Swansea University Computer Society

Held on Thursday February 25^th 1999 in the Computer Society lab

Start time: 15:07
End time: 16:43
Minutes taken and published by Steve Hill (Secretary).
Summary of events over the past year:

• Sunrise was taken offline for a memory swap. Since it was not used much, it remained offline until we were provided with a room to house our machines in. Sunrise was re-installed, renamed as "Klatch", was given a monitor and is now running as an X server.
• SUCS and Galaxy were moved to the Kopy Shop after we were asked to vacate the room in which our servers were originally housed. We’d like to thank the Kopy Shop for providing the space, power sockets and network connection for us.
• We joined compsoc.org.uk.
• We started producing our own Linux distribution CDs.
• SUCS was upgraded to Red Hat Linux 5.1 and Galaxy was upgraded to Red Hat Linux 5.2 to fix some security issues.
• The Student Union gave us a room in which to put our servers and workstations (The Computer Society lab is located in the old Debates A on the 3^rd floor in Mandela House). SUCS and Galaxy were quickly moved to the new lab.
• We joined the RC5DES competition, "Project Bovine".
• The Computer Society lab opened to our members a few weeks before the AGM.
• Jeremy Palmer (Jezz) donated an Intel 486DX2/80 machine. The committee has rewarded his generosity by giving him honorary membership.
• A 486 Socket 3 motherboard was donated by Steve Hill (FireFury) – this has now been installed in Galaxy together with a 486DX4/100 CPU, which was donated by Steve Whitehouse (Rohan). Galaxy is noticeably faster after being upgraded from an AMD 386DX/40.
• After the university switched from Novell NetWare to Microsoft Windows NT, we made the change from Mars NWE (a third party NetWare server) to Samba (a third party Windows NT network server) within a few days.
• DHCP allocated network connections in the Computer Society lab have been made available to all members, allowing them to plug their own machines into our subnet.
• Steve Whitehouse (Rohan) donated a D-Link Via Rhine 100BaseTx network card, which has been installed in SUCS to replace our 3Com 3c509 10BaseT / 10Base2 as the external interface. The old 3c509 is now running one of our 3 internal nets, with the 4 SPARCstation SLCs and their SPARCstation 2 server on that segment.
• With the help of Steve Whitehouse (Rohan) and his father, we cabled the 3 subnets in the lab on a Saturday.
• With the money we have received from membership fees and Linux distribution CD sales, we were able to afford a 9 GB Quantum UWSCSI hard drive and a single channel BusLogic UWSCSI PCI controller. This has lead to much faster disk access times, less CPU load on SUCS and a huge increase in hard drive space.
• Started mirroring parts of frequently accessed FTP sites.
• We purchased a mascot for the Computer Society – an official Linux penguin.
• 7 SUN SLCs/SPARCstations were purchased from the Computer Science department for £150 for all 7.

• An NEC SilentWriter S60P laser printer was donated by Rhys Jones (Rhys) (who bought it from the German Dept for £10 on the grounds that it would no longer pick paper up) - this was fixed within 2 minutes by Steve Hill (FireFury). ;-) Treasury Report (Since 25^th February 1998):
  • We received a £200 grant from the Student Union at the start of this year - £20.50 of the grant has been spent on printing, £138.84 has been spent on books for the Computer Society library. If you would like to borrow one of these books, please see Rhys Jones in room 403, Electrical Engineering – a full list is available on the web site.)
  • £160.41 was carried over from last year in our society account, £430.50 has been collected in membership fees, £42.99 in donations and £94.50 from sales of the Linux distribution CDs. OF that money, we have spent £495 on the UWSCSI hard drive and controller for SUCS and some new memory for Galaxy. £160 has been spent on miscellaneous equipment, £38.99 has been spent on blank CD-R discs.
  Amendments to the constitution:
  Please note the amendments will only take effect when the new committee takes over. Until then, the old constitution is still in place.
  • 2.3.1: "This society is open to all members of the Student Union" amended to read "This society is open to all members of the Swansea University Student Union" in order to clarify our constitution. (A dispute was raised as to whether someone who was a member of the National Union of Students, but NOT a member of the Swansea University Student Union fell into the category of "student member". It did not explicitly say in our constitution, but it did in the Swansea University Student Union’s, which is a superset of our own, so this amendment does not actually change any of the rules regarding membership, however, it does clarify them.) This amendment was passed with 12 for, 2 against.
  • 3.1.4: An addition reading "General meeting quorum – 10% of student members must be present, ²/₃ must vote for an amendment for it to be passed." This amendment was passed with 12 votes for, 3 against.
  In order to clarify the process of a student member becoming an honorary member, the following 3 additions were passed unanimously:
  • 2.3.6: "When a student member’s status changes with regards to the Swansea University Student Union membership, this change must be informed to the committee directly by the member".
  • 2.3.7: "If a student member’s status changes without notification to the committee, the membership will default to honorary."
  • 2.3.8: "Status change from the student to honorary membership by the committee must be notified in writing to the member before the change occurs."
  Appointments: To help with the smooth running of the society, there are several positions to which the committee can appoint various people. The following appointments were suggested:
  • Webmaster - Denis Walker (Dez) - passed.
  • Publicity officer - Rhys Jones (Rhys) - passed.
  • Technical advisor - Justin Mitchell (Arthur) - passed.
  • Technical advisor - Steve Hill (FireFury) - passed.
  • Technical advisor - Steve Whitehouse (Rohan) - passed.
  • Technical advisor - Alan Cox (Anarchy) - passed.
  • Technical advisor - (Dick) - passed.
  Other business:
  • Price of printing will be 4p per page (subject to change without notice) and will be run on a strict pre-payment scheme once we have written the accounting system.
  • To clarify the date when each member’s membership ends, the committee has set 30^th September as the end date. A grace period will usually be provided such that 2 weeks after the end date the account will be disabled, and 4 weeks after the end date, the account (and all of the member’s data and mail) will be deleted. However, the grace period is provided at the discretion of the committee, and as such, members should renew their membership on or before the above end date.
  Nomination and Election discussions:
  After Denis Walker (Dez) disputed the validity of Petroc Gill’s candidacy on the grounds that one of his nominators, Stenner, was not a member of the Swansea University Student Union, the attendees of the meeting were asked to vote on two motions.
  • Is Stenner a valid seconder? Rejected with 1 vote for, 9 against.
  • Should Petroc Gill (Petroc)’s candidacy still be allowed, since despite the Student Union’s constitution being clear on the matter, the Computer Society’s is not? Passed with 12 votes for, 2 against.
  Each election candidate, with the exception of Petroc Gill (Petroc), made a quick speech – some of the speeches were posted on the Milliways electronic bulletin board.

  Thanks: I’d like to thank the people who came to the meeting. Thanks should also go to Manic for doing a wonderful job of chairing the election discussions / speeches, lending us his skills of writing amendments to the constitution and being the returning officer through the elections this year.

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