News

Firstly I'd like to say a big thank you to all that showed up, it was very much appreciated. I just want to make everyone aware of the key votes that took place.

We were able to vote on the changes to the constitution, in accordance with section 7.1. You may find the updated constitution in the usual place. https://sucs.org/About/Constitution

The position of Gaming Officer was ratified.

The appointment of Isabel Jenkins (~unreturnable) as the Gaming Officer was also ratified.

A detailed set of minutes will be published sometime in the future.

On 19 March 2015, we'll be hosting a table-top games event in the SUCS room.

The event will start at 1800 and conclude at 2100.

Hope to see you there

Our next Lightning Talks session will be held on 18/03/2015 at 18:00 in Faraday 205 (Robert Recorde room).

This is an event we hold every few months, where members of the society give short talks about what they're currently working on, or just something that they're interested in.

Anyone can give a talk, just show up with one :)

We have our Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 13/03/2015 at 18:00 in Faraday 205 (Robert Recorde room).

The AGM gives members of the society an opportunity to help decide on what the society does and focuses on the year ahead. Additionally, it gives people a chance to bring up any issues or concerns they might have.

As promised, here is this year's AGM agenda:

0. Welcome
1. Present/Apologies
2. Confirm last AGM's minutes
3. Treasurer report
4. Secretary report
5. Publicity Officer report
6. President ? Ask me almost anything
7. Constitution Changes
8. Ratification of the Gaming Officer
8.5. Gaming
9. Need more members
10. What new toys do we want?
11. What is "SUCS Orange"?
12. Website redesign
13. Relationship with the Students' Union
14. Need more student admins
15. Events
16. Any other business

We hope to see you all there!

We will be hosting our first film night of the term on Thursday 19 February at 18:00 in Café West, First Floor, Fulton House.

The film is yet to be announced, all will be revealed on the evening.

Hope to see you there!

Andrew Pover (~andy)
Publicity Officer

The SUCS room will be unavailable to members tomorrow evening (14th) from around 5pm while the existing server rack is removed and replaced. The new rack should allow us to mount our servers properly, and further away from accidental beverage spills.

Most SUCS services will be offline during the move. Further details and updates will be given through the society Facebook and Twitter accounts while Milliways and other services are unavailable.

As a reminder, a backup instance of Milliways is accessible by SSH to outpost.sucs.org, using the username and password bbs. You can then log in using your Milliways username and password.

Apologies for the short notice and any inconvenience caused.

Part of what the exec want to do this year is to develop the gaming side of SUCS. We have had a games server for quite a few years now and we've even had a LAN party... about 7 years ago.

We thought the most effective way to help get this all going again would be to have a dedicated person be responsible for gaming, so it isn't treated like an afterthought but more like a proper segment of SUCS.

So I'm pleased to announce that Peter Jenkins (~unreturnable) has be co-opted to the position of Gaming Officer.

His responsibilities are but not limited to:

• To make sure the games server is functional and all our members can access it
• To help decide what games and mods are run on the server
• To run and organise events
• To work with the publicity officer in regards to games

If you have any ideas of suggestions as to what you'd like to see us do regarding gaming, please email Peter at games@sucs.org

All the desktops have now been upgraded to Fedora 21 Workstation.

Some of the release highlights include: DevAssistant, just look for "DevAssistant" in the application menu and Gnome on Wayland, see the "Session" menu which can be accessed by pressing the gear icon on the login screen if you'd like to give it a go.

If you encounter any problems or bugs, please let an admin know - if you can't find one in the room then email admin@sucs.org or visit Milliways and have a chat.

Greetings everybody,

The elections are now closed!

Which means that the SUCS executive committee for the calendar year 2015 is:

President - Imran Hussain (~imranh)
Treasurer - Priyan Gami (~stig)
Secretary - Courtney Simone Vasile (~sockitwench)
Publicity - Andrew Vincent Pover (~andy)

We wish you all good holidays and best of luck for your exams in the New Year,

SUCS Exec

Hello, world!

Don't forget that we're meeting in the SUCS room today at 18:00 to discuss changes to our constitution and terms and conditions. The proposed changes relate to gender-neutrality and spelling and grammatical errors.

Light refreshments will be served at the meeting. Hope to see you there.

Andrew Pover (~andy), Publicity Officer 2015

Greetings!

The nomination period for the executive elections for 2015 has now closed, so it's time for the elections. OK, one election.

The only contested position this year is Secretary, which will be contested between Stuart John Watson (~ripp_) and Courtney Simone Vasile (~sockitwench). The remaining positions received only one successful nomination each.

Therefore the following positions are filled for next year.

President - Imran Hussain (~imranh)
Treasurer - Priyan Gami (~stig)
Publicity - Andrew Vincent Pover (~andy)

The online voting can be found here: http://sucs.org/Vote and will open at midnight tonight and last for 7 days. Only Student Members of the society who have been members for more than 14 days from the start of voting, i.e. before 17/11/2014 are eligible to vote.

Once the time for voting has expired the results will be available from the voting page above.

Any questions should be directed to myself at vote@sucs.org.

Best of luck to both candidates and congratulations to those who will be on our new exec already,

Nick Corlett (~worldinsideme), Returning Officer

Hello,

It's that time of year again where the sun isn't out, the birds aren't singing, and it's very wet. What am I talking about? I hear you cry, Elections!

Interested in helping shape Swansea University's Society of the Year? Good then keep on reading! :)

If you have been a student member from at least the 1st of November and are expecting to still be a student in September of 2015 then you can run!

Nominations for positions on the executive committee, which lasts a whole calendar year, will be open on the 15th of November at 00:00, that's this Saturday, and will end on the 28th of November at 23:59. The standard rules apply, to be nominated for a position you must have 2 other student members put your name forward, an email must be sent to vote@sucs.org. Those students must have been members from 2 weeks before nominations open, so the 1st of November in this case.

Here's a list of positions and what you can expect to be doing:

NONE OF THESE POSITIONS ARE TECHNICAL ROLES. NO EXPERIENCE WITH COMPUTERS REQUIRED.

President (president@sucs.org):
* Responsible for the overall running of the society.
* A spokesperson for the society, able to promote the society’s interests in outside circles. The main point of contact for liaison with the SU.
* Responsible for calling committee meetings and full society meetings.
* Supporting the other committee members in their roles.
* Joint responsibility (with Treasurer) of authorising all payments.
* Ensure that the aims and objectives are being achieved.

Treasurer (treasurer@sucs.org):
* Responsible for the financial affairs of the society.
* Manage a record of the society’s finances.
* Able to present the finances of the society to the Societies and Services Officer upon request.
* Joint responsibility (with President) of authorising all payments.
* Leading on applications for grant funding (with President).
* Requesting cheques/petty cash/bank transfers from the Finance Office.

Secretary (secretary@sucs.org):
* Responsible for the administration of the society.
* Minute-taker for all meetings of the committee and the whole society.
* Responsible for notifying members of Annual General Meetings/Elections.
* Maintain all records of the society.

Publicity (publicty@sucs.org):
* Responsible for organising society events
* Working with the president to complete room bookings
* Promoting the society
* Be the societies PR person

Once the nominations have closed the mandatory 2 day break will be enforced. Online voting will begin on 01/12/2014 at 00:00 and will close on 07/12/2014 at 23:59.

Our returning officer is Nicholas Corlett (worldinsideme) so any queries should be directed at him via the email address vote@sucs.org. All the election rules can be found in our constitution which is at https://sucs.org/About/Constitution.

Good luck and have fun!

It saddens me that the first news post I make of this academic year is about a data corruption incident.

On Friday the 10th of October some of you may have noticed that silver (our main server) went away for a bit, and so did your files. What happened was that sometime during Wednesday the 8th of October the part of the server where we keep your (and our) files got corrupted, we didn't notice. Maybe if we had noticed then this wouldn't have been so bad, maybe. However for the next 2 days or so, random files and data were being erased, overwrite or just not being written.

When we finally noticed on the morning of Friday the 10th we took the server offline, after examining the damage we decided the best course of action was to wipe everything and restore from a backup. Due to the fact that files were being randomly written to etc.. the last backup that we had and that we also trusted was taken on the morning of the 8th. That has been restored and you should all now have the vast majority of your files back.

The file restoration process is still going on and at a later date we shall make the backups from the 9th and the 10th available to you all, these are to be used at your own risk as we cannot guarantee that they are what you think they are. Instructions on how to access them will be posted later, watch this space.

We have taken steps to prevent data corruption potentially becoming so bad in the future, upon detecting an error, file systems will be remounted as read only and only after an admin has examined the situation will they become available for writing again.

In the occurrence of unexpected downtime places like facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SwanseaUniversityComputerSociety) and twitter (https://twitter.com/sucsexec) are where we will post updates.

I would also like to remind that you should have anything important backed up in multiple places.

Thanks,

Imran

South WAles Makers & Programmers present SWAMP Fest

10am - 5pm Saturday 11th October 2014

TechHub Swansea, 11 Wind Street, Swansea, SA1 1DP

A day of workshops, tutorials talks, stands and exhibitions of everything that is making, coding, tinkering, and crafting. Workshops include 3D Printing,  Chain Maille, Soldering, Raspberry Pi, Minecraft, Sugru, Machine Sewing, and Arduino. Plus stalls, exhibitions and talks on a variety of subjects.

