BUGS is a group of users of BSD based operating systems, founded in Sydney, Australia on 16 May, 1999. We communicate via IRC, and occasionally on our mailing list. We meet sometimes.

Activities include support, advocacy, and sharing of resources and information, but a major objective is to enjoy each other's company and have a good time without actually wasting time.

We don't care what stage people are at, and our group includes people who have not started using BSD yet as well as experts. Current members run FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS and Mac OS X Server, on many different types of hardware. We are a friendly informal group, where each member has equal responsibility for making our activities a success. Decisions are made by consensus, rather than having a single decision making leader. For that reason, active participation in the IRC channel and/or mailing list is necessary to benefit from the group. Firefox users can use IRC channel (#bugs on irc.oz.org) to connect, make sure you select Mibbit when prompted.

We maintain the locations of the less paranoid members on a Google Map. Ask on IRC if you want to be on the map.

One of the founding members of BUGS, Sue Blake, passed away early on 2010-Dec-17 from cancer. She will be dearly missed.

Jürgen passed on the 8th of August 2015. A friendly, helpful guy. He always took the time to help the less enlightened among us. A generous contributor to the FreeBSD project, and a keen mind.

Active on our IRC channel since October 2008.

nox: moin

The classic nox greeting. You will be missed our friend. c u

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib-develinmemoriam.html

Also mentioned in the 11.0-RELEASE under “Dedication”

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/announce.html

Images of people who are older now.

None at present

Come and chat on #bugs on irc.austnet.org. You may also find people on one of our contingency servers: #bugs on irc.ozorg.net, #bugs on irc.oftc.net, #bugs on irc.libera.chat (why so many? - there may even be a bridge running between the networks). There are usually about 20 members on at any time, and the channel is very active. IRC newbies click here for help.

From time to time we have needed a key on the channel to help prevent bots joining. If the key is enabled (see below), you will need to use it to join the channel:

/join #bugs ilikepie

If you need any help with this please email the list or message one of the channel regulars when you are connected to the server, and be patient, IRC isn't quite like instant messaging, the message is delivered, but IRC isn't necessarily instant response. Sometimes people are watching, sometimes no one is. The key is currently required.

If you're interested, why not read some past topics or some future topics.

Subscribe to our mailing list to get occasional updates and chit-chat that doesn't get onto IRC. Simply visit https://www.rulingia.com/mailman/listinfo/bugs/ or send an email to bugs-subscribe@bugs.au.freebsd.org. Note that you must be subscribed to the list in order to post to it.

The list is unmoderated. Please note that on occasion, posts to the mailing list will contain commonly used colloquialisms that may be regarded as unsuitable for children under two years old and braindead mail filtering software. Mailing list archives back to late October 2007 are available at: https://www.rulingia.com/pipermail/bugs/.

Feel free to add yourself to the BUGS members page or world map.

• How it all started
• The first meeting
• More past meetings
• Our members - please add yourself!
• BUGS Infrastructure
• IRC channel topics

• Australian FreeBSD mirrors
• Expanding ZFS RAID pools
• Replacing faulty disks in ZFS RAID pools
• FreeBSD 4BSD vs ULE Scheduler
• Internet Operationing Instructions
• IRC for beginners
• Running Diskless over WiFi with lagg

In the past some of the BUGS members organised a meeting somewhere. Usually this is just a social gathering, but occasionally we may want to share technical know-how with other members. Here is a list of topics that could be discussed or presented at a future meeting. Meetings will most likely be organised on IRC though also there may be notifications on the mailing list.