So, Sonic suggested a list of useful commands

393 2009-10-22 16:55:58 @sonic What would ye all think about making up some cheatsheets or perhaps getting people such as johan/atlas/lil_cain/andrew/haus/myself to make one up or suggest entries
394 2009-10-22 16:56:20 andrew sounds like a wiki project
395 2009-10-22 16:56:38 andrew start something with each talk
396 2009-10-22 16:56:44 andrew then let people contribute etc.
397 2009-10-22 16:56:49 lil_cain Define cheatsheet?
398 2009-10-22 16:59:06 haus old topic is old
399 2009-10-22 17:01:09 -- lil_cain has unset topic for #rbTraineeAdmins
400 2009-10-22 17:01:54 @sonic lil_cain: similar to what you posted a few days ago in here
401 2009-10-22 17:02:05 @sonic most popular commands/switches, what they do

So, I'm adding it

== Useful Mail Stuff ==

mutt -Z :-: Opens mutt, with a folder with new mail open

mutt -y :-: Opens mutt, with folders

mutt -s <subject> <email address> :-: pipe/redirect stuff to this to send email

== Useful Bash Stuff ==

mesg n :-: sets your tty permissions to -w All. Useful to stop people dumping stuff on your terminal

vim :-: The coolest text editor ever

type :-: This is a bash builtin (I think) that tells you what you're running (where it is, whether it's a builtin, or whatever). I prefer it to which, since its A: always there, and B:knows more about your aliases and stuff

write :-: like hey, but nor formatting

who :-: gives you a list of logged in users. Useful for playing with when your scripting

last :-: gives you a list of the users who *have* logged in. On RB, its in the last month

wget :-: downloads websites

man -k :-: is a synonym for apropos, but easier to spell. Searches for manpages, based on some kind of meta data

[[Category:Helpdesk]]

Useful Commands

2009-10-22T16:41:53Z

Lil cain:

Useful Commands

2009-10-22T16:35:09Z

Lil cain:

Useful Commands

2009-10-22T16:32:43Z

Lil cain: New page: So, Sonic suggested a list of useful commands 393 2009-10-22 16:55:58 @sonic What would ye all think about making up some cheatsheets or perhaps getting people such as johan/atlas/li...

Redbrick Companies

2009-08-27T14:50:42Z

Lil cain: /* Other companies brickies work for */

[[Category:Jobs]]
Once upon a time there were a lot of former RedBrick people starting companies, particularly in the professional services area. Do any of these companies still exist and if so, where do I find them? -- [[User:Fergus|fergus]]

You can find them right here!

==In present operation==

* [http://www.vade.ie Vade] - Web Hosting & Development: [[User:ryaner|ryaner]]. (Formerly [[User:kyper|kyper]], [[User:phreak|phreak]]).
* [http://www.jeebers.com Jeebers] - E-business solutions: [[User:Jeebers|jeebers]].
* [http://www.cliste.net Cliste] - Consultancy: [[User:Colmmacc|colmmacc]] and [[User:X|x]].
* Beanbag Ltd - Consultancy: [[User:Shimoda|shimoda]].
* [http://www.terminalfour.com Terminalfour] - Enterprise Content Management: [[User:Piero|piero]].
* [http://www.digitalrights.ie Digital Rights Ireland] - Online Lobby and Activism group. [[User:Colmmacc|colmmacc]]
* [http://www.farrellscientific.com Farrell Scientific Consulting] - Consulting services in science. [[User:lithium|lithium]]
* [http://1timetracking.com Time Warden Ltd.] - Time management solutions [[User:jeebers|jeebers]].
* [http://www.gits.ie GITS ] - ICT Support and Consultancy: [[User:kyper|kyper]].

==Previous==

* Eolach - Open Source consulting: [[User:Hyper|hyper]], [[User:Thalia|thalia]] and [[User:Fergus|fergus]].
* [http://www.rfc-networks.ie RFC-Networks] - Web dev, hosting, consulting, open source: [[User:Phil|phil]], [[User:Mark|mark]] and [[User:Noelfitz|noelfitz]].
* [http://www.callisto.ie/ Callisto] - IT Vendor: [[User:Halenger|halenger]] and [[User:Af666x|af666x]].
* [http://www.magnet.ie Magnet Networks]: [[User:Grimnar|grimnar]].

==Other companies brickies work for==

* [http://www.amazon.com Amazon] - [[User:Pixies|pixies]], [[User:Grimnar|grimnar]], [[User:Jerry|jerry]], [[User:Marvin|marvin]], [[User:Singer|singer]].
* [http://www.accenture.ie Accenture] - IT Consultancy: [[User:Tuama|tuama]].
* [http://www.securelinx.ie Securelinx] - Linux consultancy: [[User:Kpodesta|kpodesta]].
* [http://www.pwc.ie PwC] - System Audits/Compliance/Process Improvement/Tax: [[User:Cokane|cokane]], [[User:Myk|myk]].
* [http://www.kerna.ie Kerna Communications] - IT Security: [[User:Lecter|lecter]], [[User:Stark|stark]], [[User:svan|svan]], [[User:lil_cain|lil_cain]] and [[User:Prolix|prolix]].
* [http://www.ericsson.com Ericsson] - Telecommunications: [[User:dec|dec]].
* [http://www.google.com Google.com]: [[User:aeris|aeris]], [[User:doc|doc]], [[User:drjolt|drjolt]], [[User:pooka|pooka]], [[User:trevj|trevj]], [[User:valen|valen]], [[User:dizer|dizer]], [[User:redgiant|redgiant]], [[User:toaster|toaster]], [[User:usal|usal]] and [[User:magluby|magluby]].
* [http://www.heanet.ie HEAnet]: [[User:cns|cns]], [[User:orly|orly]], [[User:Rob|rob]], [[User:esoteric|esoteric]], [[User:Bass|bass]], [[User:tbolger|tbolger]].
* [http://www.thus.net THUS]: [[User:homerj|homerj]]
* [http://www.symantec.ie Symantec]: [[User:macbain|macbain]], [[User:moridin|moridin]], [[User:plop|plop]] and [[User:tibor|tibor]].
* [http://hosting.digiweb.ie Digiweb]: [[User:.phil|phil]].
* [http://s3group.com/ S3 (Sillicon and Software Systems)] (and no, it's not the video card makers) - Software and hardware services for Digital Media, Medical Systems, System IC and Network Processors: [[User:cammy|cammy]].
* [http://www.rte.ie RTE] - Your national broadcaster. (No, your TV license does not fund my wages): [[User:spock|spock]].
* [http://www.sbpost.ie Sunday Business Post] - Ireland's national business newspaper: [[User:griffin|griffin]].
* [http://www.ibm.com IBM]: [[User:waggers|waggers]], [[User:goratrix|goratrix]], [[User:edel|edel]], [[User:smudger|smudger]], [[User:merchelo|merchelo]]
* [http://www.yardmedia.ie Yard Media] - Digital Post Production: [[User:decob|decob]].
* [http://www.itconvergence.com IT Convergence] - Oracle Consulting, Staffing, Education, Remote Support and Hosting Services. [[User:mark|mark]]
* [http://www.smartcentric.com SmartCentric] - Smartcard security/financial application development: [[User:markpb|markpb]], [[User:elpres|elpres]].
* [http://w4.siemens.de/ct/en/home/index.html Siemens] - R & D Medical Imaging: [[User:MLynch|mlynch]].
* [http://www.demonware.net/ DemonWare] - Network Software for Computer Games: [[User:Atlas|atlas]], [[User:Halenger|halenger]].
* [http://www.yahoo.com/ Yahoo] - Not google: [[User:nareik|nareik]]

Encyclopedia

2009-05-08T18:52:07Z

Lil cain:

The Encyclopedia was the first great collection of Redbrick's history and terminology. A collection of stories, phrases and nostalgia, it it one of the central cultural features of Redbrick, along with [[Shadowmap]], [[the Table]], [[desist]], and [[SLAKERS]].

--Sares

----

One day, not too many moons ago, some-one, I can't remember who and have no inclination to waste time finding out said something like 'You know there should be an encyclopedia for all this Redbrick injoke shite'. This comment was noticed by the ever observant and astute Chairman and he mentioned the idea to Wishkah. Then the Chairman went away for a bit and came back to discover that Wishkah had actually gone and done something about the bullshit, sorry, ingenius idea, and actually set up a Redbrick Encyclopedia. Shocked that some-one had gone and done some work for the Society without asking for money, a title, a [[Committee]] position or root access the Chairman wandered away for a little bit promising vaguely to write some articles.

