The history laid out below is told from Skylarâs view and some of the details are fuzzy and a lot of information and people who were involved have been lost to time. Take it with a grain a salt, as the timeline is most likely all out a whack due to how memories fade and alter as the years pass us by.
There is little to no documentation of the project from before around 2016, only some random naming schemes for project âreleasesâ. Everything we did was flying by the seat of our pants back then and
was a huge exercise in could we make a server that actuallyâŚdidâŚanything at all.
At some point in the past, the server(s) we made had their storage disks imaged and were occasionally put up for download, after passwords and other private information were removed or changed, for others to use as a base for starting their own projects or communities. These âreleasesâ came with a naming scheme similar to another well known OS/firmware. Now days, we donât release bootable images anymore or really anything that could be based on, but our team still marks releases with a funny little name.
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Iâve been in charge of âThe MFN Projectâ in some form of another since June of 2009. Let that sink in for a moment, thatâs a long time to watch technology change. I have been running this project since Linux 2.4 or 2.6 was the base of most ISOs. Ubuntu 6.06 was the operating system that Chuck and I painfully installed on an iMac G3 that was hooked to a cable modem at my fatherâs house that we used to run a website. (Edit to this from the original post: It took some digging, but minecraft was ran on a seperate
machine and neither I nor Dhovakin remember what it was on, but it wasnât multiplayer either, we VNCâd in to playâŚthis was the early days of my hosting adventure and none of us in the group really had a clue as to what we were doing back then.)
2009
The group didnât exist at this time but it should be noted that this is when I jumped into the Linux/GNU OS since a friend had borrowed my Windows laptop and it was returned to me with Damn Small Linux running on it. I learned the hard way how to function under the Linux based OS because I suddenly had no choice for a few years. I will say though, for a slow machine with only 64MB of memory, that brick of a laptop made a decent machine for doing school work and learning on.
2010/2011â˛ish?
Later, The UNXT Group, a small Minecraft server of about five players and a handful of plugins was initiated. We had a trading post, a crude market system, and some other essentials.
I bought a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server from eBay; it wasnât shiny or new but it had 32GB of memory on two 32bit CPUs. We had recently upgraded to cable internet at the house and had expanded to a strange Minecraft setup that allowed each of us to run our own worlds and settings; seamlessly migrating without reconnecting. It was pretty neat but wasnât a setup that really took off until a few years later when it seemed that the bigger community hubs started doing the same.
Later in 2010/2011, the members of the group all had slightly different ideas of how to build and manage everything, which led to various components of UNXT finding themselves across different houses.
Disk image of the data drive with game data was made and was named âroasted coffee cakeâ. Image was hosted on our website for download for around two months after folks had started splitting off.
2011
I think parts of UNXT ended up at Dhoavkinâs house. The main server handled functions of our Minecraft server to allow players to jump between worlds while keeping their items synced. Other smaller side project servers provided the market and backups. Though laggy at time, it worked and that is what counted.
Some pieces were running at my grandparentâs house and it was around this time that UNXT had a very short venture with another project that was running under the name âJoeyTechâ while I was in high school. Due to issues surrounding how the systems were piloted differently, the two groups did not
work alongside each other for long.
2012
I graduated from high school and went on to college. The original group fell apart, we were all in different points of life, but for posterity I kept the server online at my grandparentâs house, serving solely as a website. I renamed things to just UNXT and it hosted sky pictures from a webcam that I modified and
waterproofed.
2013
A friend got OpenVPN running on the server and had it setup so that it would allow our friends to play a few games with each other as if we were all in the same room together. Although short lived because of bandwidth and latency issues, it was pretty neat to see in action and might be one of the larger things that got me interested in computer networking.
2014
I stopped hosting all together because it was no longer interesting, and I didnât have the time to keep everything up to date. At this time my interest in ham radio became more of a focus and what extra funds I had were put towards my radio projects and packet gear. I ran a small AX.25 BBS in East Texas for around a year, but had very few connects or messages left.
