handles unaligned stuff correctly, so that works.

Except it wasn't faster. It turns out that the MIPS busdma code was doing very inefficient things with mbuf handling if everything wasn't completely aligned. Ian Lepore (who does ARM work) recently fixed this for armv6, so he ported it to MIPS and I added it.

The result? bridging performance leaped from 180mbit to 420mbit. Quite nice, but not where Linux was.

I left it for a few days, and someone on the freebsd-mips mailing list pointed out big stability issues with his tests. I started looking at the Linux OpenWRT driver and the MIPS24K/MIPS74K memory coherency operations. I found a couple of interesting things:

• The busdma sync code never did a "SYNC" operation if things weren't being copied or invalidated; and
• I was using cache-writethrough instead of cache-writeback for the cached memory attribute for MIPS74K.

I recently figured out most of the missing pieces for 11n support and stability with the rsu driver in FreeBSD. This handles support for the RTL8188SU and RTL8192SU chipsets. I'll cover what I found and fixed in this post.

First off - the driver was in reasonably poor shape. It sometimes paniced when the NIC was removed, it didn't support 802.11n at all and it wouldn't associate reliably. I was pestered enough by one of the original users behind getting the driver ported (Idwer! Hi!) and decided I'd give fixing it up a go.

Importantly - it's a mostly real fullmac device. "fullmac" here means that the firmware on the device does almost everything interesting - it handles association, it can do encryption/decryption for you if you want, it'll handle retransmission and transmit rate control. There are some important things it doesn't do - I'll cover those shortly.

Here's a fun bit of trivia - this firmware outputs text debugging via a magic firmware notification, and it's on by default. This made all of the debugging much, much easier as I didn't have to guess so much about what was going on in the firmware. All firmware developers - please do this. Please!

I first looked at the association issue. The device does full scan offload - you send it a firmware command to start scanning and it'll return scan results as they come in. Plenty of firmware devices do this. Then you send it an association message, then a join_bss message. For those looking at the source - rsu_site_survey() starts the scan, and rsu_join_bss() attempts an association. Now, I noticed that it was sending a join message before the site survey finished. I also noticed that I never really received any management frames, and when I used a sniffer to see what was going on, I saw double-associations sometimes occuring.

I then checked OpenBSD. Their driver just stubbed out the management frame transmit routine. This wasn't done in FreeBSD, so I added it. It turns out the firmware here does all management frame transmit and receive, so I just plainly have to do none of it. This tidied things up a bit but it didn't fix association.

Next up - the whole way scan results were pushed into net80211 was wrong. Sometimes scan results ended up on the wrong channel. The driver was doing dirty things to the current channel state directly and then faking a beacon to the net80211 stack. I replaced that with some code I wrote for the 7260 wifi driver - the stack now accepts a channel (and other things!) as part of the receive frame, so you can do proper off-channel frame reception. This tidied up the scan results so they were now consistent.

Then I thought about an evil hack - how about delaying the call to rsu_join_bss() until after the survey finished. That worked - associations were now very reliable.


Now the device associated reliably and worked okay. There were some missing bits for the firmware setup path for doing things like power saving, saying how many transmit/receive streams are available, etc, but those were easy to add. Next up - 802.11n.

On the receive side, 802.11n requires you to do A-MPDU reordering as the transmitter is free to retransmit failed frames out of order. But the net80211 stack only handled the case where it saw the management frames and it itself drove the A-MPDU negotiation. Here, the firmware drives the negotiation and just tells us what's just happened. So, I had to extend net80211 to be told what the A-MPDU parameters are. It turned out that yes, the firmware sends a notification about A-MPDU going up, but it doesn't tell you how big the block-ack window is. Sigh. So, I needed to add that.

But the access point still wasn't negotiating it. Here was the next fun bit - join rsu_join_bss() it lets the stack assemble optional IEs to send to the access point and, the more interesting part, it looks at said IEs for an idea of what its own configuration should be. I added the HTINFO IE and voila! It started negotiating 802.11n.

(Oh, and I had to add M_AMPDU to each RX'ed frame from an 802.11n node before I called net80211, or the receive code would never do A-MPDU reorder processing.)

The final hack - I stubbed out the A-MPDU TX negotiation so we would never attempt to do it. So yes, there's no TX aggregation support, but that's fine for now.

Then Idwer told me it wasn't working for him. After much digging with the Linux driver authors (Thanks Christian and Larry!) we found that the OpenBSD driver tried to program the chip directly for 40MHz mode and that's wrong - instead, I just missed one of the 802.11n IEs. The firmware looked into that to see what the channel setup should've been. Two lines of diff later and I was on at 40MHz wide modes.