Time passed. Wishkah received no articles and went ahead and put up the Encyclopeida on the web with very little in it. Its appearance encouraged some of Redbrick's greatest and most gifted writers to read it and laugh at the poor writing style of those who contributed to it. Now many people have written for it, to such an extent that it merits an entry of its own and tribute should be paid to its Editor, Publisher, Sub-Editor, Webmaster, Head Researcher, the man who took the gibberings of the insane and finally set up THE guide to Redbrick past and present, the one, the only, Wishkah :)

--Cain

----

Shucks, what can I say? The original suggestion was Singer's, who, when somebody asked him what [[Sl@nted @nd Ench@nted]] was, told them to look it up in the Redbrick Encyclopedia (and there was probably a (tm) appended to it). It was a joke, but yes, the idea stuck in a few peoples' heads, and it actually became a reality.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed so far, everyone who's going to contribute in the future (this means you), and especially to those who gave me stuff at the start so I had something to begin with. Thanks also to Sandman for his exceedingly clever fanpage. :>)

--Wishkah

----

Just as an update, the Encyclopedia has now been moved from wishkah's website, and is instead held on the main RedBrick website, and is maintained by the [[Webgroup]]. Anyone can submit to it as per previously.

--Kpodesta

----

As an other update, it's now on the wiki, so any users can edit it nice and easily.

--lil_cain

Origionally from the [[Encyclopedia]]

[[Category:Encyclopedia]]

A Brief History

2009-03-23T03:52:05Z

Lil cain: /* Loose History */

== Loose History ==

'''Disclaimer'''

Every redbrick member has their own personal history of the society, and together we have a collective personal history of events. The society indepdently of this has it's own independent history rooted in facts, developments, events. Whether we can accurately describe all these views of our beloved society in true glory (with warts & all, for better & worse) remains uncertain, and we each develop a view of the history the more we learn and the more involved we become. Given all this, here's a loose overview of things anyway. Maybe we can work with it. Add or change bits that you know about, if you can!

'''Beginnings'''

"In October 1995 a group of friends got the ball rolling on the idea of a computer network in DCU, run by students for the students". These immortal words have been on every society website since 1998, and still capture what redbrick essentially is (friends, vision, education, cooperation, proactivity). The first redbrick machine was a personal computer of drjolt, dubbed 'Nurse', named after a Therapy? Album. It was originally put on the network in the School of Computer Applications, hidden under a desk at the back of the LG01 computer lab, but first went online from under a desk in QG07 in the Business School (Computer Apps unwilling to extend the temporary arrangements up to this point). This was early 1996 when Redbrick was switched on for the first time. Soon after, Redbrick was granted a 'subnet' (136.206.15.X) from the wider college organisation, DCU Computer Services (CSD), giving the society more official status within the university.

The first event took place in Fibbers (now Bacchus) of Parnell Street on October 17th, organised by some users in the chat room. The first event organised by the committee however, dubbed "The First Fiddle", took place in The Mean Fiddler, and also was the first Intersocs event. A more renown event was held at Christmas, the month after, in the Jolly Beggarman pub (now Kitty Kiernans) on Collins Ave, just down the road from DCU. This event has become legendary for stories of thayl@rb climbing & falling off a nearby phonebox, and further trouble at a house party later on where uninvited local ruffians ("scumbags") were dealt with by some of the society's more intimidating early members.

Redbrick as a system for users consisted of a Bulletin Board System (BBS), which were popular at that early time of the Irish internet. These were systems that people could dial into from home, post messages to, chat, all in a purposely-designed program on a text based terminal. Redbrick's BBS had a popular chat room area and a strong newsgroup culture. Many famous discussions and posts took place, and the BBS system is remembered fondly as an easy to use central hub for society members to communicate.

'''Social Times'''

In 1996/1997 both the BBS and the social events started gaining notoriety, and the society grew gradually as a result. Justin Moran (cain@rb) joined the BBS as a journalism student to write an article for An Tarbh which captures some of the spirit at the time. A popular part of the BBS was "Redbrick House", a custom style chat area in the style of a house, with different rooms. Every member joining the chat gained a certain "level" depending on how many hours they had spent, which gave a certain level of 'epic'ness to the whole thing! Overall, there was a good social spirit to the society, which centered on the BBS and newsgroup, as well as the events of the time and even a "table" in the canteen that would regularly be be populated by redbrick or STOCS people throughout the day.

'''Growth & Momentum'''

Early society growth, the spock tenure, membership cards, Alt Rag Ball, huge fresher events, dyed hair
Redbrick was physically housed at this time in open CSD computer labs in the Henry Grattan, in a single rack (spray painted black) and dubbed "The Monolith".

'''DCU's Biggest Society'''

1000+ members. Officially the biggest society. Powerful systems, powerful influence. Awards & accolades. Recognition.

'''Technical Prowess'''

Website/webgroup project, the network grows, clusters, IPv6, contributing to technical projects in Ireland like SAGE-IE and ILUG.

'''Female leads'''

Potential infights post-success, Kamili, Drusilla tenures, society happenings around this time? Later Angelkat's chairship, more infighting and the robby incident.

'''Associate Culture'''

The first time the associate presence becomes sizeable, the effect on the society's dynamic

'''Settling in'''

Living in the Redbrick room, consolidating the network, Wavehunt, Techweek

'''Anniversary'''

Anniversary organisation, the event, the collage, the general spirit, associate meetups, the death of drjolt

== Topics ==

=== Network ===
The first system was a single computer (Nurse), an Intel 386 with 8 MB RAM and 800 MB of disk. A few months later this changed to 2 x 4.6 GB disks. "Mother" replaced this system a year later (Dec 1997). "Enigma" arrived a year after this (October 1998), running FreeBSD. Up to now the systems had been stored in CSD, Henry Grattan Building. A move of the systems took place in September 2000, to the Publications Office in the Hub. A desktop computer donated by CA was used as dax.redbrick for CTYI kids, set up in February 2001. A Sun E450 system (largest donation to a student society in DCU, from Sun Microsystems) arrived in April 2001 and went online as "Prodigy".

Several years later, Redbrick was running on a Sun T2000 donated by colmmacc, and a pair of Dell Poweredge 2650s. A pair of encom disk heavy boxes were both during 2007, one to take over login, and increase users quotas, and one to finally replace enigma, running backups (although, the only original bit of enigma at that point was the case.). The year after, a pair of sun boxes (morpheus and daniel, named after dream from sandman) were bought, one to take over primary services, and one to allow users to play with VMs. A pair of dell poweredge thingies (that's a technical term) were also bought off adverts.ie to do localbackups (when not refusing to boot) and adminy stuff respectively.

=== Education ===
Helpdesk tutorials, Open labs, System Adminstrator & Webmaster tests, helpdesk webpages & wiki, student projects (CA class)

[ In progress page by kpodesta - due to be finished August 2006. Stick in whatever you want though! Word. ]

[[Category:Redbrick History]]

A Brief History

2009-03-23T03:49:38Z

Lil cain: /* Network */

== Loose History ==

'''Disclaimer'''

Every redbrick member has their own personal history of the society, and together we have a collective personal history of events. The society indepdently of this has it's own independent history rooted in facts, developments, events. Whether we can accurately describe all these views of our beloved society in true glory (with warts & all, for better & worse) remains uncertain, and we each develop a view of the history the more we learn and the more involved we become. Given all this, here's a loose overview of things anyway. Maybe we can work with it. Add or change bits that you know about, if you can!

'''Beginnings'''

"In October 1995 a group of friends got the ball rolling on the idea of a computer network in DCU, run by students for the students". These immortal words have been on every society website since 1998, and still capture what redbrick essentially is (friends, vision, education, cooperation, proactivity). The first redbrick machine was a personal computer of drjolt, dubbed 'Nurse', named after a Therapy? Album. It was originally put on the network in the School of Computer Applications, hidden under a desk at the back of the LG01 computer lab, but first went online from under a desk in QG07 in the Business School (Computer Apps unwilling to extend the temporary arrangements up to this point). This was early 1996 when Redbrick was switched on for the first time. Soon after, Redbrick was granted a 'subnet' (136.206.15.X) from the wider college organisation, DCU Computer Services (CSD), giving the society more official status within the university.