The OVPN server from 2013 was imaged and named as âDusted Sherbetâ and Iâm not sure where the hard disk with that image ended upâŚ
2015
I brought things back online running in a virtual machine on my gaming pc at my grandparentâs house when I started living with them. I registered the name âUNXT Hallowsâ and was hosting a website, Minecraft server, OpenVPN for remote work and a live weather camera that actually got use from a nearby group because it had decent night imagery.
2016
At this point everything died off because I did not have enough income to support the cost of the server, domain names and licensing and it got boring compared to the online gaming I was doing.
During this time the Hallows group began to break down because I refused the idea of commercializing the project and expanding it to be a service instead of a gathering place for people to hangout. I really did not want the project to become a business, I wanted it to remain free and accessible for anyone who wanted to join us. A few members imaged the small server that was currently in operation and took that as their base for elsewhere. I donât know what became of the images or if they were scrapped and started fresh.
2018
I ran a joint project with a few friends under the name âHallows Caveâ which included Minecraft, DayZ, a poor attempt at emulating another game we all played and hosting VMs for some income on the side. This project dissolved in 2019 when a new relationship happened, so with this life change I had to
focus elsewhere for a while.
Before someone points out the monetization of the VM hosting, I was not the lead on that project and it wasnât my choice. I just did a lot of the upkeep and was given a small part of what that project brought in.
2020
At this point I ran a nameless IP hosting only SSH and OpenVPN so that I could tunnel my phone. I didnât even rent or own a server at this point, but instead a VPS from OVH with just enough resources to run the tunnel.
2021
I bounced back as âmarbledfennec.netâ and began with just two routers being virtualized on a server rented by the month. It was a little intel server that struggled to keep up with the bandwidth my phone could use but did okay tunneling the house to the Dallas server for a game my friends played a lot.
During this year the project had to be moved to an Opteron server because it had greater resources as some members had heavily expanded their Minecraft server that I agreed to host. Others made use of the
VPN to host things from their home using the serverâs IP. I believe this to be what sparked the idea of the direction that the âThe MFN Projectâ has taken.
This is also where it was decided that disk images of the project would no longer be a thing. As of August 2021, the project has ceased to make any downloadable and bootable image releases, but still marks production âreleasesâ with dessert themed names. Production for 2021 was reached in October and was internally named âLemon Tartâ as the project wasnât very stable and would crash from a sneeze, but worked well enough.
2022
âmarbledfennec.netâ then expanded into the âThe MFN Projectâ with a now much bigger server running a website, Minecraft VM, three router VMs (on IPv4), an on the fly streaming VM, self-hosted email, and a
rarely used Minecraft VM. Yet, there was a small community of users helping run things and working on the build out.
During this year âThe MFN Projectâ experienced some leadership changes and few volunteer staff members walked off causing the volunteer staff membership to become pretty lackluster due to my lack of interest in commercializing once again. My goal is to keep the human element at the center of âThe MFN Projectâ and would rather not run the risk of it becoming just another faceless service provider. The goal of operations has always been to teach others how to setup and work with computer networks and to gain experience hosting services in a somewhat controlled environment.
In 2022, production was reached around June and was named âGingerbread Poptartâ and a hold on OS/firmware updates was issued for roughly three months after due to not having enough time to properly balance real life with the project.
2023
âThe MFN Projectâ now owns both the names âmarbledfennec.netâ and âfenfox.runâ for daily operations. We secured IPv6 access from our upstream provider and were given a /48 subnet to further build out
our virtualized infrastructure with.
The few members we had certainly helped accelerate the build out in early 2023 and the project runs five router VMs, provides semi-public IP transit, hosts two websites, has self-hosted email, still does OTF streaming, provides routed IPv6 subnets upon request, hosts a GTA5 RP server and has a somewhat playable but outdated Minecraft VM.
All of this is hosted on a Ryzen 7 based server we rent and for the most part, the system is self-running and requires little intervention these days.
