Funding

VTLUUG does not charge membership dues and is therefore entirely dependent on university funding and hardware donations to support the needs of its members and the VT community.

For departments with surplus property donations, the VT Inventory Update Form must be completed in order to officially transfer items to VTLUUG through the ECE department. The new location of the items can be marked as 432 Whittemore Hall.

We have a few options for obtaining funding:

• SEC - gives money to engineering design organizations. Requires meeting attendance and E-week participation.
• Student Budget Board - gives money for event hosting and possibly conference travel via reimbursement.
• ECE department - have obtained surplus servers in the past this way. Can also occasionally get cables, etc if we ask nicely. Probably won't directly fund VTLUUG.
• Corporate sponsorship - have done this with O'Reilly, Fedora, Facebook, etc in the past for food and prizes at meetings/tech talks/installfests.

Infrastructure upgrades needed

• Rackmount servers, especially those which support virtualization
• Hard drives (RAID boxes especially) for home directories and additional distros for the mirror
• Raspberry Pis (for a Beowulf Cluster?)
• Office space
  • When we get an office, we could use some hardware terminals because GUIs are unnecessary

In the future, we may also need departments to donate rack space with IPv4 address allocations, as the building we currently use has almost run out of spare IP addresses. This could be helped by the acquisition of a vt.edu subdomain such as luug.vt.edu.

Cable management stuff needed

Our rack is currently cablefail. We could really use:

• Zipties - tons and various sizes
• Velcro cable ties
• Patch cables
• Labelmaker tape
• Rack hardware
• Dell rails (that can fit non-dell servers)
• Power strips, extension cords, etc
• Ethernet connectors

Items for various projects planned

• RFID stuff:
  • ProxMark III
  • Touchatag reader
• Darknet
  • Bulk ethernet cable and termination equipment
  • 900 MHz antennae

Conference, event funding

This a list of things we want the Student Budget Board or RSO Budget Board to fund:

• Southeast Linux Fest
• Conleycon
• Installfest
  • Food
  • Install server
  • Hard drives
• OpenStreetMap day (if that's still around)
• USENIX Security Symposium