The first event took place in Fibbers (now Bacchus) of Parnell Street on October 17th, organised by some users in the chat room. The first event organised by the committee however, dubbed "The First Fiddle", took place in The Mean Fiddler, and also was the first Intersocs event. A more renown event was held at Christmas, the month after, in the Jolly Beggarman pub (now Kitty Kiernans) on Collins Ave, just down the road from DCU. This event has become legendary for stories of thayl@rb climbing & falling off a nearby phonebox, and further trouble at a house party later on where uninvited local ruffians ("scumbags") were dealt with by some of the society's more intimidating early members.

Redbrick as a system for users consisted of a Bulletin Board System (BBS), which were popular at that early time of the Irish internet. These were systems that people could dial into from home, post messages to, chat, all in a purposely-designed program on a text based terminal. Redbrick's BBS had a popular chat room area and a strong newsgroup culture. Many famous discussions and posts took place, and the BBS system is remembered fondly as an easy to use central hub for society members to communicate.

'''Social Times'''

In 1996/1997 both the BBS and the social events started gaining notoriety, and the society grew gradually as a result. Justin Moran (cain@rb) joined the BBS as a journalism student to write an article for An Tarbh which captures some of the spirit at the time. A popular part of the BBS was "Redbrick House", a custom style chat area in the style of a house, with different rooms. Every member joining the chat gained a certain "level" depending on how many hours they had spent, which gave a certain level of 'epic'ness to the whole thing! Overall, there was a good social spirit to the society, which centered on the BBS and newsgroup, as well as the events of the time and even a "table" in the canteen that would regularly be be populated by redbrick or STOCS people throughout the day.

'''Growth & Momentum'''

Early society growth, the spock tenure, membership cards, Alt Rag Ball, huge fresher events, dyed hair
Redbrick was physically housed at this time in open CSD computer labs in the Henry Grattan, in a single rack (spray painted black) and dubbed "The Monolith".

'''DCU's Biggest Society'''

1000+ members. Officially the biggest society. Powerful systems, powerful influence. Awards & accolades. Recognition.

'''Technical Prowess'''

Website/webgroup project, the network grows, clusters, IPv6, contributing to technical projects in Ireland like SAGE-IE and ILUG.

'''Female leads'''

Potential infights post-success, Kamili, Drusilla tenures, society happenings around this time?

'''Associate Culture'''

The first time the associate presence becomes sizeable, the effect on the society's dynamic

'''Settling in'''

Living in the Redbrick room, consolidating the network, Wavehunt, Techweek

'''Anniversary'''

Anniversary organisation, the event, the collage, the general spirit, associate meetups, the death of drjolt

== Topics ==

=== Network ===
The first system was a single computer (Nurse), an Intel 386 with 8 MB RAM and 800 MB of disk. A few months later this changed to 2 x 4.6 GB disks. "Mother" replaced this system a year later (Dec 1997). "Enigma" arrived a year after this (October 1998), running FreeBSD. Up to now the systems had been stored in CSD, Henry Grattan Building. A move of the systems took place in September 2000, to the Publications Office in the Hub. A desktop computer donated by CA was used as dax.redbrick for CTYI kids, set up in February 2001. A Sun E450 system (largest donation to a student society in DCU, from Sun Microsystems) arrived in April 2001 and went online as "Prodigy".

Several years later, Redbrick was running on a Sun T2000 donated by colmmacc, and a pair of Dell Poweredge 2650s. A pair of encom disk heavy boxes were both during 2007, one to take over login, and increase users quotas, and one to finally replace enigma, running backups (although, the only original bit of enigma at that point was the case.). The year after, a pair of sun boxes (morpheus and daniel, named after dream from sandman) were bought, one to take over primary services, and one to allow users to play with VMs. A pair of dell poweredge thingies (that's a technical term) were also bought off adverts.ie to do localbackups (when not refusing to boot) and adminy stuff respectively.

=== Education ===
Helpdesk tutorials, Open labs, System Adminstrator & Webmaster tests, helpdesk webpages & wiki, student projects (CA class)

[ In progress page by kpodesta - due to be finished August 2006. Stick in whatever you want though! Word. ]

[[Category:Redbrick History]]

Top Ten Redbrick Arguments

2009-03-23T03:41:57Z

Lil cain:

I guess we must really like these debates seeing as we bloody well talk about them so much.

# Science vs. Religion
# Best interface to use for new Redbrick members (flin vs. zsh vs. web frontend)
# Abortion
# The structure/number of the Redbrick newsgroups
# Coding style
# Linux vs.OpenBSD vs. everything
# The "troubles"
# Israel vs. Palestinians
# Homeopathy
# Random conspiracy theories (September 11th 2001, the moon landings, J.F.K., etc.)
# iPods vs. other mp3 players (this one's also over, iPods won)
# Legalisation Of Drugs (and drug abuse in general)

[[Category:Redbrick History]]

TimeLine2008

2009-03-23T03:38:12Z

Lil cain: /* October */

{{Timeline Years}}
[[Category: Redbrick History]]

== January ==

Christmas Cake & exams, not much happens here.

== February ==

* Thursday 7th - EGM Held to fill vacant admin position. There were no candidates. The committee asked to modify the constitution to reduce the size of Helpdesk from 3 to 2. This was not passed.

* Saturday 16th - minerva.redbrick.dcu.ie goes live as login.redbrick.dcu.ie

* Monday 25th - Techweek begins with the Video Editing Tutorial by Allen Dixon. Later that day there is a launch party in the old bar, which was epic win.

* Tuesday 26th - Install Fest in the seminar room, followed by Filmsoc's showing of DieHard 4pointless.

* Wednesday 27th - Techweek continues in the seminar room with talks from demonware, Sean Hand, and Colm MacCarthaigh.

* Wednesday 27th - Murphy takes over from Deathray as www.redbrick.dcu.ie. Horrid hash bangs no longer required in php :)

* Thursday 28th - Web Design & Photoshop workshops, followed by Q-Zar and beers.

==March==

* 4th - Amy deemed to be resigned for missing lots of committee meetings. She won't be replaced until the AGM.

* 7th - Deadling for socs awards. Redbrick submits nomination for Most Improved Society. The competition will be: College View, FotoSoc, Flashback, Juggle Soc & St Vincent de Paul. Redbrick also submits a nomination for Tech Week, which will be competing against Ross O'Carrol Kelly, Arts Week, Fame the musical, Debate's DCU Open, European Business Weekend, Jugglesoc's Unicycle to Galway, MPS's Shag pad, and the Andorra Trip.

* 11th - Follow up workshop to the Linux Install Fest held.

==April==
* 1st - Redbrick annual table quiz is held. Western Digital Passport 160GB external hard drives are given to the winners. gamblitis wins the raffle of an EEE PC.

*3rd - AGM

Chairperson:

Robert O'Reilly (robby) was elected with 16 votes. Kat Farrell
(angelkat) received 14 votes.

Secretary:

Damien Rathigan (dano) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Treasurer:

Leah Doyle (bambi) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Public Relations Officer:

John Needham (colossus) was elected with 22 votes. Matt Fitzpatrick
(snoogins) received 9 votes. Failchair received one vote :(

Events Officer:

Lotta Mikkonen (attol) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Helpdesk:

Sean Hand (revenant), Seaums Ronan (train) and Gavin Tubritt
(gmblitis) were the only candidates and were elected by a
majority show of hands.

Webmaster:

Andrew Martin (werdz) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

System Administrators:

Andrew Harford (receive), Cian Brennan (lil_cain), Eoghan Cotter
(johan) were the only candidates and were elected by a
majority show of hands.

* Redbrick wins Best Website at the Clubs and Socs Awards, which were held in the Helix on Thursday 10th of April. Redbrick Chairperson Andrew Harford wins a First Five award for Best Individual.

*17th - Redbrick wins Best Society Website of a Large College at the BICS Awards in Dundalk - Best Website in Ireland!

*19th - Admins take down Murphy for a while to rearrange disk partitions, because /var/tmp really doesn't need 105GB. This part goes suspiciously smoothly, with nothing breaking. Admins then begin to move vhosts to murphy (unrelated, but we had planned it today anyway). This part takes 6 hours, and involves pain and cursing at computer screens, and werdz committing his second ever [[Inevitable Admin Fuckups|IAF]] when he accidentally deletes the apache configuration, and realises we had no backups of it. Luckily, the important parts were modularised (thank you, Debian), so restoring the default configuration and rewriting our bits only took about half an hour. The Redbrick main site is then moved to murphy's local disks, and everything is faster afterwards.

*24th - It is pointed out in #lobby that Redbrick hasn't been rooted in years.