Free Tickets and full schedule on http://swampfest.eventbrite.co.uk

Thanks to everyone who showed up.

It was good.

The annual SUCS beach party will take place on Saturday the 7th June. We will be starting at around 19:00 though people will be around to set up before hand, any help would be appreciated.

We will be on the beach near the junction between Mumbles road and Sketty lane, here. Everyone is welcome especially if you can bring burnable items for the fire. Please remember to bring your own food and drink for the BBQ.

We hope to see you all there.

For those of you that have yet to discover email here's the agenda for the AGM taking place next Monday, that's the 17th of March at 6PM in Faraday 205 (Robert Recorde room).

0. Welcome
1. Present/Apologies
2. Confirm last AGMs minutes
3. Treasurer report
4. Secretary report
5. Publicity Officer report
6. President – Ask me almost anything
7. Discussion of hardware (desktops, osmium, backup, door, printer)
8. Discussion of software (Fedora 20, door, pykota)
9. Discussion of the room (whiteboard, clean up, noise, heat)
10. Price for printing – Minimum of 2p per page
11. Discussion/suggestion of future events
n. Any other business

If you're thinking "Huh A-G-M???". The Annual General Members meeting (AGM) gives members of the society an opportunity to help decide on what the society does and focuses on for the next year. It also gives people an chance to bring up an issues or concerns they might have.

We have our Annual General Members meeting on Monday the 17th of March. It will be held in the Robert Recorde room, which is Faraday 205, at 6PM. An email with the agenda for the AGM will be going out on Monday the 10th of March.

On Thursday the 20th of March we have a Lightning talks session. Which will be held in the Robert Recorde room, Faraday 205, at 6PM.

For those of you who are unaware of what lightning talks are. Members give talks on a variety of topics. The talks are about 5-10 minutes in length, and can be on any subject. Any member is free to give a talk - if you're interested in doing so then it would be helpful (but not mandatory) if you could let the exec know in advance (exec at sucs.org).

A few of our earlier talks are available online at http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

Good news everybody. Our backup server is back in the Computer Science department and fully operational!

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you should have backup copies of your important files in multiple places and that relying solely on SUCS for backup is not recommended.

Our gateway machine will be upgraded to the latest stable version of Debian (Wheezy) on Saturday afternoon. This means that SUCS services will be unavailable for a short period of time while the machine is rebooted for a kernel update.

Users are reminded that the SUCS backup server is still unavailable while we fix it's filesystem. Users should make sure that they have their own backups of anything important stored on SUCS.
But you all do that already, right?

The election results are in and Priyan Gami (stig) is our new Treasurer, congratulations!

This means that next years executive committee is:

• President: Imran Hussain (imranh)
• Treasurer: Priyan Gami (stig)
• Secretary: Calum Mark Phillips (nenenxi)
• Publicity: Samuel Joseph Bust-Webber (sambw)

Well done to all candidates, enjoy your holidays and best of luck to everybody with their exams in January.

7pm Monday 2nd December 2013
Volcano Theatre, 229 High Street, Swansea.

A hands on workshop teaching the basics of using small, cheap computing devices to build circuits that can automate and interact with the physical world. This session will be covering the Getting Started (buttons and lights) and Communications (serial ports) tutorials.

Participants will need to bring their Starter Kit and a suitable laptop, it would be advisable to download and install the software in advance (links on the website). I have a few loan kits for anyone that doesn't already have a Starter Kit.

Bonus Activity: To help demonstrate that this isn't just an electronics club, and that we want to embrace all of the creative maker community, we shall also be running an informal intro to Crochet for those that want have a go.

These events are open to the public, no membership, tickets, or fees require.

Last week, backup suffered a single drive failure and suffered a second drive failure during the rebuild this week. As such is out of commission until further notice.

As such it is important that users continue to back up important information to other locations.

SUCS services will be unavailable for a short period after 9pm while silver is rebooted.

Our next Lightning Talks session will be in the Robert Recorde room in Faraday block on the 17th October at 6pm. This is an event we hold every few months, where members of the society give short talks about what they're currently working on, or just something that they're interested in. Anyone can give a talk, if you're interested just send an email to exec@sucs.org saying what your name is and what you'd like to give a talk on.
There is a Facebook event here

The next evening, the 18th October, at 8pm we are having our reorganised Laserzone event. The Facebook event page is still there with the updated date, so if people could click attending so we can get an idea of numbers that would be great. It can be found here. If you don't have Facebook or prefer not to use it, email exec@sucs.org and we'll count you in

SUCS Make Lab & Swansea Hackspace - Introduction to Microcontrollers.

7pm Monday 7th October, Lecture Room 1, Fulton House

This is the first in a new season of talks and workshops on building, modifying and otherwise hacking on your own projects.

This session will be an introduction to a few of the popular Microcontrollers on the market and how they can be used to control and computerise your projects and ideas. We will also cover the planned series of workshops which will be hands on teaching how to construct and use such simple circuits and take you get to take them home.

These sessions are free and open to everyone, please invite anyone you feel might be interested.

We are having a Meet and Greet event tonight [02/10] in JCs coffee side to get to know the new people in the society and just generally hang 
out. We will be in JCs from 7pm till 9pm, and some of us will probably stay later.

If you aren't sure where JCs is, it is on the second floor of Fulton House and we will be on the side of the bar with all the sofas.

The porters at the front of Fulton House will be happy to direct you if you're really lost :)

Come say hi!

After a longer than expected period of downtime, SUCS services have now been resumed on our new server. As well as moving to new hardware, we have also upgraded to the Debian 7.1 Wheezy.
Services should function as before, unless noted below. If something is no longer working, please let us know by emailing admin at sucs.org.

Known Issues/Notable changes:

• PHP, Python and most other software has been updated
• The default apache configuration has changed slightly. Let us know if you notice problems with any websites.
  The largest change is that we are no longer running suhosin - although this isn't expected to cause any problems
• PHP have removed support for the option "allow_call_time_ pass_reference"
  If you have a custom php.ini file, this entry will need to be removed.
  
• SUID perl scripts are no longer supported
   

The main SUCS server, silver, will be moved to new hardware this weekend. It will also be upgraded to the latest stable version of Debian.
During the upgrade on Saturday, SUCS services will be unavailable. This includes:

• Desktop on Demand
• Email
• Database access
• Hosted websites
• Jabber/XMPP
• Milliways

as well as all other SUCS services. Emails sent to SUCS accounts during this period will be held on Outpost and delivered when normal service is resumed.

There may also be some shorter periods of disruption after the upgrade has been completed while servers are physically moved in preparation for Freshers Week and the start of term.

Users are invited to join Outpost, our backup Milliways instance, during the upgrade. Information will also be made available via our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In case you hadn't noticed, it's summer! For everyone who had exams, I hope they went well. Many of you are aware that we have been slowly aquiring new equipment over the last few weeks/months to perform an upgrade on Silver. We plan to do this with as little downtime as possible but if anything goes missing we apologise in advance.

We are already looking for volunteers to help us with Freshers Fayre. Be it ideas about our first semester socials or handing out flyers inside the Freshers Marquee we are always looking.

I hope everyone has a good summer and comes back ready to 'aquire' Freshers.

It's that time of year again. Beach party is going to be on Saturday June 1st 2013.

As usual, we need people to help find and arrange for wood to be available on the day to keep us going throughout the night.

A few drinks and good company will keep us powered through the night (weather permitting) ready for our breakfasts on Sunday morning at the Uplands Diner.

As usual we are going to be in this general area.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.605&mlon=-3.98297&zoom=15

As usual, SUCS will be providing a small amount of food (no drinks I'm afraid) so you will have to bring your own to supplement this.

Anyone who wants to help with the planning and organisation of the event can contact exec@

Hope to see you there!

Swansea Hackspace are holding a set of Lightning Talks at the university at 7pm on Monday the 22nd in the Marino Room, Fulton House.
Talks can be up to 10 minutes long and anyone interested in giving one should email hackspace@swansea.hackspace.org.uk

For more information, and to keep up to date with the Hackspace project, visit the website and join the mailing list.
There is also a facebook page that can be used to promote the group, but the mailing list is where most discussions take place

Swansea Hackspace project, building a community workshop and meeting space for those that like to tinker, build, create and learn about technology.

Introductory Meeting 7pm 2nd April, Vivian Arms, Sketty.

http://swansea.hackspace.org.uk

As some of you might have heard, the final week of the students' union sabbatical elections is here. SUCS will be running the live coverage of the hustings on Monday, with the results being announced on Thursday evening.
In an attempt to avoid disruption to SUCS services due to the extra traffic we're likely to see this week, all sites hosted on vhost.sucs.org are now being served via an instance of Varnish (a caching proxy) on rubidium. This may mean that updates to hosted websites will be delayed, but should stop everything grinding to a halt as it did last year.