Finally - stability. It turns out that the USB drivers do inconsistent things when it comes to the detach path. They're supposed to stop transmit/receive, then flush buffers which flushes the net80211 node references, and then tear down the net80211 interface. Some, eg if_rsu, were doing it the other way. I fixed if_rsu and if_urtwn - they're now both stable.

Hi!

The progress of the AR9170 FreeBSD-ification can be found here:

https://github.com/erikarn/otus

Yes, I did actually keep the history of the driver bring-up here.

I told myself a long, long time ago that I really don't want to be working on USB wireless. It's not that I dislike USB or wireless; it's just that the hoops required to get it all working in a stable way is quite a bit to keep in your mind. But, I decided recently that it's about time I learnt how it worked and I was very sad that we still didn't have any working USB wifi devices that also operated with 802.11n.

So, I picked a NIC and dove in.

I picked if_rsu(4) - it's the RTL8188SU / RTL8192SU series hardware from Realtek. It turned out I chose reasonably well.

First off - it's a "fullmac" device - meaning that outside of a handful of things, the device firmware offloads a lot of the 802.11 complications. The driver does hardware initialisation and the wireless stack speaks WPA/WPA2/etc for negotiating encryption, but the hardware handles scanning, authentication, 802.11n aggregation negotiation and most management frame work.

Secondly - it's ported from OpenBSD. The OpenBSD folk do a good job of getting drivers up and running, but there tend to be some sharp edges and the 802.11n bits just don't work.

So, besides currently doing encryption in software, the rsu(4) driver behaves rather well. I'll write a separate article about that. This article is about the AR9170, or otus(4) driver in FreeBSD/OpenBSD parlance.

Now, the AR9170 is a ZyDAS device with an Atheros 802.11n PHY and radio. It's quite a hybrid beast. It's also buggy - there are issues with QoS frames and 802.11n aggregation that make it impossible to behave well. So, for now I'm treating it like a 11abg device and I'll worry about 802.11n when someone gives me patches to make it work.

The OpenBSD driver is based on the initial otus driver that Atheros provided to the Linux developers circa 2009. The firmware blob is closed and very old - the ar9170fw project is still out there on the internet (and I have a mirror at https://github.com/erikarn/ar9170-fw) but I can't get it to build on a recent FreeBSD install so a firmware update will take time. But, it does seem to work.

There are a few pieces to think about when porting a USB driver. The biggest piece is that it's not memory mapped IO or IO port based - everything is a message. There are USB device control commands you can send which will sleep until they're done, but the majority of stuff is done using bulk transmit and receive endpoints and that's all conveniently asynchronous. But it complicates things in the driver world.

Memory mapped and IO port drivers treat device IO as this magical "I do it, then the next instruction executes when it's done" mostly serialised paradigm. It's a lie, of course - the intel x86 CPUs will pretend things are occuring in a specific order, but a lot of platforms require you to mark memory as uncached or use memory / cache flush operations to ensure things go out to the device in any particularly controlled manner. But USB doesn't - outside of USB control transfers, USB devices tend to look like remote network devices and this includes register accesses. Now, the RTL8188SU driver (rsu(4)) implements the firmware upload and register accesses using control transfers, so it's all pretty easy to get the driver initialisation and attaching working before you care about the asynchronous parts. But the AR9170 driver implements register accesses as firmware commands - and so I have to get a lot more of the stack up and working first.

So, here's what I did.

First up - I commented out almost all of the device driver, and focused on getting the probe, attach and detach methods working. That wasn't too hard. But yes, almost all the code was commented out.

Next up was firmware loading. This was done using control transfers, so I didn't have to worry about implementing the bulk transmit and receive endpoint handling. I had to convert the firmware load path to the FreeBSD firmware API rather than the OpenBSD API, but that was mostly trivial.

Then I realised I wasn't doing any driver locking - so yes, I ensured I did the bare minimum of driver locking required to stop the kernel panicing. OpenBSD doesn't use locks, they use old style BSD spl() levels.

Next up was command transmit and receive. Now, I needed to setup the USB endpoints - which FreeBSD makes really easy to do using a structure to define what endpoints are what. It was pretty clean. The complicated bit is the bulk callback - it handles transfer statuses and transfer initiation. This is the bit that took me a little time to wrap my head around.

