TimeLine2008

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 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.

May

• 16th - Redbrick chairperson, Robert "robby" O'Reilly, receives an email containing the Redbrick root password. He informs the committee of this, but then deletes the email.

• 22nd - Robby is told to resign by lil_cain in Fibbers. "RESIGN!" soon becomes a popular catchphrase and a rallying cry for disgruntled members and/or trolls.

• 23rd - Robby, the Redbrick chairperson, resigns from his position.

June

• 9th - Receive emails the Redbrick membership informing them of the recent events:

Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 00:11:39 +0100
From: Andrew Harford <receive@redbrick.dcu.ie>
To: announce-redbrick@lists.redbrick.dcu.ie
Subject: [Announce-RedBrick] RedBrick Back Online, Chairperson Resigns
Reply-To: committee@redbrick.dcu.ie
Sender: announce-redbrick-bounces@lists.redbrick.dcu.ie

Hi,

We are pleased to announce that RedBrick is back online following a disk
failure in our primary storage array (minerva) on Tuesday evening. No data
was lost, and the array was re-built sucessfully with a replacement disk.

We are planning to schedule downtime this Saturday to that will allow us
to reduce the number of disks in use on minerva, meaning there would be
spare disks available and installed in the event of future failures.

This work is dependant on re-installing severus, and creating a full backup
of minerva in advance. More detailed notice will be given via boards/motd
later in the week.

I must also take this opportunity to announce the resignation of our
chairperson, robby, and explain the circumtances leading up to this.

On Friday May 16th robby told the committee over irc that he had received
an email containing the root password that had been in use on minerva & murphy
when RedBrick was hacked.

Robby provided this password, but told us that he had deleted the email, which
was received from 10minutemail.com. Myself and the other admins found it
odd that someone would go to the relative trouble of sending mail via
this service, and that robby would delete this potential evidence.

The following Monday I emailed the committee, requesting that we hold an
emergency meeting to dicuss this email. Robby replied, saying he would
be unavailable for any meetings that week. Given that the semester was ending
and people would be gone home by the next week it was decided to hold the
meeting anyway, on the Thursday evening. This was the first meeting called
by anyone since before the network had been compromised.

At this meeting the committee decided that in robby's absence the only
course of action was to discuss the issue further over the email.

Late that night, cian, johan, werdz and I met robby in Fibbers. Cian, Johan and
I expressed our discontent with the situation by telling robby he should resign.
Whatever the circumstances, it was pretty unprofessional of us to have a go
in public like that, and we apologise for our actions.

The following afternoon dano mailed the committee outlining our conversation
about the email, and asking robby for more information. Robby replied to this
email with his resignation, citing the events of the previous night as his
primary reason.

An EGM will be held at the earliest oppertunity next semester to elect a new
chairperson, however the committee have not decided how best to fill this
position in the interim, and will be happy to take on board any suggestions
from members.

All the best,
andrew.

Rabble ensues.

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 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).