Office space

In September 2013, VTLUUG acquired an office in 358 Whittemore Hall after several months of effort to more effectively directly support Linux use on campus.

Contents

Purpose

Our office is intended to serve several purposes:

• Holding office hours several times per week to provide technical support and installation help
• Supporting students in the growing number of courses which require Linux and Unix usage
• Storage for VTLUUG property other than networking/server infrastructure (installfest supplies, Tux, banners, etc). Previously these were in the CVL and officers' apartments
• Lending library of technical books (possibly a branch of the Telnor Institute Libraries)
• Opportunity to socialize with VTLUUG members
• Public terminals with LDAP/Kerberos auth (maybe)

Office infrastructure

The office came with these items from the ECE department:

• 2 desks
• 2 chairs
• 1 CNS port
• 2 workstations and monitors/keyboards/mice
• Wall shelving

Items needed

VTLUUG could use the following items to make the office into more of a lounge area:

• Computer speakers
• Large HDDs (>= 1 TB) for a music server
• VT220-like hardware terminals
• Minifridge (power-permitting, there's one in the server room we could potentially acquire)
• Coffee maker (there's one in the CVL we can take)
• Router (OpenBSD) and maybe an OpenWRT WAP as well

Project ideas

• Music server - mpd/ncmpcpp/beets/icecast/NFS share on spare poweredge tower
• Home automation stuff - SSRs/raspberry pi/buses (I2C or CAN)/HTCPCP
• Door auth system - electric fail-secure door strike, magstripe reader or RFID
• Redundant networking - run ethernet to our switch in the CVL and put our CNS ports in failover. If a router/port fails, VMs can get rerouted.

Future expansion

If additional space is needed, we could look into getting a satellite office through UUSA in Squires or through another department. Currently, we will be focusing on making the most use out of our current office. This section contains mainly historical information that was preserved from when we were intially trying to acquire an office.

Potential locations

During the initial acquisition of office space, VTLUUG looked into several potential locations, including:

• Whittemore Hall - has 100Mbps CNS ports but hardly any spare IPv4s. SEC and IEEE have offices on the 3rd floor, and unallocated space may be available as a radio lab recently moved to the CRC. Exterior doors are locked after 10pm and on weekends to everyone except ECE students, but we can prevent them from locking from the inside. Potentially hard to find for freshmen. We could easily run Ethernet to our rack and/or the darknet from here.
  • The SEC has two offices, which is two more than they need.
  • WHIT 326 appears empty and is near all the student organization rooms.
  • The CVL is apparently being converted to a server room
• Durham Hall - Exterior doors are also locked at night and on weekends except to ECE students.
  • Room 232 is marked "student society" on the floorplans but may not be used. - Found to belong to the Institute of Industrial Engineers. This is approximately across the hall from our weekly meeting location.
• Squires Student Center - highest concentration of student organization offices, including WUVT and VTARA, so would be easier to get an office here. Building has enforced closing times (~12am?) but is open on weekends. After hours member access would almost certainly be impossible, as we would not be located in the media wing. Contact is Scott Reed (sreed@vt.edu) / 540-231-5431 / 225 Squires.
• McBryde Hall - not behind Burruss router
• Torgersen Hall - open 24/7, gigabit connectivity

Desired features

Desired features of the office space:

• CNS port available (preferably with static IPs available for us)
• Easy for people to find
• Exterior doors open to everyone on weekends
• After-hours access for officers, etc
• Behind bur-6509-1.vl702.cns.vt.edu so we can use our IP allocations (this may be harder than we originally thought, as CNS might use VLANs to further restrict subnets to individual buildings)

Rationale

Why we needed an office:

• Despite the lack of official university support for alternative operating systems, there is an ever-growing number of Linux and Unix users and CS and ECE courses which require Linux.
• Over our 15 year history, VTLUUG has provided a number of services to the campus community including open-source software mirrors, detailed OpenStreetMap data for Blacksburg, shell accounts and a Virginia Tech wiki.
• VTLUUG would like to obtain dedicated space in order to hold office hours several times per week to provide technical support and installation help, as well as small group hands-on tutorials that can not be effectively accomodated during our weekly meetings.