The University Computer Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Motto | |
|---|---|
| Established | 1974 |
| President | David Adam |
| Vice President | James French |
| Patron | |
| President Emeritus | Bernard Blackham |
| Vice President Emeritus | James Andrewartha |
| Patron Emeritus | |
| Location | Cameron Hall, Crawley Campus, UWA |
The University Computer Club (UCC) is a Guild affiliated club at The University of Western Australia. It was founded in 1974 and recently celebrated its thirtieth birthday. It claims to be the first organised personal computer user group in the world.
Most UCC activities take place in the club room. The room is located in Cameron Hall on UWA's Crawley Campus, and is open most days and weekends into the late evening. Popular activities are programming, study avoidance, electronics and various types of gaming.
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[edit] Achievements and Awards
In 1980 the UCC won an award from the Silver Jubilee Trust for Young Australians. The award reads:
- Award for 1980 presented to University Computer Club for the purpose of providing students with access to practical experience in computer use and management, promoting community understanding of computer benefits, and providing computer services to service groups who could not otherwise afford them.
In 1992, when members brought the UCC Coke machine online, it was only the second operational vending machine on the Internet, after the one at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1999 UCC was awarded the Guild's Best Club Award.
UCC members were heavily involved in the organisation of linux.conf.au in 2003. Several members are well-known contributors to open source projects, including GNOME, Monotone, Debian, Dropbear, FreeBSD, Ubuntu and Squid.
[edit] Club Organisation
The club has an organising committee comprising a President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, Fresher Rep and three Ordinary Committee Members. In addition to the official committee, several ad-hoc groups exist. Door group members are able to open the club door, and are responsible for looking after the room. Coke group members can administer the coke system. Wheel group members look after the servers, desktop machines and network.
[edit] Notable projects
UCC members have produced some remarkable hacks. Some of the most egregious are documented below.
[edit] Computer automation
The UCC door, snack machine and Coke machine are all computer controlled. A central system dispense provides an electronic credit system.
The snack machine runs custom firmware that turns it into a serial console, controlled by server software running on a Linux machine. Club members log in on the keypad of the snack machine with their UNIX numeric user ID, and a PIN. Once logged in snacks can be vended, drinks can be dispensed from the coke machine, and the clubroom door can be opened.
Drinks can be dispensed over the World-Wide-Web, from a terminal or from the keypad of the snack machine.
The electronic door latch is driven by an old modem; ATH1 is sent to open the door. The door sensors were handled by a "black box" RS-232 switch, this eventually broke, so now we are using a DEC serial terminal server to probe the door sensors and report their presence over Jabber.
[edit] Machine Room
One weekend in 1996, club members built themselves a machine room. It provides a small, insulated area in which to securely host servers. It is air-conditioned in order to cope with Australian summers. The club servers centrally authenticate via LDAP, and allow club members access to many operating systems. These include Solaris, Tru64, Linux, Mac OS X and BSD.
[edit] Manbo
Manbo is the UCC's Sun Enterprise 6000 donated by the ERG Group. Significant donations by club members, as well as a grant from Linux Australia, have resulted in a very impressive machine. The current hardware configuration includes:
- 14x UltraSparc 400MHz CPUs
- 12.5 GiB of RAM
- 2x D1000 wide differential SCSI arrays, with 18 x 18GB Cheetah HDDs
- 10 slot DLT7000 tape changer
The source of this information is the machines page for manbo. Consult it for further information.
[edit] External links
[edit] See also
- UniSFA - The University Science Fiction Association, UCC's sister club.
- Image:UCC_clubroom_panorama_20060126.jpg - 360° panorama of the clubroom.
