Home Unix Machine Brisbane User Group
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The Home Unix Machine - Brisbane User Group, also known as HUMBUG, was the first non-commercial user group based in Brisbane to focus on Unix in all of its variations, and one of the earliest Linux user groups in Australia. It was founded on September 8, 1995 with fourteen members and has always had its regular meetings at the University of Queensland, St Lucia Campus. Meetings were initially monthly (until January 1996), then bi-monthly and finally fortnightly.
HUMBUG is unusual among modern computer user groups in encouraging users to bring their systems to meetings in large numbers. Since its first meeting (which had only three computers) each meeting has involved the construction and eventual removal of a LAN which has in some cases included 50 computers or more. Before the widespread adoption of UTP this often involved complex debugging of BNC related network issues.
Meetings tend to be a combination of social event and Unix tutorial with talks on various aspects of Unix also taking place. The group has a culture of encouraging good system administration skills among members, such as keeping the use of root privileges to a minimum and encouraging the use of utilities such as sudo and ssh in preference to less secure alternatives.
Meetings typically go for approximately 10 hours (3pm-1am) as of 2005 although many meetings in the past have gone for much longer. One meeting that started on time at 3pm did not actually close until after 8am the following morning.
When Jon "maddog" Hall visited HUMBUG in the mid 1990s, as well as offering praise, he called it "unique".
Humbugs (boiled mint candies) are sometimes given away at meetings.
HUMBUG has hosted its own mailing lists since December 1995, as well as hosting the archives for the Aussie ISP mailing list from October 29, 1996, an important forum for Australian ISP professionals and staff to discuss industry relevant issues. The group hosted the third national Linux and Open Source conference in Brisbane, Queensland between February 6 and February 9, 2002.