The USB stuff handles things in-sequence. Everything going to an endpoint here gets handled in the sequence you queue it. It also will process the bulk callback in a single worker thread taskqueue, rather than the driver author having to worry about creating their own worker threads. So, this is what
you end up doing:

• The bulk callback has three states: USB_ST_TRANSFERRED, USB_ST_SETUP, and everything else (error.)
• USB_ST_TRANSFERRED says "I've finished a transfer".
• USB_ST_SETUP says "I've been asked to initiate a transfer."
• Any driver thread starts a transmit by calling usbd_transfer_start() on the usb_xfer struct, which will kick off a call into the bulk callback with USB_ST_SETUP.
• So, the driver has to maintain its own queues of "pending", "active" and "waiting" transactions. "pending" is the queue to put outbound transmit messages on. "active" is the queue you put messages that you've submitted when USB_ST_SETUP is called. When USB_ST_TRANSFERRED or an error is called, you pop off the top entry from "active" and you finish with it, then you fall through to USB_ST_SETUP to start a new transfer.

I just committed "NUMA" to FreeBSD. Well, no, I didn't. I did almost no actual NUMA-y work in FreeBSD. I just exposed the existing NUMA stuff in FreeBSD out and re-enabled it.

FreeBSD-9 introduced basic NUMA awareness in the physical allocator (sys/vm/vm_phys.c.) It implemented first-touch page allocation, and then fell back to searching through the domains, round-robin style. It wasn't perfect, for some workloads it was apparently okay. But it had some shortcomings - it wasn't configurable, UMA and other subsystems didn't know about NUMA domains, and the scheduler really didn't know about NUMA domains. So I'm sure there are plenty of workloads which it didn't work for.

That was all ripped out before FreeBSD-10. FreeBSD-10 NUMA just implements round-robin physical page allocation. It still tracks the per-domain physical memory regions, but it doesn't do any kind of NUMA aware allocation. From what I can gather, it was removed until something 'better' would land.

However, nothing (yet) has landed. So I decided I'd take a look into it. I found that for a lot of simple workloads (ie, where you're doing lots of anonymous memory allocation - eg, you're doing math crunching) the FreeBSD-9 model works fine. It's also a perfectly good starting point for experimenting.

So all my NUMA work in -HEAD does is provide an API to exactly the above. It doesn't teach the kernel APIs about domain aware allocations - there's currently no way to ask for memory from a specific domain when calling UMA, or contigmalloc, etc. The scheduler doesn't know about NUMA, so threads/processes will migrate off-socket very quickly unless you explicitly limit things. Devices don't yet do NUMA local work - the ACPI code is in there to enumerate which NUMA domain they're in, but it's not used anywhere just yet.

Then what is it good for?

If you're doing math workloads where you read in data into memory, do a bunch of work, and spit it out - it works fine. If you're running bhyve instances, you can run them using numactl and have them pinned to a local NUMA domain. Those coarse-grained things work fine. You can also change the system default back to round-robin and use first-touch or fixed-domain for specific processes. It's useful for exactly the same subset of tasks as it was in FreeBSD-9, but now it's at least configurable.

So what's next?

Well, my main aim is to get the minimum done so kernel side work is NUMA aware. This includes UMA, contigmalloc, malloc, mbuf allocation and such. It'd be nice to tag VM objects with a domain allocation policy, but that's currently out of scope. I'd also like to plumb in domain configuration into devices and allow devices to allocate memory for different driver threads with different policies.

But the first thing that showed up is that KVA allocation and superpages get in the way of malloc/contigmalloc working. Allocating memory in FreeBSD first allocates KVA space, then back-fills it with pages. As far as malloc/contigmalloc is concerned, KVA is KVA and it finds the first available space in a time-fast way. It then backfills it with physical pages. The superpage reservation bits (sys/vm/vm_reserv.[ch]) join together regions that are contiguous and in the same superpage and turn it into an allocation from the same superpage. These have no idea about NUMA domains. So, if you allocate a 4KiB page via malloc() from domain 0 and then try to allocate a 4KiB page from domain 1, it will likely mess it up:

• First page gets allocated - first KVA, then the underlying 2mb superpage is allocated and a 4k page is returned - from physical memory domain 0;
• Second page gets allocated - first KVA, and if it's adjacent or within the same 2mb superpage as the above allocation, it'll "fake" the page allocation via refcounting and it'll really be that same underlying superpage - but it's from physical memory domain 0.

Here's how I was introduced into this UNIX world, or "wait, WHO was your WHAT?"

So, here's 11ish or so year old Adrian. It's the early 90s. I was hiding in my bedroom, trying to make another crystal set out of random parts and scraping away the paint at my windowsill. In walks my Aunty, who introduces her new boyfriend.

"Hi, I'm Julian." he said. That wasn't all that interesting.

"Oh, are you making a crystal set?" .. ok, so that was interesting.

And, that was that. Suddenly, someone role-model-y shows up in my life out of the blue. There I was, an 11 year old who felt very mostly alone most of the time, and someone shows up who I can look up to and think I can relate to. So, I'm a sponge for everything he shows me. Whenever he comes over, he has some new story to tell, some new thing to show me. He would show me better ways of building transistor switch circuits when I was in the "make large arcs with car alternator" phase of my early teens. And, when I saved up and bought a PC, he started to show me programming.