*25th - Redbrick gets rooted. Elected root holders (three out of four of them on INTRA) cry.
** Decision taken to take redbrick offline at about 10am. Network is disconnected by taking down the interface connecting us to CSD on enzyme.
** Root holders in DCU spend the day running between fourth year projects and looking through logs looking for evidence of the intrusion.
** Reinstall begins later on, with the help of atlas. Minerva is reinstalled first, as it's needed for us to receive mail. First packages are installed again there by 9.50pm that night. The internet connection is switched back on and deathray is configured to receive and store mail by about 1am. Everything else remains unavailable, and the network is left in a rediculously complicated segregated state to stop anyone accessing anything.

== September ==
Redbrick returned to close to normal, except for murphy at some point at the start of this month

*29th Academic year starts back up.

CAIS and CASE are no longer streams of the CA course. Instead there are now two courses: Computer Applications (CASE) and Enterprise Computing (CAIS).

For some reason EC does not actually require you to do programming and is considered a joke by some of the snobbier members of Redbrick.

== October ==

*7th & 8th - Clubs and Socs Day - The HUB gets taken over by freshers and not so fresh students. C&S day a chance for students to sign up for RB and any other society that takes their fancy.RedBrick were giving out Red Slushies to those who joined on the day(these seemed like a good idea, but tasted minging). According to an email from train on the 12th of Oct RB signed up a total of 224 members (this figure subject to change)

*8th EGM takes place.

First year representative:

Emma was the only candidate and was elected by a majority show of hands

Chairperson:

Kat Farrell (AngelKat) was elected with 29 votes. Kevin Lally
(kevinly) received 12 votes.

* EGM also sees the sign up of those who are interested in a trip to Finland the home of attol and linux.

*Sometime before the 25th - Two of Redbrick's beloved Helpdesk team, Mr. Sean Hand and Mr. Gavin Tubritt, died in a mysterious fire in the server room, thus leaving the committee. The blaze is believe to have been caused by an overheated server catching fire, undoubtedly the result of bad adminning. Cian was unable for comment at the time of the tragedy, but there was a lovely smell of bacon in the server room afterwards. It is also revealed that Kevin Fox can't use bullet points in MediaWiki.
[this could be translated as gmblitis and revenant resigned. (Cian, now available for comment)]

*25th Intersocs paintballing event - Redbrick win at paintballing

==November==

*4th - Clubs and Societies Ball - The highlight of all soc heads calendar C&S ball this year in Citywest. Redbrick gentlemen don some suits while the ladies opt for the dresses. Great night had by all for those of who can remember.

*11th - werdz presents workshop "Web design for beginners".

*13th - Attol gets all those heading to Finland nice and excited about the trip

*14th - RB night out in the Woolshed

*29th - Intersocs night. Location Bull & Castle.

==December==
* 1st - Downtime from 5pm - 5:30pm. Kernel updates.
* 4th - Redbrick goes Ice Skating in the RDS [https://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~angelkat/pics/skates.jpg pic].
* 11th - Christmas Party in the slipper with gamessoc, booksoc, strange things and some other randomers. Much booze and mincepies are had. Alan Keegan (SPC Chair) appears as Santa (Bob was unavailable)

* 16th - EGM held to elect new PRO, Carri is elected (landa2 also ran).

TimeLine2008

2009-03-23T03:36:09Z

Lil cain: /* September */

{{Timeline Years}}
[[Category: Redbrick History]]

== January ==

Christmas Cake & exams, not much happens here.

== February ==

* Thursday 7th - EGM Held to fill vacant admin position. There were no candidates. The committee asked to modify the constitution to reduce the size of Helpdesk from 3 to 2. This was not passed.

* Saturday 16th - minerva.redbrick.dcu.ie goes live as login.redbrick.dcu.ie

* Monday 25th - Techweek begins with the Video Editing Tutorial by Allen Dixon. Later that day there is a launch party in the old bar, which was epic win.

* Tuesday 26th - Install Fest in the seminar room, followed by Filmsoc's showing of DieHard 4pointless.

* Wednesday 27th - Techweek continues in the seminar room with talks from demonware, Sean Hand, and Colm MacCarthaigh.

* Wednesday 27th - Murphy takes over from Deathray as www.redbrick.dcu.ie. Horrid hash bangs no longer required in php :)

* Thursday 28th - Web Design & Photoshop workshops, followed by Q-Zar and beers.

==March==

* 4th - Amy deemed to be resigned for missing lots of committee meetings. She won't be replaced until the AGM.

* 7th - Deadling for socs awards. Redbrick submits nomination for Most Improved Society. The competition will be: College View, FotoSoc, Flashback, Juggle Soc & St Vincent de Paul. Redbrick also submits a nomination for Tech Week, which will be competing against Ross O'Carrol Kelly, Arts Week, Fame the musical, Debate's DCU Open, European Business Weekend, Jugglesoc's Unicycle to Galway, MPS's Shag pad, and the Andorra Trip.

* 11th - Follow up workshop to the Linux Install Fest held.

==April==
* 1st - Redbrick annual table quiz is held. Western Digital Passport 160GB external hard drives are given to the winners. gamblitis wins the raffle of an EEE PC.

*3rd - AGM

Chairperson:

Robert O'Reilly (robby) was elected with 16 votes. Kat Farrell
(angelkat) received 14 votes.

Secretary:

Damien Rathigan (dano) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Treasurer:

Leah Doyle (bambi) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Public Relations Officer:

John Needham (colossus) was elected with 22 votes. Matt Fitzpatrick
(snoogins) received 9 votes. Failchair received one vote :(

Events Officer:

Lotta Mikkonen (attol) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

Helpdesk:

Sean Hand (revenant), Seaums Ronan (train) and Gavin Tubritt
(gmblitis) were the only candidates and were elected by a
majority show of hands.

Webmaster:

Andrew Martin (werdz) was the only candidate, and was
elected by a majority show of hands.

System Administrators:

Andrew Harford (receive), Cian Brennan (lil_cain), Eoghan Cotter
(johan) were the only candidates and were elected by a
majority show of hands.

* Redbrick wins Best Website at the Clubs and Socs Awards, which were held in the Helix on Thursday 10th of April. Redbrick Chairperson Andrew Harford wins a First Five award for Best Individual.

*17th - Redbrick wins Best Society Website of a Large College at the BICS Awards in Dundalk - Best Website in Ireland!

*19th - Admins take down Murphy for a while to rearrange disk partitions, because /var/tmp really doesn't need 105GB. This part goes suspiciously smoothly, with nothing breaking. Admins then begin to move vhosts to murphy (unrelated, but we had planned it today anyway). This part takes 6 hours, and involves pain and cursing at computer screens, and werdz committing his second ever [[Inevitable Admin Fuckups|IAF]] when he accidentally deletes the apache configuration, and realises we had no backups of it. Luckily, the important parts were modularised (thank you, Debian), so restoring the default configuration and rewriting our bits only took about half an hour. The Redbrick main site is then moved to murphy's local disks, and everything is faster afterwards.

*24th - It is pointed out in #lobby that Redbrick hasn't been rooted in years.

*25th - Redbrick gets rooted. Elected root holders (three out of four of them on INTRA) cry.
** Decision taken to take redbrick offline at about 10am. Network is disconnected by taking down the interface connecting us to CSD on enzyme.
** Root holders in DCU spend the day running between fourth year projects and looking through logs looking for evidence of the intrusion.
** Reinstall begins later on, with the help of atlas. Minerva is reinstalled first, as it's needed for us to receive mail. First packages are installed again there by 9.50pm that night. The internet connection is switched back on and deathray is configured to receive and store mail by about 1am. Everything else remains unavailable, and the network is left in a rediculously complicated segregated state to stop anyone accessing anything.

== September ==
Redbrick returned to close to normal, except for murphy at some point at the start of this month

*29th Academic year starts back up.

CAIS and CASE are no longer streams of the CA course. Instead there are now two courses: Computer Applications (CASE) and Enterprise Computing (CAIS).

For some reason EC does not actually require you to do programming and is considered a joke by some of the snobbier members of Redbrick.

== October ==

*7th & 8th - Clubs and Socs Day - The HUB gets taken over by freshers and not so fresh students. C&S day a chance for students to sign up for RB and any other society that takes their fancy.RB was on hand handing out lots of slushies. According to an email from train on the 12th of Oct RB signed up a total of 224 members (this figure subject to change)

*8th EGM takes place.

First year representative:

Emma was the only candidate and was elected by a majority show of hands

Chairperson:

Kat Farrell (AngelKat) was elected with 29 votes. Kevin Lally
(kevinly) received 12 votes.

