[IMC] Chambana.net Status and Updates

Dan Blah blah at danblah.com
Tue May 24 10:05:02 UTC 2016


Brilliant Josh. You've been an amazing steward of a critical community
service. For what it's worth, by my count, you've also been the longest
serving of stewards and responsible for at least two major upgrades (where
the first was to clean up the mess left in my departure). Thank you for it
mate :)

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 5:02 PM Josh King <jking at chambana.net> 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
>
> --
> Josh King
> PGP Fingerprint: 8269 ED6F EA3B 7D78 F074 1E99 2FDA 4DA1 69AE 4999

-- 

Dan Blah
pgp 0x36377134
ricochet:danblahp6j4vr45y
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