If you encounter any problems accessing a hosted website, please email admin@ or visit Milliways

In order to accommodate those of you with inept ISPs, we are now offering SMTP on port 587 in addition to port 25.
If available in your email client, enable TLS or STARTTLS to use a secure connection

The first SUCS lightning talks of the year will be taking place on Thursday 21st February at 6pm in the Robert Recorde room in the Faraday building.

Members give talks on a variety of topics. The talks are about 5-10 minutes in length, and can be on any subject. Any member is free to give a talk - if you're interested in doing so then it would be helpful (but not mandatory) if you could let the exec know in advance (exec@sucs.org).

A few of our earlier talks are available online at http://sucs.org/Community/Talks


If you have questions about either of these events, just ask or drop an email to exec@sucs.org.

Nominations for treasurer have (finally) closed, and we now have a complete commitee for 2013:

President: Robert James (~rjames93)
Treasurer: Michael Dec (~grepwood)
Secretary: Lorah Woodward (~shirelings89)
Publicity Officer: Jake Bailey (~melonxhead)

Well done, and good luck to them for the next twelve months

The vote for next year's SUCS president has now finished. Nominations were received for the roles of secretary and publicity officer during the respective nomination periods, and the candidates for those positions were elected unopposed.
The SUCS executive committee for 2013 will be:

President: Robert James (~rjames93)
Treasurer: To be determined (see below)
Secretary: Lorah Woodward (~shirelings89)
Publicity Officer: Jake Bailey (~melonxhead)

As no candidate for the role of treasurer was nominated by the deadline, nominations for this role will remain open until 5pm on Friday the 7th of January, with an election to follow.
Our current treasurer, Safi (~Zephyr) will continue in post until after that election has been held.

Congratulations to all successful candidates and the best of luck for 2013!

Votes for the presidency can now be cast by all student members by logging into the SUCS website.
Nominations are still being accepted for the roles of secretary and treasurer  - see the previous posts for more information

At the close of nominations, the following candidates were nominated in accordance with the SUCS constitution:
President:

• Robert James (~rjames93)
• Robert Fletcher (~robrotheram)

Publicity:

• Jake Bailey (~melonxhead)
  

As such, Jake Bailey is elected to the post of Publicity Officer for 2013.
A vote for the role of president will take place between Midnight on the 3rd of December and 23:59 on Sunday the 9th.
Nominations for the posts of Secretary and Treasurer are extended until 5pm on Friday the 7th. Candidates are reminded that they must receive at least 2 nominations, other than themselves, to stand for a position.

The time has come to elect the new SUCS exec for 2013.

Nominations are now open, to nominate someone (or yourself) for a committee position email vote[AT]sucs[DOT]org saying who and for which position. Candidates must receive at least 2 nominations, other than themselves, to stand for a position.

The SUCS exec consists of:

• President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
• Treasurer: Deals with the society's accounts, and general financial administration.
• Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
• Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

These positions are all non-technical, for more information on getting involved with SUCS admin email admin[AT]sucs[DOT]org. If there is more than one candidate for each position then a vote will be taken.

All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Friday 30th November. Voting will then commence from 12 midnight on the morning of Monday 3rd December for a period of 1 week.
Next years executive will be announced on Monday 10th December

To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/Blogs/vote

Hey Guys, the next batch of Lightning Talks are due to take place in the Robert Recorde Room in Faraday Building on Thursday 18th October at 6pm. The talks are about 5-10 minutes in length, and can be on any subject. Any member is free to give a talk.

A few of our earlier talks are available online at http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

Our Halloween social this year will be the same deal as last: The Dungeon of Dance - Costume Ball. The facebook event is here, and there's a link to The Vault on Google Streetview here, - if you have any questions just ask.
It will cost £3.00 on the door.

First of all a huge thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make sure that Freshers Fayre went as smoothly as possible. So on with business, to remind any existing members and to tell all our new members that our weekly socials are in JCs at 1pm on Fridays, we hope you can bring some friends along too (we don't bite). The official Meet n Greet is now officially booked for JCs Coffee Side on Wednesday 3rd October at 7pm. 

 Last but certainly not least, we have the first SUCS Minecraft event!!! For those of you who are new to the society we have a communal games server, which we are planning on using to our advantage from now on.  More on this event to come, including a list of what you need to bring.

There will be a short period of downtime at **17:30** in order to fit a replacement for the failed hard drive that was removed from Silver last week.
Further details and times will be given on Milliways and via the societies facebook and twitter accounts (probably)
** - Updated

I know that not everyone is back off their holidays yet but it's that time of year again. We are busy planning the Freshers Fayre stall and some social activities for October.

For those of you who want to take an active role with SUCS this year we have plenty of jobs for you to be doing. We know that the Freshers Fayre tent is going to be hectic again this year so we are asking for volunteers to help make the job more palatable. We have a facebook event just for it here and for those of you who don't have or use Facebook a direct link to the volunteering form can be found here or if that still doesn't float your boat give us an email at exec@ and we will be right back to you.

A word about the Lightning talks, the provisional date for these is the 18th of October. If this is an issue and you were planning on giving a talk, a quick email to exec@ will help us sort that out. Again information about the Lightning talks can be found on Facebook here and on the SUCS site as more information becomes available.  If you are new to the site you can check out previous lightning talks here.

Any other questions give us an email at exec@ and we will endevour to deal with it

We hope you've all had a good holiday.

Cheers,
The Exec

There will be a short (~15 minute) downtime later today in order to remove a failed hard drive from silver.
Update: All done, hard drive has been returned to Seagate for replacement (again)

Today's maintenance is complete - Silver, gw and rubidium have all been moved to the new rack. Total downtime was just over two hours.
Krypton, Argon, Iodine, Fluorine and Chlorine and Xenon are turned off, and will remain turned off for the rest of the summer. Helium and Bromine are available via Desktop on Demand, SSH or for use in the room.
There may be some further downtime between now and September to rearrange the room - more details will get posted here.
Until then, enjoy the summer!

SUCS services will be unavailable for a few hours on Sunday July 8th in order to swap the SGI rack for the new replacement.
The work to rearrange the room will begin around 11, which may result in desktop on demand being unavailable. Downtime for all other services will be kept to a minimum.
Email will be held at outpost and redelivered after services are brought back online.

More information will be available on Outpost and probably via the society twitter account  (@sucsexec).
To access Outpost, connect to outpost.sucs.org using the username and password bbs.You will then be able to log in using your Milliways credentials. If you cannot remember you Milliways password then login to Milliways on Silver before the downtime begins

Some SUCS services were unavailable or slow to respond between 19:15 and 19:40. Hosted websites and the society Jabber server were taken offline until Silver recovered.
All SUCS services should now be operating normally

The annual SUCS beach party will take place on Saturday the 2nd June. We will be starting at around 19:00 though people will be around to set up before hand, any help would be appreciated.

We will be on the beach near the junction between Mumbles road and Sketty lane, here. Everyone is welcome especially if you can bring burnable items for the fire. Please remember to bring your own food and drink for the BBQ.

We hope to see you all there.

The exec

Silver was rebooted shortly after 21:30 today as it had become unresponsive and various attempts to improve the situation failed. Some SUCS services had been slow to respond or unreachable since around 20:45

Hi everyone,

We are collecting orders for SUCS T-shirts. The T-shirts are black with a printed SUCS logo on the front, they will cost approximately £6.
This order will be placed at lunch time on Monday 19/3/2012 - payment will be required by the Friday lunchtime social on the 16th (JCs coffee side at 1pm until 2-ish or until people get bored)

T-shirt sizes
Small – chest (35"-37")
Medium – chest (38"-40")
Large – chest (41"-43")
X-Large – chest (44"-46")
XX-Large – chest (47"-49")

I'm also (still) trying to gather photos for the wall at the back of the room, can anyone who has any either send them to me by email or place them somewhere i can access and point me in the right direction.

Any questions, just drop an to exec@sucs.org

SUCS services were unavailable from off campus between 23:30 yesterday and shortly after 08:00 this morning, due to problems with the university's network connection.

There will be a period of downtime tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon in order to replace UPS batteries, beginning at 3pm.
This will probably involve two short periods of downtime, each about 10 minutes long.
Each shutdown will be announced on Milliways and via the society twitter account (@sucsexec)
Apologies for the short notice

The SUCS Annual General Meeting will take place on Thursday 1st of March at 18:00, in the Robert Recorde room.

Any motions for the AGM need to be submitted to exec@sucs.org by Thursday the 23rd of February.

The AGM is open to all members who want to see some of the inner workings of the society and help make decisions for the future.

If everything goes to plan, the lightning talks on Thursday (16th) should be available live at https://sucs.org/Community/Stream/
If you can't make it and want to ask questions or discuss the talks, feel free to login to Milliways - someone will be keeping an eye out during the talks to pass questions on.
For those of you who can make it, I look forward to seeing you there!

The first SUCS lightning talk of the year will be taking place on Thursday 16th February at 18:00 in the Robert Recorde room, and our AGM will take place two weeks later on Thursday 1st of March at 18:00, also in the Robert Recorde room.

Lightning talks are about 10 minutes long and tend to cover a wide range of topics. If you're interested in giving a talk, feel free! If you can let a member of the exec know in advance then that helps us organise the night. A few of our earlier talks are available online at http://sucs.org/Community/Talks if you want an idea of what sort of topics we've covered in the past.

