Wheel Group

Wheel has been around for almost as long as the club has had computers, and its name probably comes from the default administrative group in UNIX wheel. At the time of writing (Feb 2019), there are 30 active members of the Wheel group and a further 34 who have not renewed their membership.

Wheel members have administrative access to all of UCC's systems, and are typically responsible for keeping everything running. Wheel members must abide by the Wheel Group Ethical Guidelines at all times, and a breach of those rules is considered extremely serious.

Traditionally, new wheel members have been invited into the group by a consensus of existing active wheel members, however if you are interested in joining then you may send an email to Wheel and the Committee with an explanation of why you believe you should be added. If you believe that a Wheel member the breached the ethical guidelines or otherwise acted contrary to the best interests of the club, then you should first contact the Committee.

If you wish to contact Wheel, simply use the Wheel mailing list. For more general and non-sensitive tech-related topics, please use the Tech mailing list instead. (Note: the tech list automatically includes all wheel members.)

Wheel Group Guidelines

See here.

Finding Wheel Members

Wheel members are particularly elusive, especially since most of them have already graduated and have full time jobs. If you wish to talk to some of them, consider joining IRC #ucc or the UCC Discord.

Alternatively if you wish to meet some of them in person, come along to the clubroom on Monday evenings ("Project night") and join us for some pizza / drinks.

For a list of active wheel member accounts, run the snippet getent passwd|grep -v locked|cut -d: -f1|parallel id 2>/dev/null |egrep 'wheel' on any user server.

For a list of all wheel member accounts, including locked accounts, run getent group | grep -e '^wheel:\*' on any user server. Alternatively run samba-tool group listmembers wheel on any machine that has samba correctly configured (best to run this on the domain controller).

Wheel Meetings

Every few years, or if the mail server breaks down, the members of the Wheel group gather somewhere (usually the clubroom) and spend several hours discussing computery things. They also sing the secret Wheel Song.

Note that Wheel additions are primarily approved by circular and thus a Wheel meeting is not necessary for a new member to join the group.