Now, I was already programming. My parents had saved up and bought me an Amstrad CPC464. We had a second-hand commodore 64 for a short while, but that eventually somehow stopped working and I didn't have the clue to fix it. But I was programming Locomotive BASIC and dabbling in Z80 assembly when I was 12, and had "upgraded" to Turbo Pascal 6 when I hit high school. (Yes, school taught Turbo Pascal at Grade 10 level, and I decided to learn it a bit earlier. That's .. wow, that dates me.) I hadn't yet really stumbled into C yet. I had heard about it, but I didn't have anything that could write it.


Julian explained task switching to me one day during a walk along the beach. He explained that computers can just appear to be doing multiple things at once - but the CPU only does one thing at a time, and you can just switch things really quickly to give the appearance that it's multitasking. With that bright spark planted in my head, I went home and started dreaming up ways to make my Z80 based CPC do something like this.

My mother dragged me to McDonalds to apply for a job the moment I was legally able to (14 years, 9 months) and I saw a computer at a second hand shop - it was a $500 IBM PC/AT, with EGA monitor, two floppy disks and a printer. We put down a down-payment and I paid it off myself with my minimum wage money. Once I had that home I quickly erm, "acquired" a copy of Turbo Pascal for home and was off drawing funny little fractals.

So yes - it's Julian's fault I discovered FreeBSD. Yes, this is Julian Elischer. One day he showed me his computer, running something called BSD. He was trying to explain bourne shell scripting and the installer. I nodded, very confused, and eventually went back to the VGA programming book he lent me. He also showed me fractint running in X on his monochome 486 DX2-50 laptop. I had no idea what was going on under the scenes, only that the fractals were much more interesting than the ones I was drawing. So I took the VGA book home and started learning how to use the higher resolutions available. One thing stuck in my mind: so much bit-plane work. Ugh. One other thing stuck in my mind - reading from VGA memory is one of the slowest things you can do. Don't do it. Ever. (Do you hear that console driver authors? Don't do it. It's bad.)

One day he explained pointers to me. I had erm, "acquired" a copy of Turbo C 2.0 from a friend after failing to make much traction with the less friendly versions (Tiny C, for example.) I had coded up a few things, but I didn't really "get" it. So he sat me down with a pen and paper, and drew diagrams to explain what was going on. I remember that lightbulb going off in the back of my mind, as I dimly connected the whole idea of types and sizes together - and that was it. I was off and doing bad things to C code.

I eventually saved up enough for an updated 286 motherboard, then an updated graphics card (full VGA!), then a sound blaster card, and finally a 486-DX33 motherboard. He introduced me to his friend Peter (who had, and I believe still has, a rather extensive electronics collection) and handed me a FreeBSD-1.1 CDROM. I took it home, put it in, and .. it didn't do anything. My 486 had a soundblaster pro + CD-ROM, and .. well, FreeBSD-1.1 didn't speak to that hardware. So, I eventually put Slackware Linux 3.0 on the thing, and became a Linux nerd for a bit.

I did eventually try FreeBSD-1.1 on it - after putting a lot of FreeBSD bits on a lot of floppies - but I couldn't figure out what to do when it booted. This is going to sound silly - but the lack of colorls turned me off. I know, it seems silly now, but that's honestly why I went back to Slackware.

I eventually went back to FreeBSD in the 2.x era once I had an IDE CDROM and I was working part time at an ISP after (high) school finished. Yes, I figured out how to get colorls to work, I got in trouble disagreeing with a Michael (O, not M) at iiNet about Squid on Linux versus FreeBSD, and well.. stuff. Here was this 17yo kid disagreeing with things and acting like he knew everything. I'm sure it was endearing.

Fast-forward a couple years, and I had been hacking on FreeBSD here and there. I got in a little erm, "trouble" before I finished high school, which phk reminded me of - when they granted me a commit bit. I forget when this was, but I wouldn't have been much older than 20.

So - this is why mentoring kids is important. It may seem like a waste of time; it may seem like they don't understand, but we were all there once. We wanted someone to relate to, someone to look up to, and something interesting to do. Julian was that person for me, and I owe both him and my mother (of course) pretty much everything about my existence in this silly little computer industry.

(This is also why you don't skimp on hardware support for popular, if cheaper platforms and "shiny" looking features if you want people to adopt your stuff -  but that's a different rant.)

Ok, that's done. I'm going back to hacking on VGA/VESA boot loader support for FreeBSD-HEAD. That's long overdue, and I want my pretty splash screen.