Any motions for the AGM need to be submitted to exec@sucs.org by Thursday the 23rd of February.

The downtime on 23/01/2012 was performed in a smooth and efficient manner by tswsl1989, we thank him for giving his time to perform necessary maintenance.

It's the end of exams and so time for celebrations/drowning our sorrows

We will be meeting this Saturday (21/01/12) at 19:30 in the Potters Wheel for food and drink. It would be good to see everyone out.

SUCS services will be unavailable for approximately 1 hour on Monday the 23rd . The downtime should begin at 11:00.
It is also possible that SUCS will be unavailable for short periods of time on Sunday 22nd due to work in the Library machine room.

The planned downtime is to make changes to our LDAP directory in order to improve security and reliability and to avoid future compatibility problems.
More information will be available on Outpost and probably via the society twitter account  (@sucsexec).
To access Outpost, connect to outpost.sucs.org using the username and password bbs.You will then be able to log in using your Milliways credentials. If you cannot remember you Milliways password then login to Milliways on silver prior to the downtime

Due to mysterious circumstances SUCS would have been unavailable externally from around 13:00-13:55, we apologise for any inconvenience during this time.

Happy New Year!
Everything seems to be working, and the new committee haven't decided what's going on yet
Many thanks to this year's committee, and best of luck to their successors :)

Hi some of us will be going for a meal at Miahs this Saturday at 7:00 PM. Afterwards we will head down to the pub probably the potters wheel.

Miahs is in the converted church on the corner of st Helens road and st Helens avenue, open street map here
http://sucs.org/uri/83

Any questions drop me an email.

Ed SUCS secretary

Hi everyone,
We are collecting orders for SUCS hoodies and T-shirts. The hoodies are black with an embroidered SUCS logo on the front. The T-shirts are also black with a printed SUCS logo on the front.
Prices are £15 for a hoodie, £6 for a T-shirt, or £20 if you want both.

We will be placing the order over the Christmas break, so please send your order with your size and payment to the exec before midday on Friday 16th of December. An email will be sent out after Christmas to let you know when the order arrives.

Hoodie sizes

• Small – Chest (34"-36")
• Medium – Chest (38"-40")
• Large – Chest (42"-44")
• X-Large – Chest (46"-48")
• XX-Large – Chest (50"-52")

T-shirt sizes

• Small – chest (35"-37")
• Medium – chest (38"-40")
• Large – chest (41"-43")
• X-Large – chest (44"-46")
• XX-Large – chest (47"-49")

Any questions, just drop me an email,
Ed, Secretary

Nominations for the SUCS Exec are now closed and due to uncontested nominations the SUCS Exec of 2012 are as follows

President   Edward Smith (~Ed)

Treasurer   Safi Dewish (~zephyr)

Secretary   Robert James (~rjames93)

Congratulations and Good Luck to the new Exec who take over on January 1st.

Jessica Hunt  (~snowdrake)  Returning Officer

The time has come to elect the new SUCS exec for 2012.

Nominations are now open, to nominate someone (or yourself) for a committee position email vote@sucs.org saying who and for which position. Candidates must receive at least 2 nominations, other than themselves, to stand for a position.

The SUCS exec consists of:

    President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
    Treasurer: Deals with the society's accounts, and general financial administration.
    Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
    Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

These positions are all non-technical, for more information on getting involved with SUCS admin email admin[AT]sucs[DOT]org. If there is more than one candidate for each position then a vote will be taken.

Also those nominees who wish to have manifestos available to view during the election period must submit them to me before the voting session opens.

All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Friday 2rd December. Voting will then commence from 12 midnight on the morning of Monday 5th December for a period of 1 week.

To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/Blogs/vote

Jessica Hunt (Snowdrake)

Returning officer and current Treasurer

There will be an admin meeting on Monday 21/11 at 7.30pm in the Marino Room in Fulton House.
The meeting is open to all members of the society, particularly those interested in getting involved with the technical side of things.
Among other things, we will be discussing buying a new server.

The Marino Room is on the second floor of Fulton House. From JCs, head across the balcony overlooking the canteen - it's the room just beyond the set of double doors at the far end.

The SUCS Desktops were upgraded to Fedora 16 on Saturday - one of the more noticable changes of this upgrade is that we are now running GNOME 3.2 rather than the more familiar GNOME 2. It is possible to change the behaviour of the new Gnome Shell - look for Advanced Settings or run gnome-tweak-tool. KDE and XFCE desktop environments are also available - see the "Session" menu on the login screen if you'd like to give them a try.
If you encounter any problems or bugs, please let an admin know - if you can't find one in the room then email admin@ or visit Milliways and have a chat.

We will be upgrading the desktops to Fedora 16 on Saturday (12th November) from 10am
Desktop on demand will be unavailable during the upgrade process.
If you're interested in getting involved, pop down to the room on Saturday

Our next social will be at Laserzone. We will be meeting at 7pm on the 18th outside Lazerzone, behind Pizza Express off Castle Square.

A map showing the location is available here, and a facebook event is also available here
You'll pay when you get there, it's £3 per person for a 20 min game and we will be playing around 2-3 games.

Afterwards we'll be headed to a pub chosen by popular choice.
If you're interested please email exec@sucs.org
Hope to see you there!

Video from the lightning talks held on 1st November has now been uploaded. Enjoy talks on a wide range of topics including neutrinos, Bertrand Russell and the history of SUCS now at https://sucs.org/Community/Talks

The SUCS Lightning Talks, starting at 7pm today, will be streamed live. Please go to https://sucs.org/Community/Stream/ to choose the version of the stream you would like to use. Remote users can discuss the talks and ask questions on Milliways.

Silver was rebooted just after half past 3 today - it had become unresponsive and various attempts to improve the situation failed. Some SUCS services had been slow to respond or unreachable since around 3pm.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

On halloween we are having the annual joint social with Sci-fi, anime, photography, wargaming, CLASH and RP. We will be in The Vault on the 31st of October.

The Facebook event is here, and there's a link to The Vault on Google Streetview here, - if you have any questions just ask.

The first SUCS lightning talks of the year will be taking place on Tuesday 1st November at 7pm in the 3rd Floor CS Board Room room in the Faraday building.

Members give talks on a variety of topics. The talks are about 10 minutes in length. Any member is free to give a talk - if you're interested in doing so then it would be helpful if you could let the exec know in advance (exec@sucs.org)

A few of our earlier talks are available online at http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

SUCS Exec

Hi Everyone,
SUCS is Planning a Frets on Fire (Guitar Hero) competition, taking place in JCs from 1-7pm on Friday 21st October, everyone is welcome to drop in and compete for the cash prize.
Also the first SUCS lightning talk of the year will take place on Tuesday 1st November at 7pm in the Robert Recorde Room in the Faraday Building. Anyone wanting to give a talk on any topic should send a message to exec@ and let us know.

SUCS Exec

Silver will be unavailable for a short period from 3pm in order to install a replacement hard drive. All SUCS services will be unavailable during this time. Updates will be posted on outpost.

To log into outpost, SSH to bbs@outpost.sucs.org using the password bbs . You can then log in using your Milliways username and password.

The UPS will be calibrated around lunchtime today. Proxy (rubidium) and tilesrv will be unavailable during this time. There may be a short period of downtime. More information will be available on Milliways.

Welcome to all our new members and welcome back to everyone else!

Members looking to join or renew should come and find us at Freshers Fayre. Anyone wanting to join or renew after Freshers should drop by the Room during the day (lunchtimes tend to be good) or email joinus@sucs.org

Help with using the services provided by SUCS is available on our website, along with various useful tools, such as a pastebin, URI shortener and Web Mail. To access them, enter your SUCS account details in the login box at the top right corner of the website.

If you get stuck with anything or just want a chat, log on to Milliways - we don't bite (often…) :-)

And of course, don't forget the SUCS room where you can connect your own computer or use one of ours. The room is on the ground floor of the Student Union Building.

There will be some disruption to SUCS services on these dates. The two main tasks are:

• Replace caesium with a more recent machine (rubidium)
  • This will result in the games server and webcam being unavailable as well as all web access from SUCS machines.
• Test the new UPS
  • Some of the machines attached to the UPS will be configured to shutdown early in order to keep silver and gateway online longer in the event of a power failure.
    

More information will be available on Milliways. If it all goes horribly wrong then updates will be available on Outpost and via the society twitter account  (@sucsexec)

Silver and gateway were rebooted for a kernel update at 7.30. Downtime was ~2 minutes

SUCS services were temporarily unavailable for 30 mins from 1:45pm due upgrading the UPS.

The SUCS UPS will be replaced on Friday 2nd September at 1:30pm. SUCS services will be unavailable for portions of the upgrade process.
During any downtime, information will also be available on Milliways (while available), Outpost (see below) and the society Twitter account

Outpost is our alternative Milliways instance, and may be accessed by opening an ssh connection to outpost.sucs.org, using the username bbs, password bbs. You will then be able to login to Milliways using your  *Milliways* username and password. The password you have set for Milliways may not be the same as your login password - if you're  not certain then login to Milliways on Silver prior to the planned downtime and ask for help.

