[IMC] Chambana.net Status and Updates

[Josh King]

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

-- 
Josh King
PGP Fingerprint: 8269 ED6F EA3B 7D78 F074 1E99 2FDA 4DA1 69AE 4999
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