* EGM also sees the sign up of those who are interested in a trip to Finland the home of attol and linux.

*Sometime before the 25th - Two of Redbrick's beloved Helpdesk team, Mr. Sean Hand and Mr. Gavin Tubritt, died in a mysterious fire in the server room, thus leaving the committee. The blaze is believe to have been caused by an overheated server catching fire, undoubtedly the result of bad adminning. Cian was unable for comment at the time of the tragedy, but there was a lovely smell of bacon in the server room afterwards. It is also revealed that Kevin Fox can't use bullet points in MediaWiki.

*25th Intersocs paintballing event - Redbrick win at paintballing

==November==

*4th - Clubs and Societies Ball - The highlight of all soc heads calendar C&S ball this year in Citywest. Redbrick gentlemen don some suits while the ladies opt for the dresses. Great night had by all for those of who can remember.

*11th - werdz presents workshop "Web design for beginners".

*13th - Attol gets all those heading to Finland nice and excited about the trip

*14th - RB night out in the Woolshed

*29th - Intersocs night. Location Bull & Castle.

==December==
* 1st - Downtime from 5pm - 5:30pm. Kernel updates.
* 4th - Redbrick goes Ice Skating in the RDS [https://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~angelkat/pics/skates.jpg pic].
* 11th - Christmas Party in the slipper with gamessoc, booksoc, strange things and some other randomers. Much booze and mincepies are had. Alan Keegan (SPC Chair) appears as Santa (Bob was unavailable)

* 16th - EGM held to elect new PRO, Carri is elected (landa2 also ran).

TimeLine2009

2009-03-23T03:34:41Z

Lil cain: /* March */

{{Timeline Years}}
[[Category: Redbrick History]]

== January ==

* 1st - Cynic is re-installed with debian so that it can temporarily host mysql (disk issues on deathray had caused it to be temporarily moved to severus, which hadn't been much better.)

* 3nd - Murphy is re-installed with Solaris. Tests with OpenBSD had mainly proven that it was good at crashing a lot

== February ==
* 4th - Finland has a redbrick? 21 of redbricks member go to Finland to visit some random Museum. (very very very cold!)
* 19th - Webmaster makes a test edit to the wiki.
* 24th - Bake Sale for Rag week! Carri , emma, kat & lotta baked enough cakes to feed redbrick. €110 euro was earned.
* 24th - [[Dare Day]]. Redbrick members took part in many weird and wonderful dares in the name of charity.
== March ==
* 3rd - Trainee Admins first workshop. Topic Shell Scripting. Location Meeting room 1, Attendance 12.
* 9th - Redbrick's annual tech week begins! First event filmsoc presents hackers.
* 10th
1pm - Forensic Security talk presented by Charlie Daily - note Charlie Daily was a no show.
2pm - Microsoft XNA Talk. Present by Martha Rotter - free pens for all! Also windows 7 for some.
5pm - Git VCS: How to not lose your final year project. Present by redbricks Lorcan McDonald
6pm - Build Your Own PC Tutorial. Present by Sean Hand (Revenant)
8pm - Strange Things Table Quizz.
* 11th
4pm - Demonware Talk, presented by Eoghan Gaffney (atlas).
5pm - Linux install fest.
* 12th - redbrick goes to Q-Zar! Blues (oldies) win Oranges (newbs + bambi).
* 12th - The New Sun x4140s, Morpheus and Daniel Arrive, Morpheus goes into Production within 6 hours of it being racked.
* 13th - Wavehunt runs again this year. Phaxx wins and donates his prize money to redbrick.
* 13th = Intersocs night in the longstone. Huge platter was had, some loved it, two (Angelkat & carri) hated it.

Welmar

2008-11-24T14:18:18Z

Lil cain: /* Description */

{{Redbrick Hardware}}
__NOTOC__
'''Welmar ~ 136.206.15.7'''
== Details ==

<table>
<tr><td>Type:</td><td>3COM 3C19504 Internet Server Appliance</td></tr>
<tr><td>OS:</td><td>OpenBSD 4.3</td></tr>
<tr><td>CPU:</td><td>Pentium II 500MHz</td></tr>
<tr><td>RAM:</td><td>96MB</td></tr>
<tr><td>Storage:</td><td>Onboard UDMA IDE</td></tr>
<tr><td>Disks:</td><td>1 x 40GB (limited to 32Gb)</td></tr>
<tr><td>Drives:</td><td>None</td></tr>
<tr><td>Network:</td><td>xl0 3Com 3c905C-TX Fast Etherlink XL</td></tr>
<tr><td>Extras:</td><td>Powered by Spooge(TM).</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Name:</td><td>The name Welmar was picked by Dave (doc@rb), Brian (humbug@rb) and Tanya (toaster@rb).</td></tr>
</table>

== Description ==
[[Image:Welmar.jpg|thumb|right]]Welmar was graciously loaned to the society by Stephen (stephenc@rb). The MUD server used to run on Enigma but wouldn't work on Prodigy due to endian issues or some such sillyness so it was decided to get a dedicated machine for it that wouldn't be affected by admins constantly shutting down and tearing apart Enigma. Welmar went live 23rd October 2002 and the MUD moved over to it on 29th October 2002 (at 18:39).

After the great hack of 2008 DoC went off to get mud running on one of the linux machines.

Welmar was gracefully retired on the 21/11/08, it's last job passed off to sprout. It's currently sitting under a desk in the clubs & socs office while people try to find something to do with it.

== Services ==

* Secondary Admin Porn Server

[[Category:Hardware]]

Murphy

2008-11-24T14:16:20Z

Lil cain: /* Brief (hah) history of it's OSes */

{{Redbrick Hardware}}
__NOTOC__
'''Murphy ~ 136.206.15.14'''
== Details ==

<table>
<tr><td>Type:</td><td>Sun T2000</td></tr>
<tr><td>OS:</td><td>OpenBSD 4.4</td></tr>
<tr><td>CPU:</td><td>8-core (32 threads) 1Ghz UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara)</td></tr>
<tr><td>RAM:</td><td>16GB</td></tr>
<tr><td>Disks:</td><td>2x 73Gb 10,000 RPM SAS Disks</td></tr>
<tr><td>Drives:</td><td>Internal DVD drive</td></tr>
<tr><td>Network:</td><td>4x Gigabit Ethernet BroadCom</td></tr>
<tr><td>Extras:</td><td>Onboard Advanced Lights-Out Management (ALOM) card.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Name:</td><td>Named in honour of RedBrick founder David Murphy (drjolt).</td></tr>
</table>

== Description ==

[[Image:Murphy.jpg|thumb|right]]Murphy was donated to RedBrick in April 2006 by a member of the society. It is named after David Murphy (drjolt) who was the founding system administrator of the society, and who died tragically in January 2006.

The machine is an 8-core UltraSPARC monster. It will gladly chew through any normal multithreaded application you throw at it (That is not a challenge). It sucks horrendously at floating-point operations, though.

== Brief (hah) history of it's OSes ==

When Sun first released the (somewhat revolutionary) Niagara processor, Canonical (the people who co-ordinate Ubuntu) made a big deal about Ubuntu 6.06 fully supporting the architecture. Kernel support for sun4v (the Niagara architecture) was '''very''' new, but they said it was supported.

When we first received murphy, it was nicely set up with Ubuntu 6.06 (thanks to colmmacc). This was great - it had an entire repository of apt packages, was easy to manage, things made sense, and it was a long-term support release, so we wouldn't have to worry about upgrading to the next version until 2011. It was also very similar to our other Debian (and later Ubuntu) machines. Everything seemed to work quite nicely for the most part. The system went through a few months in a testing state, then it was promoted to be our login server, due to it's sheer scalability. Everything seemed to be wonderful.

It quickly turned out, however, that users weren't too fond of it. The emphasis of the system's design was on multi-threading and data throughput, but most of our users preferred the single-threaded performance of carbon. Complaints about speed ensued, even though the system was never hitting anywhere near max load or memory usage. Eventually the decision was taken to move primary login to Minerva, our new storage server with less RAM and inferior scalability but faster processor clock speeds. It was decided that murphy's future would be best spent as a web server (deathray was crashing once a month because it just couldn't handle the load of WWW anymore anyway).

This was where the problems began to show themselves. MySQL just plain didn't work by default. It turned out to be an issue with libnss, which, to our knowledge, still hasn't been fixed in Ubuntu. We compiled our own replacement packages, but it was an annoyance.

