About us..

Ausics.net is located in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The network was brought to life by Noel Butler to provide free information and services to the Internet community at large promoting Free and Open Source Software, in particular, the Linux Operating System. "We started out around 1992 as host fox.detour.net, by around '98 we obtained our own domain "auschat.net", that was wrong, very wrong, it made us sound like a bloody IRC network, so in 2003 we changed to ausics.net, and here we are today, very happy to stay".

Noel himself has used Linux exclusively on his desktops at home and work since that era, and in more recent years also on his laptop, although he is not a gamer (or gaymer as he affectionately calls them) he feels there's nothing Linux cant do, and do better, faster and with much more reliability then Windows and without being criminally extorted at Micro$ofts prices... "It's not just about free software, its about stability, reliability and performance, Google, the New York Stock Exchange, and even NASA run on Linux, would you seriously trust the space shuttle if Windows was used? scary thought isn't it! It also truly amazes me why people pay hundreds of dollars for microflop office, when they can legally download and use OpenOffice for FREE!, so it doesn't have publisher, do you really need it? Do you really need to pay even one hundred dollars for Windows? You're paying for heartache, pain and despair, when BSOD appears, or yet another exploit is found and your pc is rooted because of microsoft incompetence, what about spam, botnets are comprised of compromised windows machines, FAIL again M$..."

Our servers (except our off-site U.S. based secondary MX and slave DNS server which runs CentOS) all run Slackware, we chose Slackware because it's rock solid, (it's the oldest surviving Linux distro) and most importantly, PatV doesn't screw with/hack the hell out of packages like most others (RedHat, Debian, SuSE and their variants) all do, hence very few issues arise and minimal updates are required, since Pat doesn't break things and stays true to form from the packages upstream and supports releases on security issues well over 5 years, so Slackware by default is an enterprise grade distribution that has given us no problems in many years (this includes here and at the ISP's we've worked at) so are very happy using and recommending Slackware for mission critical servers (just a shame he dropped Gnome support else we'd be using it on PC's as well).

The network today hosts official mirrors for some well known projects such as Samba, Linux Documentation Project, and Netfilter, it is also the primary site for some smaller Open Source Projects.

The key people running the show have experience dating back over 20 years in Unix Systems and Network Administration for corporate enterprise, Web Hosting companies and ISP's, but, as you can tell from the pathetic design of our website, none of us are webmasters