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So this past week has been a rather eventful one. A lot of progress has been made in getting our service online!

Firstly, the whole Freeside Cluster was rebuilt over the weekend, due to an issue with our SAN causing huge IO Wait on one of our nodes. It was determined the best way to repair this was to reimage, but this caused further issues with the quorum on the servers. In the end, we decided the best plan of action was to wipe everything and start again.

Over the weekend, we were visited by a number of potential students during the University's Applicant Day. It was great to meet an array of potential students, and answer some of their questions on the Linux platform and what we do. We may have some potential members for next year! Freeside Cluster

Next up, we were pleased to receive donations of a Coffee Machine and a Fridge for Freeside. As you may or may not know, the IT Industry functions on Coffee and Soft Drinks. Our Tassimo Coffee Machine makes a great addition to the window ledge of our Office, and the Fridge is already full of Soft Drinks for the team. The Computer Science department were kind enough to donate some branded mugs to us for us to use with our new coffee machine, so many thanks to them. Coffee Machine

Also this week, we've been working hard to refine our Standard Image that will be used on all of the hardware in our cluster, and on our Critical Services. We're building in security and centralized User Management services to allow us to provide a consistent and easy to manage platform.

Finally, we managed to fundraise a significant amount among the team this week, and order 15 new Dell Poweredge Servers from eBay. These servers are a step up from our current equipment, and came at a very low cost to us. We hope to get these added to our cluster over Easter, before launching our services some time in the next Semester!

Overall, it's been a busy week of meeting new people and solving new challenges. We hope you have a great week, and I'm sure we will plenty busy over the next seven days!