Apache mostly worked - there were some hiccups but they were mostly to do with our Apache configuration, not Ubuntu's packages. Pubcookie was a nightmare to set up, but that's pubcookie for you. SuPHP worried us - the packages supplied by Ubuntu were out of date, and had not applied critical security patches a few months after they'd been released by the upstream vendor. We ended up compiling our own patched versions, but the fact that it had been neglected (whereas up to date versions were available for Ubuntu 7.10) was concerning.

We moved our web server to Murphy after a few months of testing, and it worked quite nicely. General response times were a little higher then they were with deathray (due to the lower CPU clock speed), but the system never even flinched under heavy load (where deathray would've locked up).

It was about now that news came that Canonical had dropped SPARC support. So much for their big noise about sun4v support. Even worse, they dropped support just months before they released the next LTS release. It was also about now that Redbrick got rooted, and we had to reinstall all of our machines from scratch.

Our first course of action was to update the system firmware (as directed in the Ubuntu install instructions), and put dapper back on there. 2011 was a long way away, we could worry about rearchitecture later on. However, it turned out that the newest version of the firmware wouldn't even boot Linux, which was very worrying. Surely canonical would've at least thought to release a kernel update that ran on the updated hypervisor (Sun4v runs everything inside a hypervisor).

We faced a descision as to what to do with Murphy. There were a few alternatives, none of which were too appealing.
* Install Ubuntu 6.06 again, knowing that Canonical seemed to be just losing interest in it (leaving out security patches, not bothering to patch libnss, leaving the kernel too old to boot on modern firmware). This would involve downgrading the firmware again.
* Install Ubuntu 8.04 from ports. This is an unofficial Ubuntu release - essentially, a bunch of build scripts are set up to compile everything for SPARC, and it's left to do it's own thing. If things break, nobody really cares too much. While in theory everything here is newer and should work better, there's never a guarantee that anything will work.
* Install Solaris 10. Solaris has near perfect support for Sun4v, because Sun has a very clear vested interest in it. However, Solaris is completely devoid of package management, making administration a nightmare. Also, it's full of proprietary crap that's incompatible with everything else we've spent years putting together. Finally, none of the current elected root holders had ever used Solaris.
* Install Debian. There was evidence that it ran on Sun4v, but three hours of googling revealed 3 (yes, '''three''') people in the world that seemed to have even tried it.
* Install Gentoo. Seemed to have more users then Debian did, and the community around it seemed more interested in keeping it up to date then Canonical did with Ubuntu. However, a number of root holders seemed to object to "gen-feckin-too" (an actual quote), and more seriously, it doesn't have the enforced package compatibility that Ubuntu/Debian does. In other words, an update one day could cause our apache configuration to suddenly break for unknown reasons.
* Install a BSD variant. This had a smallish community around it, but again administering it is more of a pain then the average Debian system, there was little in the way of root holder previous experience (although more then there was for Solaris), and there didn't seem to be any amazing success stories of it being used on servers in the wild.

We decided to stick with the devil we knew at first. We downgraded the firmware and put Ubuntu (6.06) back on it. We quite quickly regretted this - running into bizarre problems ranging from the serial console randomly not responding to random segmentation faults. The installer also didn't work at all; werdz ended up installing it manually with apt from a rescue console.

This was fairly unacceptable - especially the issue with the serial console. The ALOM still had the ability to shut off system power and get to OpenBoot, etc, but we couldn't actually access the operating system. So we jumped ship to Solaris.

As expected, it installed fairly painlessly (the installer wasn't amused at the sight of Linux partitions on the disks, but aside from that it worked perfectly). Once it was booted, everything worked nicely. It had far better support for the hardware than Linux did - the amount of detail given by prtdiag in the global zone showed that off. It could even update the firmware itself!

Another nice feature was zones/containers. We decided to split the system into a web host zone (with user logins), another for databases, and another to run a secondary LDAP in.

Unfortunately, getting Solaris to work with the rest of our systems was painful. Cian first tried getting PAM and PADL to authenticate off our LDAP, but couldn't get them to compile. After a while spent fecking around with the Sun client and a few other LDAP servers (trying them out), we eventually (somehow) got PADL working. Hurdle number 1 conquered.

The web stack proved to be equally as nightmarish. It took a while to even get apache to compile (turned out to be a path issue, I felt stupider then usual that day). PHP was a nightmare, because of the number of dependencies that had to be either installed from Sunfreeware or compiled. What we'd have done for apt-get install php5. That eventually compiled.

SuPHP compiled, but it doesn't work. And now, for no absolutely reason at all, LDAP authentication has broken again on it. Grumble grumble.

The system is also a nightmare to keep up to date. It's a pain that we have to do it alright, but what really worries us is that it will stagnate when the next group of rootholders are elected.

So we're seriously considering the other alternatives again. Ubuntu 8.04 seems worth a try, but the main problems with that are likely to come down the line, when package builds start failing and nobody does anything about it. The only other reasonable option seems to be Gentoo, which makes some root holders break out in hives at the very mention of it's name.
--[[User:Werdz|Werdz]] 23:54, 1 Sep 2008 (IST)

Eventually, after lots of cursing, and werdz getting a good proportion of the way into porting nexanta to sparc, we decided to move to OpenBSD. It's a system that myself and werdz have a reasonable amount of experience with, it has a reasonable packaging system (but as phaxx said, apt was spoiling us anyway), just work (TM) on Sun_4v, seems to be well looked after, and is just generally amazing. It's lack of PAM/NSS support is a bit of a pain, but YPldap appears to be doing the job, without any major hicups. We're still compiling our own apache, but that's a minor thing compared to the million and one things we'd have to look after on solaris.
--[[User:lil_cain|lil_cain]] 14:16, 24 Nov 2008 (IST)

== Services ==

* Apache
* Available for login
* To eventually run MySQL and PostgreSQL

== Other Hardware ==

* [[Minerva]]
* [[Carbon]]
* [[Deathray]]

[[Category:Hardware]]

Murphy

2008-11-24T14:15:54Z

Lil cain: /* Brief (hah) history of it's OSes */

{{Redbrick Hardware}}
__NOTOC__
'''Murphy ~ 136.206.15.14'''
== Details ==

<table>
<tr><td>Type:</td><td>Sun T2000</td></tr>
<tr><td>OS:</td><td>OpenBSD 4.4</td></tr>
<tr><td>CPU:</td><td>8-core (32 threads) 1Ghz UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara)</td></tr>
<tr><td>RAM:</td><td>16GB</td></tr>
<tr><td>Disks:</td><td>2x 73Gb 10,000 RPM SAS Disks</td></tr>
<tr><td>Drives:</td><td>Internal DVD drive</td></tr>
<tr><td>Network:</td><td>4x Gigabit Ethernet BroadCom</td></tr>
<tr><td>Extras:</td><td>Onboard Advanced Lights-Out Management (ALOM) card.</td></tr>
<tr><td>The Name:</td><td>Named in honour of RedBrick founder David Murphy (drjolt).</td></tr>
</table>

== Description ==

[[Image:Murphy.jpg|thumb|right]]Murphy was donated to RedBrick in April 2006 by a member of the society. It is named after David Murphy (drjolt) who was the founding system administrator of the society, and who died tragically in January 2006.

The machine is an 8-core UltraSPARC monster. It will gladly chew through any normal multithreaded application you throw at it (That is not a challenge). It sucks horrendously at floating-point operations, though.

== Brief (hah) history of it's OSes ==

When Sun first released the (somewhat revolutionary) Niagara processor, Canonical (the people who co-ordinate Ubuntu) made a big deal about Ubuntu 6.06 fully supporting the architecture. Kernel support for sun4v (the Niagara architecture) was '''very''' new, but they said it was supported.

When we first received murphy, it was nicely set up with Ubuntu 6.06 (thanks to colmmacc). This was great - it had an entire repository of apt packages, was easy to manage, things made sense, and it was a long-term support release, so we wouldn't have to worry about upgrading to the next version until 2011. It was also very similar to our other Debian (and later Ubuntu) machines. Everything seemed to work quite nicely for the most part. The system went through a few months in a testing state, then it was promoted to be our login server, due to it's sheer scalability. Everything seemed to be wonderful.

It quickly turned out, however, that users weren't too fond of it. The emphasis of the system's design was on multi-threading and data throughput, but most of our users preferred the single-threaded performance of carbon. Complaints about speed ensued, even though the system was never hitting anywhere near max load or memory usage. Eventually the decision was taken to move primary login to Minerva, our new storage server with less RAM and inferior scalability but faster processor clock speeds. It was decided that murphy's future would be best spent as a web server (deathray was crashing once a month because it just couldn't handle the load of WWW anymore anyway).

