WLUG Committee Meeting

21 July 2004

Meeting Minutes

Meeting opened at 7:17pm.

Present: Daniel, Craig B, John, Jamie, Greig, Phil, Perry
Absent: Craig M
Apologies: Matt

1. Minutes from previous meeting

Motion: that the minutes are a true and accurate record of the previous meeting

Moved: Daniel
Seconded: Phil

Motion passed

2. Treasurer's Report

Due to the absence of the treasurer, no report was presented.

3. Correspondence

• The LegislatingAgainstSpam document was finished and submitted to the government.
• O'Reilly have asked us to provide more reviews of the books we are donated by them.

4. Dick Smith Open Day

A report of the recent Dick Smith Powerhouse computing day, attended by WLUG members, was written by Gavin Denby and read by the group.

Suggestions for future events:

• more interactive stuff (such as a presentation, possibly with a voice soundtrack, running for people to watch)
• more co-ordination with staff, so they know what we can and can't do

5. Taxation

The IR254 booklet which explains incorporated societies becoming tax exempt is out of print, pending law changes. We are (privately) in touch with an accountant who will try and assist us with this matter. When possible, this matter will be turned over to the Treasurer.

6. Mailing list AUP

The committee decided to have the mailing list automatically send out a monthly post with "acceptable use" guidelines and administration information. Greig will take points fom the advocacy guides he recently posted and submit this to the committee.

7. Supported WLUG distribution

There is not a single Linux distribution that every WLUG member uses, so we have to sometimes select a distribution to suggest to new Linux users.

On the monthly post to the mailing list we will link to the wiki page SelectingADistribution. This page (which is already full and well written, while still inviting edits) will maintain suggestions that the WLUG believe are sensible and will leave the user with a machine WLUG can assist with. We accept that some users in WLUG are involved with "minor" distributions but suggest that the best course of action is to suggest only major distributions for new users.

For upcoming installfests, we will continue to pick a distribution that we will provide media for, but will not discourage users from installing others.

8. General Business

Location for meetings

• Hamilton Gardens - too expensive
• Gateway Centre - Lindsay is to talk to centre staff and get back to Craig B.
• Performing Arts Centre - too expensive, facilities are not suitable
• University of Waikato Conference Services - have buildings available for $25/night, the best of which being MS4 (a prefab by the Management carpark) or $60/night (L6/L7, in the lecture block.) WLUG would meet the cost through subscriptions and gold coin donations at meetings attended by non members.

Next meeting topic

Linux Networking Security, a high level overview touching on NAT, Firewalling, VPNs, SSL, IPSec etc.

Follow ups from previous meeting

• Daniel to follow up 20/20 trust, possibly inviting them to our upcoming meeting.
• The reminder bot has been fixed, but some changes are still outstanding. (The CommitteeToDo page is to be automatically posted to the mailing list once a week, in order to prompt activity by committee members.)
• We are now in the Interwiki map for new PhpWiki installations.
• Apache is no longer dying, but we can't be sure the problem is solved unless a crash happens again, in which case we can be sure the problem is not solved!
• Changes to the charter need to be sent to the Companies Office; this will probably happen after the next AGM.

Meeting closed at 8:45.

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