SUCS services were temporarily unavailable due to network issues.
The SUCSNet -> gateway link has been reduced to 100Mbps until a replacement switch can be sourced.
EDIT: this has now be fixed

SUCS services were unavailable between approximately 8:15am and 6:30pm on 2nd August 2011 due to a power outage in the SUCS room.

All anticipated upgrade tasks have now been completed. Please report any problems to the admin committee by emailing admin <AT> sucs.org

SUCS main server, Silver, will be upgraded to the latest stable version of Debian on Tuesday 28th June at 12pm
SUCS services will be unavailable for portions of the upgrade process.
During any downtime, information will also be available on Milliways (while available), Outpost (see below) and the society Twitter account

Outpost is our alternative Milliways instance, and may be accessed by opening an ssh connection to outpost.sucs.org, using the username bbs, password bbs. You will then be able to login to Milliways using your  *Milliways* username and password. The password you have set for Milliways may not be the same as your login password - if you're  not certain then login to Milliways on Silver prior to the planned downtime and ask for help.

Backup is currently unavailable. It should be available again tomorrow.

EDIT: It's back up now

The SSL certificate for games.sucs.org has been updated.
The new certificate has the SHA-1 fingerprint ‎01:83:41:C3:8B:69:F4:CD:21:90:CC:63:D8:A3:5F:3C:47:BA:10:D8 and will expire on the 24/05/2012

It's that time of year again: The 20th Annual SUCS beach party will be held on Friday June 10th on the beach near the Sketty Lane carpark:

Donations of burnable stuff are welcome.  The party usually kicks off at about 19:00, but people will be around earlier to shift wood down to the beach so please lend a hand if you are able.

Remember to bring your own food and drink, although some small quantity of food will be provided, and we'll have bbqs on the beach to cook it, so if you would like to donate additional food all donations welcome!

Hope to see you all there!!

Silver stopped responding around 13:00 for reasons that are not fully known. It was restarted at 21:15 to resolve the issue. SUCS services were unavailable during this time and we apologise for any inconvenience this caused.

Caesium's PSU decided to fail at 17:15 and tripped the breaker in the room, stopping all SUCS services until power was restored at 17:30.
The Committee apologises for any inconvenience caused.

Silver lost network connectivity at 04:28 this morning. Connectivity was restored at 08:33

All SUCS services were unavailable during this time

The Lightning Talks are back on Thursday 24th February at 6pm in the Robert Recorde room. If you would like to present a talk please email us at exec[AT]sucs[DOT]org this is so we have a rough idea about timings.

Hope to see you there.

Silver was rebooted for a kernel update this morning.
Total downtime was ~5 minutes

Happy New Year from the outgoing exec, and best of luck to the new committee for 2011!

Hey all,

Nominations are now closed for the 2011 SUCS Exec. As there are no contested roles we will not be holding a vote.

Next year's exec will be:

• President: Callum Massey(~ kais58)
• Treasurer:Jess Hunt (~snowdrake)
• Secretary: Edward Smith (~ed)

There was no candidate for Publicity Officer.

Congratulations and good luck for next year guys!
Jonathan Gordon, Returning Officer

Silver was rebooted this morning for a kernel update. Total downtime ~5min.

The time has come to elect the new SUCS exec for 2011.

Nominations are now open, to nominate someone (or yourself) for a committee position email vote[AT]sucs[DOT]org saying who and for which position. Candidates must receive at least 2 nominations, other than themselves, to stand for a position.

The SUCS exec consists of:

• President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
• Treasurer: Deals with the society's accounts, and general financial administration.
• Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
• Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

These positions are all non-technical, for more information on getting involved with SUCS admin email admin[AT]sucs[DOT]org. If there is more than one candidate for each position then a vote will be taken.

All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Friday 3rd December. Voting will then commence from 12 midnight on the morning of Monday 6th December for a period of 1 week.

To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/Blogs/vote

SUCS was disconnected from the internet shortly after midnight, and remained unreachable until ~0830. This was due to the campus internet connection going down.

There will be a period of downtime on Friday for a planned hardware upgrade. All SUCS services will be unavailable for around 30 minutes around 2pm. Updates will be posted to Outpost (see below) and on Twitter (follow @sucsexec).

During this downtime, gateway and backup will replaced and one of the spare cards from gateway will be transferred to Silver as a permanent replacement for the failed on board NIC. The current backup machine will be taken offline around 9am on Friday, with the new machine being brought into service during the afternoon downtime.

Outpost is our alternative Milliways instance, and may be accessed by opening an ssh connection to outpost.sucs.org, using the username bbs, password bbs. You will then be able to login to Milliways using your *Milliways* username and password. The password you have set for Milliways may not be the same as your login password - if you're not certain then login to Milliways on silver and ask for help.

Silver suffered an unexpected hardware error around 8pm, normal service was resumed around 10pm. We are currently running a 10/100 NIC so things could be a little slow during peak usage.

Silver went down at ~0435 this morning (18th October), and was rebooted at 0831

The cause for this outage is unknown, and all SUCS services were unavailable during this time

There will be Lightning Talks on Thursday the 14th October at 6pm in the Robert Recorde room in Faraday Tower.
All members, new and old, are welcome to attend or give a talk. If you want to give a talk please let a member of the exec know or email exec@sucs.org

There will also be a Haloween social in Milkwood Jam, hosted jointly by SUCS, Anime, Sci-fi, Clash & Roleplay. More details closer the time!

Silver and Gateway were rebooted for kernel updates at 07:55.

Gateway failed to come back up untill kicked at around 09:50. All SUCS serices were unavailable during this time.

Welcome to all our new members and welcome back to everyone else!

Members looking to join or renew should come and find us at Freshers Fayre. Anyone wanting to join or renew after Freshers should drop by the Room during the day (lunchtimes tend to be good) or email exec@sucs.org

Help with using the services provided by SUCS is available on our website, along with various useful tools, such as a pastebin, URI shortener and Web Mail. To access them, enter your SUCS account details in the login box at the top right corner of the website.

If you get stuck with anything or just want a chat, log on to Milliways - we don't bite (often…) :-)

And of course, don't forget the SUCS room where you can connect your own computer or use one of ours. The room is on the ground floor of the Student Union Building.

All SUCS services lost Internet access between approximately 12:50pm and 2:15pm today due to a power outage in the Student Union building. The electricity supply to the SUCS room was unaffected.

Silver was restarted for a kernel update at 12:20
Everything appears to have come back normally.

Door is playing up at the moment, so it may not be possible to get into the room. We are working on the problem and hope to restore access as soon as possible.

It's that time of year again: The annual SUCS beach party will be held on Saturday June 5th on the beach near the Sketty Lane carpark:

Donations of burnable stuff are welcome.  The party usually kicks off at about 19:00, but people will be around earlier to shift wood down to the beach so please lend a hand if you are able.

Remember to bring stuff to eat and drink, we'll have bbqs on the beach so if you would like to donate additional food all donations welcome!

Hope to see you all there!!

Gateway's hard drive has developed some errors, resulting in it being unable to read significant portions of the filesystem.

The hard drive has been swapped for another one (with no bad blocks, we checked!), and normal service has been resumed.

Total downtime was around quarter of an hour.

Gateway's power supply blew at 13:16 today, disconnecting SUCS from the outside world.
All connectivity was restored by 13:38.

Thanks to itsme, mistake, u1tramarine and Scorcher for the fast rebuild.

The SUCS Annual General Meeting will take place on Thursday, 4th of March at 6PM in the Robert Recorde room in Faraday Tower.

The Lightning Talks are back on Thursday 25th of Febuary at 6pm in the Robert Recorde room. If you would like to present a talk please email us at exec[AT]sucs[DOT]org this is so we have a rough idea about timings.

Hope to see you there

We will be having our first admin meeting of the year next Thursday (4^th February) at 6:00PM in the Robert Recorde room. Anybody interested in getting involved in the admin side of SUCS should come along.

We will also be having Lightning Talks and the SUCS AGM this term, on February the 25^th and March the 4^th respectively. More details on those closer the time.

Hey all,
Nominations are now closed for the 2010 SUCS Exec. As there are no contested roles we will not be holding a vote.

Next year's exec will be:

• President: Tom Lake (tswsl1989)
• Secretary: Jon Gordon (itsme)
• Treasurer: Ashley Morris (gandalftheginger)

There was no seconded Publicity Officer.

Congratulations and good luck for next year guys!

Chris Melvin, Returning Officer

The time has come to elect the new SUCS exec for 2010.

Nominations are now open, to nominate someone (or yourself) for a committee position email vote[AT]sucs[DOT]org saying who and for which position. Candidates must receive at least 2 nominations to stand for a position.

The SUCS exec consists of:

• President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
• Treasurer: Deals with the society\\\'s accounts, and general financial administration.
• Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
• Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

These positions are all non-technical, for more information on getting involved with SUCS admin email admin[AT]sucs[DOT]org. If there is more than one candidate for each position then a vote will be taken.

All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Sunday 29th November. Voting will then commence from 12 midnight on the morning of Monday 30th
November for a period of 1 week.


To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/Blogs/vote

The first talks of the year are on Thursday the 12th of November at 6pm in the Robert Recorde Room in Faraday.

