We'd like to have 2 new Linux systems. See our goals for an explanation of why we're building new systems. We'd like to have 2 systems to provide an extra level of redundancy.

We'd been talking about building some new systems for a long time. Carl and Craig finally decided that it was time to actually do something about it instead of talking about it. So they're heading up this project. Lots of others have helped. (TODO: Get list of people who helped from Stan.)

The primary (larger) system was to be called bud. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get Debian to play nice with the hardware. Our secondary system is called budlight. Currently, that's our only system, so it's effectively the primary.

Budlight is actually a loaner system, courtesy of Craig Buchek. We're not sure what we'll replace it with at this point. We may just buy a replacement system for Craig and use the current system. We may build new systems from components, or we may buy a used server off eBay.

We have a history of naming our systems after Anheuser-Busch products. I (Craig) have no idea when or why that started, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I've worked at A-B for the past 4 years — SLUUG has been using the names before I was a SLUUG member, and before I ever worked at A-B. Of course, I did push to keep the tradition and selected the names of these 2 systems…

Like most volunteer organizations, those who volunteer and do the work get to make the decisions. However, we tend to work by consensus. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's 100% agreement — it just means that the person doing the work generally asks for advice before doing something, because somebody else will probably have to support the program in the future.

If you need to get access to the system(s), please contact one of the project leaders: Craig Buchek or Carl Fitch.

We chose Debian, because most of our members felt that Debian was most appropriate for a server OS. We ran several polls at our meetings over the previous several months. Debian was the clear leader in recommended server-based Linux distributions, and was also the most familiar Linux distro to our members. In fact, it was the most familiar of all UNIX / POSIX systems among our users. Even many of us who are not familiar with Debian believed that it was the appropriate choice for our group.

We chose to go with Debian 3.1 (sarge) even though it has not yet been released. We installed a release candidate dated from late January 2005. Release seems to be pretty close, so it should be fairly stable. We felt that Debian 3.0 was too old for us to install at this point in time, as we'd then want to upgrade to 3.1 shortly after.