[UCIMC-Tech] Chambana.net Status and Updates

[Mike Lehman]

Josh,
I want to take this opportunity to thank you in particular, but also the 
others you've mentioned for your effort maintaining this resource that 
has helped innumerable people make a difference in the world.
Regards,
Mike Lehman

On 5/20/2016 11:13 AM, Josh King wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I successfully migrated everything on Chambana.net to a completely new
> server and software setup this last weekend, in many ways making it
> faster, more secure, more up-to-date, and better than it's ever been.
> I'm still wrapping up a few loose ends, but I figure this is as good a
> time as any to provide an overall statement on the status of
> Chambana.net.
>
> I should preface this by saying that CHAMBANA.NET IS NOT GOING AWAY. I
> use its services every day and plan on continuing to use them, and all
> currently hosted sites and lists will continue to be around for the
> foreseeable future. But for a variety of reasons (that I'll talk a
> little bit about below) it's been years since I've been able to provide
> a level of service and support that I'm comfortable with.
>
> Therefore, I'm officially putting Chambana.net into "stasis" or
> "maintenance mode." What do I mean by this? I'm basically just making
> official what's been the status quo for the past few years, namely that
> Chambana.net is not currently growing or seeking out new projects, and
> all services are provided on a best effort basis. However, I want the
> project to be something that others could pick up and grow if they
> wanted to. Therefore, I've been working for the past few months on
> rewriting Chambana.net's systems and configuration to be standardized
> and reproducible, as well as documenting all of those systems. I've
> also migrated all services to a server I'm paying for at Mayfirst,
> which will serve as its permanent home and archive for the foreseeable
> future.
>
> To give a bit of background on the project: Zach Miller started
> Chambana.net well over a decade ago. Officially, Chambana.net is a
> collaboration between UCIMC and Acorn Active Media and serves as a
> community technology and hosting project for email, lists, websites,
> and other services, with a focus on central Illinois and social
> justice. When Zach moved out of the country in 2005, it was handed off
> to Dan Blah and myself as administrators. Chambana.net was started a
> time when "cloud" services were not a thing, and hosting providers were
> smaller. There were a number of community or activist-focused hosts,
> and Chambana.net was a contemporary of projects like Riseup.net. What
> started as a single server hosting a few websites and lists grew at its
> height into a 7-10 server cluster hosted out of a DIY datacenter at the
> IMC and in two other locations around the country, supporting not just
> hundreds of lists and email accounts but also the websites of dozens of
> organizations and projects throughout Illinois and elsewhere. We also
> provided a number of other services like DNS, distributed
> authentication, social networking, instant messaging, sourcecode
> repositories, radio streaming, community wireless networks, and more.
> All of these services were provided and continue to be provided free of
> charge.
>
> When Dan Blah moved out to Washington, DC, I took over as primary
> administrator and continued to grow and maintain the platform, as well
> as building and maintaining the network and technical support for the
> IMC. Eventually in 2010, I ended up moving out to DC as well to work at
> New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI), but continued to help
> with administering Chambana.net from afar with the assistance of other
> volunteer administrators like Chris Ritzo and Brian Duggan. What I
> found when I got to New America was that their IT was in such disarray
> at the time that they were unable to support even the most basic
> functions of our work. As an experiment, I began building servers there
> in order to self-host a few things and continue to support Chambana.net
> and my organization. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake, because as
> OTI ballooned in size it quickly started using these services, and I
> was stuck supporting IT for the whole organization for the next few
> years, despite the fact that it was not my job. When Chris and Brian
> moved as well, the fact that these services were now entangled further
> complicated my ability to try again to hand off Chambana.net to local
> partners.
>
> In the meantime, the proliferation of inexpensive cloud hosting and
> services like Google Apps was affecting the ability of other small
> hosting projects to keep the lights on. That combined with the fact
> that I could not promise an acceptable level of support meant that many
> of our users migrated to other commercial solutions, or as projects
> that hosted with us ended new projects weren't getting added to our
> system. As a consequence, Chambana.net now hosts only a small amount of
> the active projects it did at its height.
>
> Today, the IMC is working on migrating their lists and email to Google
> Apps, and I have now left OTI to pursue independent projects. One thing
> that I needed to complete as part of this transition was finally
> disentangling Chambana.net from OTI's systems again. But it wasn't
> enough for me to just do that. I care a lot about this project that
> I've worked on for more than a decade, and even though I wasn't
> shutting it down I wanted to bring it to a state where I could
> legitimately call it "complete." And that's why I've systematized
> Chambana.net's services as a collection of over 20 git repositories
> containing all of the code for the project and providing a snapshot of
> what Chambana.net is, technologically. With these repositories, an
> experienced administrator could reconstitute the whole platform in just
> a few steps. I will be continuing to maintain, update, expand, and
> document these repositories over time, and they'll be public and free
> for anyone to use. To me, this is a way to bring a culmination to my
> work on a project that has been a big part of my life for the last 11
> years. I hope that it's useful.
>
> https://github.com/chambana-net
> https://hub.docker.com/u/chambana/
> https://chambana.net
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IMC-Tech mailing list
> IMC-Tech at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/imc-tech


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