Lightning Talks are a great way to practice public speaking and also share with other people a topic you enjoy doing or enjoy studying!

Previous talks can be found on our website here: http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

They tend to be 5-10 minutes long and give other members a brief glimpse into your topic of interest.

If you intend to do a talk please email us at exec@sucs.org with a title so we have some sort of idea on topics being discussed.

Many of you have found our talker Milliways, however many more of you have yet to pop in and say hello to our alumni and other members of the society. They have a wealth of knowledge to share with you all! You can find more details about Milliways on our website : https://sucs.org/Community/Milliways

Also this is just a general reminder about our Friday socials in JCs at 1pm on the Just Coffee side, we're usually there for at least an hour talking about day to day things as well as discussing future SUCS events!

Silver went down about 1845, and was rebooted shortly afterwards, we apologise for the inconvenience.

Due to the shuffling in the room today the door computer has had to be unplugged. As a consequence the electronic lock isn't working until someone comes along with a key tomorrow. Apologies for any inconvenience.

All SUCS services will be unavailable for around 2 hours on Tuesday the 15th September, starting at Midday

This is so that Silver, Gateway and Caesium can be moved into the rack, along with the UPS

Any email sent to your SUCS account during this period will be held on our backup mail server and delivered when services are back online.

Milliways is available on outpost during the outage. SSH to outpost.sucs.org, username bbs, password bbs
You will need to provide your Milliways username and password when you login.

For twitter users, follow @sucsexec for updates. Updates will also be posted to Milliways on outpost.

With September around the corner, SUCS is looking for new members. We offer website hosting, mailing lists, space for blogs and 24/7 access to our own computer room. We're also an active society, with regular social events and an online chat area, Milliways, frequented by current and former students.

If you know of a society looking for mailing lists and website hosting, or a friend who wants somewhere secure to host their blog or website, let them know!

If you are interested in what we offer please come and chat with us on Milliways or email joinus@sucs.org for further details

Silver was rebooted for a routine upgrade at 10:24 this morning.
Unfortunately, a bug in the update meant that services were unavailable for around 2 hours.

All services should be running normally again.

The power cable was unexpectedly removed from silver for about 10 minutes, I apologise and everything seems to be back normally.

Silver was restarted for a routine kernel update at 18:20
All services appear to have come back normally.

It's that time of year again: The annual SUCS beach party will be held on Saturday June 6th on the beach near the Sketty Lane carpark:

Donations of burnable stuff are welcome.  The party usually kicks off at about 19:00, but people will be around earlier to shift wood down to the beach so please lend a hand if you are able.

Remember to bring stuff to eat and drink, we'll have bbqs on the beach so if you would like to donate additional food all donations welcome!

Hope to see you all there!!

Following the replacement of silver, our primary server, we believe that everything is now back up and running. If you discover anything amiss, please email admin {at} sucs [dot] org or pop into Milliways to let us know.

Due to hardware failure, SUCS' primary server, known as silver, has been replaced earlier than planned. Consequently, a number of services are currently unavailable.

Please bear with us...

For details of known issues and what we believe is now working correctly, please see below:

Silver went offline unexpectedly overnight (Friday March 13th)
Normal services were resumed around 9:15 this morning

There was also a small period of downtime on the 19th

SUCS have a number of events still planned for this term, so here are some dates for your diary.

The SUCS AGM will be on the 17th of March 2009 in the Robert Recorde Room in the Faraday Building at 6pm.

If anyone is interested in a Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory LAN for the first weekend back after half term (April 25th/26th),  please give games[at]sucs[dot]org an email so we can start organising which room would be adequate.  There is the possibility of hiring out screens from us on a first come first serve basis (while stocks last).

SUCS@JCs friday socials from 1pm are still active so if you want to come and meet up with some of us you can see us on the Just Coffee Side.

We've got another round of lightning talks on hand starting at 6pm in the Robert Recorde Room.  So if you're interested in doing a Lightning Talk please email exec[at]sucs[dot]org so we can create a schedule.  If you predict on being late and would still like to do a talk please let us know and we'll put you later on the list.  All are welcome, members and non-members alike.

We're planning on doing a group outing to Vue Cinema to go and watch the Comic Book Adaptation Film of WATCHMEN.  If you're interested in coming along please give exec[at]sucs[dot]org an email.  Tickets should be £4.50 or less depending on the number of people who come.  All are welcome.

Silver fell over at about 13:10, we apologise for the inconvenience.

A problem with the campus network cut the link between the SUCS room and the rest of the world around 4pm on the 14th.

This was fixed by LIS around 10:30am this morning (the 15th) and access to all SUCS services was restored shortly after midday.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

The voting for next years executive committee has finished, the results are as follows.

• President: eclipse
• Publicity: Foshjedi2004
• Treasurer: tswsl1989
• Secretary: insacuri

Full counts are available here: https://sucs.org/Vote
Well done again to next years committee, and have a good christmas holiday.

The voting for the 2009 SUCS exec has begun.

Go Here: https://sucs.org/Vote to vote.

Voting ends midnight Sunday the 7th of December.

The nominations for next year's committee have now closed. The Candidates are as follows:

• President - Chris Melvin (foshjedi2004), Tim Clark (eclipse)
• Treasurer - Rhodri Curnow (mistake), Tom Lake (tswsl1989)
• Publicity - Chris Melvin (foshjedi2004)
• Secretary - Adam Mann (insacuri)

Voting will commence on Monday 1st December.

The time has come to elect the new SUCS exec for 2009.

Nominations are now open, to nominate someone (or yourself) for a committee position email vote[AT]sucs[DOT]org saying who and for which position. Candidates must receive at least 2 nominations to stand for a position.

The SUCS exec consists of:

• President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
• Treasurer: Deals with the society's accounts, and general financial administration.
• Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
• Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

These positions are all non-technical, for more information on getting involved with SUCS admin email admin[AT]sucs[DOT]org. If there is more than one candidate for each position then a vote will be taken.

All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Friday 28th November. Voting will then commence from 12 midnight on the morning of Monday 1st December. Reminders and more details will follow throughout the election process.

To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/Blogs/vote

We have put together a set of tools to make it easier to access SUCS services from your own computer. Note that you don't have to use the SUCS Tools to use our services - they're just a time-saving way to do so.

More details are available in SUCS Help.

Hello all! The SUCS Halloween party will be hosted in the Bryn-y-mor pub and then Sin City this year as our usual venue, Que Pasa, has shut down :(

The Party starts in the Bryn-y-mor pub at 8pm on Friday 31st October. If anyone doesn't know where it is, here's a map.
Then we'll be moving on to Sin City at about 10pm to party until morning!

If you're on Facebook and haven't already been invited through there, you can view the event here.

Invite all your friends because this year is the society's 20th Birthday so we want this to be a big one!

ALSO! We'll be having a bash with Sci-fi, Anime and RolePlay too! This will be on Thursday 30th October, starting at 7:30 at Milkwood Jam on Plymouth Street. There will be a £3 entry charge on the door and all money will go towards paying for the event. Any left over will be divided between the societies.

See you all there!

We are holding our first admin meeting of the year on Wednesday 22nd October at 6:00PM in the SUCS room. Anybody interested in getting involved in the admin side of SUCS should come along. If you have something you would like to raise but cant make it on the day please email admin {at} sucs.org.

On Thursday the 16th of October, we will be holding another awesome Lightning Talks session. It will be at 6pm in the Robert Recorde Room (in the Faraday building). If you have never been to a session, Lightning talks are short 10 minute talks given by SUCS members on any subject that interests them. We already have several confirmed talkers, but there may be time on the night for additional speakers, so if you're interested in doing a talk yourself, please contact the exec on exec@sucs.org so that we have some idea of the number of people talking.

To find out more or watch some of our past lightning talks, visit https://sucs.org/Community/Talks

As some of you are busy at 1pm on Friday, we've decided to have another JC's social at 12pm on Monday. It will be in the quiet side of JC's coffee side) just look out for the people with laptops :) This will be in addition to the Friday social, but don't feel like you have to turn up to both!

 See you all there :)

Welcome Freshers and returning students to the Swansea University Computer Society for the beginning of the 20th anniversary of our society! The Computer society is for people with interests in computers, technology, gaming, etc, and offers a supportive and friendly environment (online and in real life!) for people to discuss these topics and learn from each other. We have a 24/7 access computer room located at the bottom of the Students' Union building, where you can hook up your laptops or use one of the desktop computers. We actively encourage our members to get involved with development and administration of the computers, programming and web development projects, whether you know a lot or not! We also hold weekly socials on Friday at 1pm in JC's, LAN events, talk sessions and party socials. Just £5 will get you membership for an entire year, which includes an account on our computer system, disk space, web space, an e-mail address, a blog, free printing (up to a reasonable limit), a jabber account and access to all of the events above.

For some reason known only to its self our gateway machine stoped dealing with traffic on its internal interface shortly after 01:35 this morning.

Our main server rebooted around 8:20 this morning.

Both fixed at 08:40 this morning. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Due to ongoing electrical upgrades around campus on Sunday the 14^th of September the SUCS room will be without power for most of the day. All services will be unavailable during this period.