This was where the problems began to show themselves. MySQL just plain didn't work by default. It turned out to be an issue with libnss, which, to our knowledge, still hasn't been fixed in Ubuntu. We compiled our own replacement packages, but it was an annoyance.

Apache mostly worked - there were some hiccups but they were mostly to do with our Apache configuration, not Ubuntu's packages. Pubcookie was a nightmare to set up, but that's pubcookie for you. SuPHP worried us - the packages supplied by Ubuntu were out of date, and had not applied critical security patches a few months after they'd been released by the upstream vendor. We ended up compiling our own patched versions, but the fact that it had been neglected (whereas up to date versions were available for Ubuntu 7.10) was concerning.

We moved our web server to Murphy after a few months of testing, and it worked quite nicely. General response times were a little higher then they were with deathray (due to the lower CPU clock speed), but the system never even flinched under heavy load (where deathray would've locked up).

It was about now that news came that Canonical had dropped SPARC support. So much for their big noise about sun4v support. Even worse, they dropped support just months before they released the next LTS release. It was also about now that Redbrick got rooted, and we had to reinstall all of our machines from scratch.

Our first course of action was to update the system firmware (as directed in the Ubuntu install instructions), and put dapper back on there. 2011 was a long way away, we could worry about rearchitecture later on. However, it turned out that the newest version of the firmware wouldn't even boot Linux, which was very worrying. Surely canonical would've at least thought to release a kernel update that ran on the updated hypervisor (Sun4v runs everything inside a hypervisor).

We faced a descision as to what to do with Murphy. There were a few alternatives, none of which were too appealing.
* Install Ubuntu 6.06 again, knowing that Canonical seemed to be just losing interest in it (leaving out security patches, not bothering to patch libnss, leaving the kernel too old to boot on modern firmware). This would involve downgrading the firmware again.
* Install Ubuntu 8.04 from ports. This is an unofficial Ubuntu release - essentially, a bunch of build scripts are set up to compile everything for SPARC, and it's left to do it's own thing. If things break, nobody really cares too much. While in theory everything here is newer and should work better, there's never a guarantee that anything will work.
* Install Solaris 10. Solaris has near perfect support for Sun4v, because Sun has a very clear vested interest in it. However, Solaris is completely devoid of package management, making administration a nightmare. Also, it's full of proprietary crap that's incompatible with everything else we've spent years putting together. Finally, none of the current elected root holders had ever used Solaris.
* Install Debian. There was evidence that it ran on Sun4v, but three hours of googling revealed 3 (yes, '''three''') people in the world that seemed to have even tried it.
* Install Gentoo. Seemed to have more users then Debian did, and the community around it seemed more interested in keeping it up to date then Canonical did with Ubuntu. However, a number of root holders seemed to object to "gen-feckin-too" (an actual quote), and more seriously, it doesn't have the enforced package compatibility that Ubuntu/Debian does. In other words, an update one day could cause our apache configuration to suddenly break for unknown reasons.
* Install a BSD variant. This had a smallish community around it, but again administering it is more of a pain then the average Debian system, there was little in the way of root holder previous experience (although more then there was for Solaris), and there didn't seem to be any amazing success stories of it being used on servers in the wild.

We decided to stick with the devil we knew at first. We downgraded the firmware and put Ubuntu (6.06) back on it. We quite quickly regretted this - running into bizarre problems ranging from the serial console randomly not responding to random segmentation faults. The installer also didn't work at all; werdz ended up installing it manually with apt from a rescue console.

This was fairly unacceptable - especially the issue with the serial console. The ALOM still had the ability to shut off system power and get to OpenBoot, etc, but we couldn't actually access the operating system. So we jumped ship to Solaris.

As expected, it installed fairly painlessly (the installer wasn't amused at the sight of Linux partitions on the disks, but aside from that it worked perfectly). Once it was booted, everything worked nicely. It had far better support for the hardware than Linux did - the amount of detail given by prtdiag in the global zone showed that off. It could even update the firmware itself!

Another nice feature was zones/containers. We decided to split the system into a web host zone (with user logins), another for databases, and another to run a secondary LDAP in.

Unfortunately, getting Solaris to work with the rest of our systems was painful. Cian first tried getting PAM and PADL to authenticate off our LDAP, but couldn't get them to compile. After a while spent fecking around with the Sun client and a few other LDAP servers (trying them out), we eventually (somehow) got PADL working. Hurdle number 1 conquered.

The web stack proved to be equally as nightmarish. It took a while to even get apache to compile (turned out to be a path issue, I felt stupider then usual that day). PHP was a nightmare, because of the number of dependencies that had to be either installed from Sunfreeware or compiled. What we'd have done for apt-get install php5. That eventually compiled.

SuPHP compiled, but it doesn't work. And now, for no absolutely reason at all, LDAP authentication has broken again on it. Grumble grumble.

The system is also a nightmare to keep up to date. It's a pain that we have to do it alright, but what really worries us is that it will stagnate when the next group of rootholders are elected.

So we're seriously considering the other alternatives again. Ubuntu 8.04 seems worth a try, but the main problems with that are likely to come down the line, when package builds start failing and nobody does anything about it. The only other reasonable option seems to be Gentoo, which makes some root holders break out in hives at the very mention of it's name.
--[[User:Werdz|Werdz]] 23:54, 1 Sep 2008 (IST)

Eventually, after lots of cursing, and werdz getting a good proportion of the way into porting nexanta to sparc, we decided to move to OpenBSD. It's a system that myself and werdz have a reasonable amount of experience with, it has a reasonable packaging system (but as phaxx said, apt was spoiling us anyway), just work (TM) on Sun_4v, seems to be well looked after, and is just generally amazing. It's lack of PAM/NSS support is a bit of a pain, but YPldap appears to be doing the job, without any major hicups. We're still compiling our own apache, but that's a minor thing compared to the million and one things we'd have to look after on solaris.
--[User:lil_cain|lil_cain]] 14:16, 24 Nov 2008 (IST)

== Services ==

* Apache
* Available for login
* To eventually run MySQL and PostgreSQL

== Other Hardware ==

* [[Minerva]]
* [[Carbon]]
* [[Deathray]]

[[Category:Hardware]]

Network Admin

2008-11-09T23:24:33Z

Lil cain: /* Network Admin */

[[Category:Jobs]]
==Network Admin==

Back to [[Interview Questions]]

'''Magnet'''

*List the RFC1918 private address space blocks.

*OSPF is a link state routing protocol. What is meant by the term link state?

*What is the Spanning Tree protocol used for?

*What is the function of an Rendezvous Point (RP) in a multicast PIM-Sparse Mode network ?

*What is control plane policing ?

*List 7 fields in the IPv4 header and their sizes in bits ?

*Write an outgoing route-map for a bgp session, advertising all bgp routes, except those containing AS 34245?

*What do you know about global routing table size increases? What problem is it causing and what are engineer.s doing to try and alleviate the problems it's causing?

*What do you know about IP address and AS number exhaustion? What current and future methods are you aware of to combat both of these problems?

*What 5 networking books do you think every network engineer should read ?

'''HEAnet'''

* Can you explain how to work out how many addresses are usable in a standard subnet?

* If you had to write some code to see if an IP address was in a particular subnet, how would you do it?

* What is a VLAN? How do they work?

* Can you explain some differences between, and give examples of when you would use HSRP, VRRP and BGP for resilience?

* Give an example of when you might use, or have used, tcpdump/ethtool/sniffer ?

* Updating ACLs safely, how would you go about it?

* Can you describe the three-way handshake, roughly?

* What's a link-state protocol?

* Do you know what an administrative distance is? Any examples?

* PKI: Can you describe, roughly how Public Key Cyrpto works? If a protocol is encrypted, how can it be proxied?

Redbrick Hardware

2008-10-17T16:01:47Z

Lil cain: /* Stuff We Don't Have, But Would Like, Or Need to Buy More Of */

This is a list of all hardware owned and run by redbrick.

NOTE : this inventory is still incomplete.