Due to ongoing electrical upgrades around campus the main campus machine room will be without power on Saturday the 23^rd August.

To prepare for this LIS are shutting down the computing services they run at 5pm on Friday (22^nd August).

Whilst this work isn't theoretically meant to affect the campus network (and thus SUCS) be prepared for interruptions.

Further problems were experienced on the evening of Tuesday 1st July on the link between Swansea and LINX. This caused intermittent connectivity issues between 18:41 and 19:10.

Don't forget that an alternative version of Milliways is available by making an ssh connection to bbs@outpost.sucs.org - the password is "bbs".

There have been network problems on the link between Wales (SWMAN) and England(JA.net)

• Monday 16th between 15:35 and 16:00
• Tuesday 17th between 8:30 and 8:50

The Beach Party was a roaring success - as I type, there are still people on the beach enjoying the early morning sunshine! Photos and video from this year's event can be found at the bottom of the Parties Page on SUCS@20. If you have any photos from the beach party, please add a link to the SUCS@20 wiki.

As you may have noticed, the university's network is having problems, this is due to an outage in JANET. Therefore people connecting from outside the university may experience slow connections to SUCS.

It's that time of year again: The annual SUCS beach party will be held on Saturday June 7th on the beach near the Sketty Lane carpark:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.605&mlon=-3.983&zoom=16

Donations of burnable stuff are welcome. The party usually kicks off at about 19:00, but people will be around earlier to shift wood down to the beach so please lend a hand if you are able.

Remember to bring stuff to eat and drink, and if we're lucky we will convince Sits to do his usual good job of running a BBQ, so BBQable food donations are welcome.

You can now find the new Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' on our ftp site - ftp://sucs.org

This term we are holding more events to give you all some breaks from exams and work. The dates for the next LAN event, lightning talks and the beach party have now been set. Read on for more…

The next LAN event is set for the Saturday 3^rd May in Dining Room C from 11am - 11pm, with setup from 10am, drop by and play some games. It's free for SUCS members and £1 in advance or £2 on the door for non-members. For more information visit: http://sucs.org/Games/LAN%20Events

We also have the date for our next set of lightning talks. They will be on Thursday 8^th May at 6pm in the Robert Recorde Room (Faraday Building). Come by and watch them - it's always interesting and fun, or if you're feeling brave, give one yourself! For videos of previous talks, visit: http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

And finally the beach party date has been set for Saturday 7^th June (the Saturday after exams finish). Put it in on your calendar, more details closer to the time.

Hope to see you all there.

Silver had kernel problems at 15:20 and was taken down shortly afterwards. As the problem was filesystem related, we fscked everything before we brought silver back up (just in case).

 Normal service was resumed around 17:40.

 Thanks to Tim (eclipse) for helping to get things running again.

We will be holding an Annual General Meeting this Wednesday (12th March) at 5pm in the Robert Recorde Room, Faraday building.

This is an opportunity for you to put your ideas to the rest of the society, as well as giving us your comments/complaints!

We hope to see you all there!

There were two short periods of downtime on Friday (12:20 -> 12:30 and 13:05 -> 13:20) as we performed maintenance on the Uninterruptible Power Supply which protects our servers.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We've got a LAN Event planned for Saturday 23rd February in Dining Room C from 10am - 5pm with setup of the room from 9am for anyone that wants to come out and help.

Free for SUCS members, £1 in advance or £2 on the door for non SUCS members.

The full list of games that may make an appearance can be found here:  http://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=183

The full list of things to bring can be seen here: http://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=184

There was a short outage at around 08:40 today due to a power problem, resulting in Silver shutting down cleanly.  A further reboot will be required later today.

We are holding another of our famous lightning talks this week on Thursday 7th February at 18:00 in the Robert Recorde Room (Faraday Building). These are when our members do short 10 minute talks on topics that may be of interest to other members. We already have several confirmed talkers, but there may be time on the night for additional speakers, so if you're interested in doing a talk yourself, please contact the exec on exec at sucs dot org so that we have some idea of the number of people talking.

To find out more or watch some of our past lightning talks, visit:
https://sucs.org/Community/Talks

See you there!

During refreshers week we are opening our game server to all Swansea University students. For more information on what games we have and when we will be playing them go to http://sucs.org/Games. To jump right in and start playing go to http://games.sucs.org/auth.

We've had a few emails recently from people who've spotted the society's name mentioned in an online promotional game for the forthcoming film, ‘Untraceable’.

We were as surprised as players of the game to see this name check, as we have no affiliation with Sony Pictures. So, to quench your thirst for answers, allow us to explain a little.

The game is using a screen shot of a computer running an old version of the Linux operating system kernel. One of our life members, Alan Cox, is a Linux developer and up until version 2.5.66 of Linux, our name appeared in the boot messages because he named his version of some networking code after us. So you would have seen something like:

Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039

Since version 2.5.67 the boot message has been absent from the Linux start up because they were reducing the amount of ‘name checks’ in the boot messages but you can still find a reference to us in the code comments of net/socket.c

This won't help you win the game but we hope you found it interesting :-)

The election is now officially over and we have a clear winner for each position.

President: Grant James (grant)
Secretary: Tim Clark (eclipse)
Treasurer: Nicholas Corlett (worldinsideme)
Publicity Officer: Jocelyn Konrad-Lee (kyara)

A full vote count is available here: http://sucs.org/vote/results.psp

Congratulations to our 2008 executive committee! Have a great year, folks :-) 

As of midnight tonight (00:00 Monday 26th November, 2007), the online polling station for the 2008 executive committee votes will be active and will remain so for one week until midnight of next Sunday (00:00 Monday 3rd December 2007).

Please cast your votes here: https://sucs.org/vote/

Any queries/issues to vote[at]sucs.org.

Once again, it's time for SUCS to come under new leadership. It's election time! If there is someone you would like to see on the committee, or you would ike to nominate yourself, please send an email to vote at sucs.org stating who you want to nominate and for what post. Candidates must receive nominations from 2 or more SUCS members (this can include themselves) to be accepted.

The positions available on the SUCS executive are:

• President: Figurehead of the Society, and general administration.
• Treasurer: Deals with the society's accounts, and general financial administration.
• Secretary: Deals with paperwork, and takes minutes during meetings.
• Publicity Officer: Deals with posters and other publicity materials, and generally publicises the society.

(Note: These positions are Non-Technical - if you would like to be involved with system administration, please send an e-mail to admin at sucs.org)

If there is more than one candidate for each position, it will be taken to a vote. All nominations must be submitted by 12 noon on Friday 23rd November. The election itself should begin on Monday 26th November (but we'll tell you closer to the time).

To keep up-to-date with election news and to read candidate manifestos, visit the Election Blog, at: http://sucs.org/blogs/vote

Something seems to have killed off several of our machines, the SUCS Gateway machine among them.

I've used thorium as a replacement gateway machine to get us back on-line for now.

The next SUCS Talks will be taking place next Wednesday, 7th November, at 5pm in the Robert Recorde room in the Computer Science department, in the Faraday tower. If you don't know how to get there, some of us will be gathering in the SUCS room beforehand, so we can wander over together. :-)

A SUCS Talks evening is a fantastic way to spend time with your fellow SUCS members, and learn from them/impart your knowledge to them/both. Any SUCS member can do a 10 minute talk on a geeky/computer-related topic of their choice. Please come along! For a flavour of previous talks, please visit: http://sucs.org/Community/Talks (I'm afraid the second lot of talks still aren't online as of writing, as I still haven't got round to editing/uploading them).

Take a look at the old talks (http://sucs.org/Community/Talks for the first session, and http://sucs.org/uri/2T for the second) for an idea of previous talk topics. And it's still not too late to take part - in fact, we need more speakers! If you have an idea for something you might like to talk about, e-mail us at exec at sucs.org and let us know! SUCS Talks are a great way to practice public speaking, among friends in an informal atmosphere. We'd especially like to see some brave first years give it a go!

Thanks, and hope to see you there,

Frosty

There will be a disruption to campus network access on Tuesday October 30th between 7am and 9am

This is due to essential upgrades to the LIS networking equipment.

Sorry we're so late in getting the word out about this but we are going back to Que Pasa on Wind St. for Halloween this year on Wednesday 31st of October (so, that would actually be Halloween ;)) at around 8pm, since everyone had so much fun last year (see here: https://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=85 and here: https://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=64 ).

It's 2 for 1 on cocktails as always, and it's a Wednesday so apparently other drinks will be cheap too. Fancy dress is obviously optional but part of the fun of Halloween is seeing what everyone comes dressed as ;)

Also, you're welcome to bring a non-SUCS friend along if you haven't met any Real Life™ SUCS members yet :) Better yet, get them to join too :P

We have a new SSL certificate for our web and mail servers, which you should accept if it has the following details.

Fingerprints
SHA1 - 31:B5:CF:00:38:67:57:32:9D:7C:34:15:AB:A3:5F:31:26:48:A1:FC
MD5  - 45:0D:66:16:75:4F:86:0D:D9:3B:3E:64:43:64:84:AF

The campus network was intermittently available between Saturday 19:00 and Sunday 14:30.

All SUCS services were intermittently avalible from the outside world during this time.