== Main login machines ==

* [[Carbon]]
* [[Deathray]]
* [[Murphy]]
* [[Minerva]]

== Other machines ==

* [[Fap]]
* [[Obelisk]]
* [[Welmar]]
* [[Severus]]
* [[Ceiling Cat]]
* [[Explodey]]
* [[Cynic]]

== Former machines ==

* [[Laser]]
* [[Nanny]]
* [[Tolka]]
* [[Enigma]]
* [[Mother]]
* [[Nurse]]
* [[Telstar]] (formerly Burner)
* [[Troublegum]]
* [[Prodigy]]
* [[Playpen]]

== Other Equipment ==

* [[Cisco Switch]]
* [[The Monolith]] (retired)
* [[The Docolith]] (retired)
* [[The Dellith]] x3
* [[APC UPS]]
* [[Dell Gigabit Internal Switch]]

== Accessories ==

Cables

* 2 x Internal SCSI LVD multimode terminators [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI LVD cable; 8 connectors [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI SE terminator
* 2 x External SCSI VHCDI <-> HD68 cable [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 cable [used for DLT]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 terminator [used for DLT]
* 1 x PS/2 splitter cable [primarily for shrapnel]

Adaptors

* 1 x SCA <-> SCSI
* 1 x External HD68 SCSI <-> Internal HD68 SCSI [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x 13W3 <-> VGA [plugged into nanny but unused]

Tools

* Set of screwdrivers
* Leatherman kit
* Electrostatic wrist strap

== Stuff We Don't Have, But Would Like, Or Need to Buy More Of ==

* Ethernet Cables (Yellow & Red) <--done
* Serial Console/IPKVM that with serial connecters <--in the post (apparently)
* New external switch (Apparently, preferably a Cisco 3560) <--done, still needs to be set up
* Bigger UPS (Not sure about this one, worth testing next time we have downtime and
when we have <insert name of the machine gliceas gave us) plugged in.
* Labeller (We don't actually need one of these, just the use of one for a day or two, <--done, thanks to those nice people at Lidl
to label the new machines)

[[Category:Hardware]]

[[Category:Projects]]

CD suggestions

2008-10-06T08:30:57Z

Lil cain:

Redbrick do a CD for first year programming every year. This page should be used as a note of things that the current one doesn't have that would be nice, or that it does have that it shouldn't.

=======Windows stuff=========
->It'd be nice if we included whatever C compiler (and libraries and such) that Engineering used.

=======Linux Stuff========
->Changing the background in terminal (to white on black) would be nice. Gnome Terminal doesn't seem to read /etc/gconf/gconf.d/apps/terminal . Anyone any idea what it does read?
->We should include an rpm/.deb of the java classes/jars. I hear this package management this is pretty cool
->Change the default music player to exaile, as rythm box is a bit crap

Zyox banning

2008-08-09T18:51:52Z

Lil cain:

Over the year 2007/2008, There were regular incidences where some person on the committee would get fed up of Zyox holding forth about every subject under the sun, and monopolizing #lobby (or spoiling films, attacking their girlfriends, whatever. His crimes were many fold). At this point, Zyox would be kicked and banned, and for two or three weeks(or months) quiet and conversation would reign in #lobby, except for the occasional (well, annoyingly regular) cries of "FREE ZYOX!!1!!"

[[Category:Encyclopedia]]

2007-12-01T05:00:38Z

Lil cain:

To be perfectly honest, I don't know very much about this machine, hopefully one of the older admins can fill it out. It was a horrible old machine, that seemed to lack a case, and had a DEC CRT the size (and weight) of a small country, that used sit in the server room, for the admins to google things on. It was unceremoniously dumped in the big server room clear out of October '07, on the basis that it was old, shit, had mysteriously been wiped and replaced with windows XP, and took up the entire desk in the server room.

[[Category:Hardware]]

Enzyme

2007-12-01T05:00:08Z

Lil cain: /* Details */

'''Cisco Switch (Enzyme) ~ 136.206.15.254'''

== Details ==

<table>
<tr><td>Type:</td><td>Cisco Catalyst 2900 Series XL Switch</td></tr>
<tr><td>OS:</td><td>IOS</td></tr>
<tr><td>Extras:</td><td> </td></tr>
<tr><td>The Name:</td><td>Enzyme.</td></tr>
</table>

== Description ==

This switch was donated to the society by the kind folk in CSD.

== Services ==

* Connecting the RedBrick network to the rest of the DCU network :o)

== Other Hardware ==

* [[The Monolith]]
* [[The Docolith]]
* [[The Dellith]]
* [[APC UPS]]

[[Category:Hardware]]

Playpen

2007-12-01T04:59:21Z

Lil cain:

Redbrick Hardware

2007-12-01T04:56:08Z

Lil cain: /* Former machines */

This is a list of all hardware owned and run by redbrick.

NOTE : this inventory is still incomplete.

== Main login machines ==

* [[Carbon]]
* [[Deathray]]
* [[Murphy]]
* [[Minerva]]

== Other machines ==

* [[Fap]]
* [[Obelisk]]
* [[Welmar]]
* [[Severus]]
* [[Ceiling Cat]]

== Former machines ==

* [[Laser]]
* [[Nanny]]
* [[Tolka]]
* [[Enigma]]
* [[Mother]]
* [[Nurse]]
* [[Telstar]] (formerly Burner)
* [[Troublegum]]
* [[Prodigy]]
* [[Playpen]]

== Other Equipment ==

* [[Cisco Switch]]
* [[The Monolith]] (retired)
* [[The Docolith]] (retired)
* [[The Dellith]] x3
* [[APC UPS]]
* [[Dell Gigabit Internal Switch]]

== Accessories ==

Cables

* 2 x Internal SCSI LVD multimode terminators [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI LVD cable; 8 connectors [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI SE terminator
* 2 x External SCSI VHCDI <-> HD68 cable [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 cable [used for DLT]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 terminator [used for DLT]
* 1 x PS/2 splitter cable [primarily for shrapnel]

Adaptors

* 1 x SCA <-> SCSI
* 1 x External HD68 SCSI <-> Internal HD68 SCSI [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x 13W3 <-> VGA [plugged into nanny but unused]

Tools

* Set of screwdrivers
* Leatherman kit
* Electrostatic wrist strap

== Stuff We Don't Have, But Would Like, Or Need to Buy More Of ==

* Ethernet Cables (Yellow & Red)
* Serial Console/IPKVM that with serial connecters
* New external switch (Apparently, preferably a Cisco 3560)
* Bigger UPS (Not sure about this one, worth testing next time we have downtime and
when we have <insert name of the machine gliceas gave us) plugged in.
* Labeller (We don't actually need one of these, just the use of one for a day or two,
to label the new machines)

[[Category:Hardware]]

[[Category:Projects]]

Redbrick Hardware

2007-12-01T04:55:24Z

Lil cain: /* Other machines */

This is a list of all hardware owned and run by redbrick.

NOTE : this inventory is still incomplete.

== Main login machines ==

* [[Carbon]]
* [[Deathray]]
* [[Murphy]]
* [[Minerva]]

== Other machines ==

* [[Fap]]
* [[Obelisk]]
* [[Welmar]]
* [[Severus]]
* [[Ceiling Cat]]

== Former machines ==

* [[Laser]]
* [[Nanny]]
* [[Tolka]]
* [[Enigma]]
* [[Mother]]
* [[Nurse]]
* [[Telstar]] (formerly Burner)
* [[Troublegum]]
* [[Prodigy]]

== Other Equipment ==

* [[Cisco Switch]]
* [[The Monolith]] (retired)
* [[The Docolith]] (retired)
* [[The Dellith]] x3
* [[APC UPS]]
* [[Dell Gigabit Internal Switch]]

== Accessories ==

Cables

* 2 x Internal SCSI LVD multimode terminators [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI LVD cable; 8 connectors [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x Internal SCSI SE terminator
* 2 x External SCSI VHCDI <-> HD68 cable [one used in enigma array]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 cable [used for DLT]
* 1 x External SCSI HD68 terminator [used for DLT]
* 1 x PS/2 splitter cable [primarily for shrapnel]

Adaptors

* 1 x SCA <-> SCSI
* 1 x External HD68 SCSI <-> Internal HD68 SCSI [used in enigma raid array]
* 1 x 13W3 <-> VGA [plugged into nanny but unused]

Tools

* Set of screwdrivers
* Leatherman kit
* Electrostatic wrist strap

== Stuff We Don't Have, But Would Like, Or Need to Buy More Of ==

* Ethernet Cables (Yellow & Red)
* Serial Console/IPKVM that with serial connecters
* New external switch (Apparently, preferably a Cisco 3560)
* Bigger UPS (Not sure about this one, worth testing next time we have downtime and
when we have <insert name of the machine gliceas gave us) plugged in.
* Labeller (We don't actually need one of these, just the use of one for a day or two,
to label the new machines)

[[Category:Hardware]]

[[Category:Projects]]