The campus network was down from about 5:30am until around 7am this morning due to "a major loss of electrical power" to the LIS machine room.

All SUCS services were unavailable from the outside world during this time.

The Swansea University Computer Society welcomes all 2007 Freshers (and returning members)! SUCS is a society for anyone with even the smallest interest in computers, technology, science, etc. and offers a friendly environment for people to interact with others and to learn from one another (be that over the internet or in real life). SUCS has a small computer room on the bottom floor of the Students' Union building which SUCS members can use 24/7, and we encourage members to become active in the development and administration of those systems and to get involved with programming and web development projects. We also have regular meet-ups, parties, LAN gaming events, talk sessions and more!

If you would like to join the society, you can fill in the form on the website (although we need to collect payment before we can create your account), you can drop into the room, and we can be found in term-time in JC's (coffee end) after 13:00 on Fridays. All you need to join is to be a member of the Swansea University Students' Union and £5, which gets you membership for the entire year (including an account on our computer system, disk space, web space, an e-mail address, a blog, free printing (up to a reasonable limit) and all the things mentioned above)!

We hope to hear from you soon!

Or it will be in 2008, so we're looking for all sorts of information from all of our members: former, old and new.

We would like your help collecting anything about the history of the society, photos from over its 20 years and any anecdotes from your time in the society.

Any useful nuggets of information that you send us will be catalogued on the SUCS@20 website at: http://twenty.sucs.org

If you have anything, please send it to this e-mail address: twenty@sucs.org .

Thanks :)

We have a new mailing list for the discussion of SUCS projects. If you're interested in learning new skills this summer whilst working on things to benefit the society, you can join the mailing list here http://lists.sucs.org/mailman/listinfo/devel . 

We'd especially welcome members new to SUCS projects to take part in building a portal for university societies. If you'd like to know more about this or the other things going on in SUCS this summer, just sign up to the list and introduce yourself :-)

Due to a buggy backup system using up too much disk space, nightly backups of users home directories have been disabled while we implement a more stable system. Users are (as normal) advised to make their own backups of any important files they might miss.

The Beach Party went very well! Thank you to everyone who helped out by collecting wood, taking wood to the beach, securing our spot, bringing food, cooking the food and coming (especially everyone who travelled so far to get here) and having fun :)

This year saw the return of the Golden Diskette Awards and the winners were:

Our Top Bananas for 2007:

• Graham Cole (chckens) for the Most Bananas this year
• James Frost (frosty) for the Second Most Bananas this year
• Andy Price (welshbyte) for the Third Most Bananas this year

We also had:

• Most Helpful Millywaysian Award - Andy Price
• Best/Most Annoying Soundeffects - Chris Elsmore (elsmorian)
• Hostess With The Mostess - Sara Howes (sazzle)
• We're Glad You're Not Leaving Yet - Chris Jones (rollercow)
• Chaos Technician - Pete Berry (pwb)
• Sitsofe Wheeler SCSI Terminator Award For Most Promising Newcomer - Kristian Knevitt (loki)

Pics from the party are being tracked in this thread: https://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?pid=910#p910 . Don't forget to add links to yours too :).

Also, "Hi and thanks for coming!" to our new friends in Loughborough Computer Society (LSUCS). We hope you had a good time too :).

See you all next year!

When: Saturday 9th June, from 7pm
Where: http://sucs.org/uri/1J (see e-mail for full directions)
Bring: Please bring however much food and drink you're likely to need. There'll be some barbeques happening too, so we we should be able to cook things. Also, if you have any burnable wood, it might be quite handy.
Please check your mail for more information!

Apologies, silver unexpectedly rebooted after a UPS Battery test. It seems the battery is dead.

The SUCS room is long due for a spring clean, so we've put together a list of all the old components we have that we don't want anymore.

See http://sucs.org/Community/Forum/viewtopic.php?id=137 for more information.

The 2nd SUCS Lightning Talks event will be taking place Tuesday 15th March, at 6pm in Kier Hardie, Room 248! Please come along!

Currently confirmed talks:
- Ian Tucker: "How I can hear you typing over the internet"
- Chris Jones: "Hiking+Geek"
- Chris Elsmore: "Processor and Semiconductor Technology" (topic
subject to change)
- Nicholas Corlett: "A Beginner's Guide to UNIX Commands - Part 2"
- Will Blackstock: "Top 10 Fictional Computers"
- James Frost: Topic to be confirmed
- Sean Handley: Topic to be confirmed
- Andy Price: Topic to be confirmed

And there's still time to get involved! If you've got something you want to talk
about then you're welcome to do so - it'd be best if you could let
us know in advance, by e-mail (exec@sucs.org).

The connection between the room and the rest of campus went down at 12:08:14 and returned at 12:29:48. This was caused by a fault with the switch on the LIS operated network we connect to.

There have been intermittent connectivity issues in the LIS-operated network infrastructure throughout the day starting at just after 9am on the 3rd, causing disruption to SUCS services.

We are told that LIS are infact trying to improve network resilance, and these works are causing the problems.

The minutes for this year's SUCS AGM are now available on the SUCS website at: http://sucs.org/About/AGM-2007-03-13

Videos of the talks given at the (extremely successful) first SUCS Talks session are now being added to the SUCS website. You can find them at: http://sucs.org/Community/Talks

There will be a short delay before the remaining videos appear, however, as Frosty left the charger for his video camera in Swansea when he went home for Easter. Unfortunately, it has now run out of battery so he can't get them off the tape until he returns. Keep an eye on the page, though, as they'll appear in the not-too-distant future.

There was a campus-wide network outage between approximately 6:30am and 11am today due to a hardware fault with a router operated by LIS.

There is now a backup Milliways available for use during network outages.

To connect, ssh bbs@sucs.opendium.net using the password "bbs". Once the Milliways login screen appears, use your normal Milliways login credentials (the user database is regularly synchronised from the one on Silver). 

We've started to run a nightly backup to a machine kindly hosted by the Computer Science dept.

You can find daily snapshots of your home directory within /backup.

We make no guarantees about this service! Make your own backups!

All the desktops have now been upgraded to Fedora Core 6. Thanks to all those that helped out!

If you have any ssh key problems just remove the problem entry from your .ssh/known_hosts file, we've set up the system so they should not  be required.

As always, if you encounter any problems or want any software installed, get in touch with admin [at] sucs [dot] org, or ask in Milliways 

The University's Internet connection was down for just over 24 hours, coming back at around 18:40 on 11/02/2007.

During that time, SUCS was not available to the outside world and this will mean that any email sent to SUCS users during that period will have been delayed. Mail will appear in inboxes as remote servers reattempt delivery over the course of the next day.

The votes are in and a new executive committee has been chosen!

Kat Meyrick (saya) will be president.
Chris Elsmore (elsmorian) will be secretary.
James Frost (frosty) will be publicity officer.
Kristian Knevitt (loki) will be treasurer.

Congratulations to our new executive committee!

Here are some photos from our excellent Halloween party!

• davea's photos - http://minus-zero.org/gallery/SUCS%20Halloween%20Party%202006
• talyn256's photos - http://sucs.org/uri/s
  

It's going to be this Tuesday, the 31st October, at Que Pasa (a cocktail bar) on Wind street. We've also invited Manga & Anime society and the Sci-Fi Soc along to join in.

• Free food for all members!
• Our own private section of the Que Pasa, just for us to use!
• Que Pasa loyalty cards for all members!*
• Halloween games!
• A live band!
• Voluntary fancy dress! (yay!)
  

So come, one and all, to the SUCS+SUMA+SciFi Halloween Party! You can bring a guest, if you'd like to :-)

If you want to discuss the party/ask questions, there's a thread on our forum at: http://sucs.org/uri/q and if you'd like to know where Que Pasa is, there's a map here: http://sucs.org/uri/r

See you there! (Que Pasa, 7:30pm, Tuesday 31st October)

Our FTP server now only accepts anonymous connections. This means that users are no longer in danger of sending their passwords in plain text across the Internet.

Users who previously used FTP to access their files should now use a more secure method to access them such as SFTP, WebDav, rsync, etc. You can find out more about how to access your files in the Knowledge section of the website.

SUCS' Jabber server is back up (for the technically minded, we're now using Ejabberd).

There are a few changes you need to be aware of:

• You now need to log in using TLS, plain text auth, and your SUCS username and password.
• All members can connect now - there's no need to register.
• Account registration is disabled. Hence, only members can log in now.

As existing members will have noticed, we have created a new visual identity to go with the new SUCS logo.  At the same time, we've taken the opportunity to reorganise the structure of the site and introduce some new features.

You can now log onto the site using your SUCS username and password. It will always submit your details securely using HTTPS even if you enter your details on a page that wasn't loaded securely. Some tools (e.g. WebMail) still require you to log into them separately, but our long term aim is to allow you to log in once to access all the web-based tools SUCS offers.

The Computer Society welcomes all Swansea freshers (and returning students)!

As usual, we'll be at the freshers' fayre this year to answer any questions you may have.

If we miss you at the fayre, then please come meet us at a social. We're usually in the quiet side of JC's from about 1pm on Fridays :-)

Have a great year!