In late 2023, my interest waned since the volunteer members who helped build out the server have mostly moved on since our disagreement over commercialization and the standards of operation. Out of the six
people that built this project and made it a realityâŚI was the only tech left on the project. I am only continuing to run it because there are still four daily users who rely on the network for day-to-day happenings and for those that simply enjoy dropping in every once in a while to catch up and help out where needed.
Emotionally, it all feels a little weird. There doesnât seem to be a need for growth at this stage in MFNâs lifecycle, however, it still shouldnât feel boring because something unique was created over several years of growth, experience, and human interactions. This project made and broke a lot of ties over the years, but the changes those individuals made have carried us to where we stand today. To the current team of volunteer staff and the ones that have moved on with time, thank you for being a part of the history of The MFN Project and helping make it what is has become.
It has been over fourteen years since I began this âhobbyâ. Thatâs a lot of nights drinking coffee and hacking away at a terminal. While the project may come and go over the years, it always seems to come back ever stronger and brighter than the last incarnation. May it continue to do so!
The project never reached what we would call a production release in 2023. The move from pfSense to opnSense meant that there were a lot of changes within the networking; there was a reverse SSL proxy built for project members to share an IPv4 WAN address and a handful of other constantly changing targets and goals. So, no cute little name ever got assigned during that year.
Q1 2024
We rebranded from âThe MFN Projectâ to just âMarbled Fennec Networksâ due a semi-close friend of Skylarâs referring to the project in a funny way as âThe Motherfucking Project.â No harm done by being funny, but it certainly highlighted the unfortunate naming we had done early on in the projectâs life. The insight also caused a bunch of changes to our policy pages due to the naming change.
Also, for Q1, we made some changes to how the project operates and how it is now governed. Responsibility was split between five people and a voting board was created to help guide the future of the project. Policies such as our âterms of useâ and ânetwork managementâ have been revised and made simpler to understand.
We also finally setup a real status page for all of our services and the changes to the network design and related VMs and services has finally settled a bit and everything appears to be fairly stable. The two techs working on MFN donât feel as stressed now that the dust has started to clear.
Q1-2024 also feels like it has fallen into a production state and should be named to reach a resting point for our volunteer staff. Hmm, I think weâll call Q1 as âCreamsicle Poptartâ.
Q2 2024
The second quarter of 2024 has been…rough. Back in April we started noticing that our main server would occasionally just, well, die without a real reason or cause. This became very disruptive to our operations, stressed our team a lot and took about two months to figure out the root cause, which turned out to be that we have a CPU with faulty power management, along with data center techs that do not seem to be able to grasp what was happening. Once our team grew to understand the problem and what was causing it, we were able to solve it for the time being by disabling the server’s power management options entirely. Not a proud fix, but a needed one.
We also converted our secondary server into a full virtual machine host in order to run our imaging server, status page and cross device storage. So that was a major change to the network that has helped us out a lot by having sixteen nightly images on hand at all times should any VM on the network need to be rolled back due to a failed upgrade or other issue.
Something else of curious change is that our project is now hosting a public, OpenNIC compatible DNS resolver. It took some learning and exploring, but we feel that we have gotten it stable, along with setting up rate and bandwidth limits for it. Time will tell how it fairs. In additional news on this subject, MFN is using this DNS for the whole network.
Big milestone for the project is that we have finally migrated away from FlatPress and have entirely rebuilt our website using WordPress. Management of the website is a lot easier and the built in editor is quicker to use.
Something to be mindful of is that our main supporters of the project both work in entertainment and as things have slowed down, so has the play money. While we don’t think it should impact MFN too bad, we have done staging to throw everything designated as “required to operate” onto our secondary server in order to survive a funding crash.
But all in all, we aren’t doing too bad for the project itself and we have reached another point of stability, marking Q2 as release naming worthy…two months ahead of time, so this release point shall be known as “Frostful Cherry Tart”
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Q3 2024:
Not going to lie, the project is struggling to survive right now. As previously mentioned, both of our financial supports are going through a dry period with work in the entertainment industry, so this quarter focused heavily on both find a third backer and making sure that our backend is ready to be imaged to the backup server on a moments notice. We did strike a deal with someone close to the project to bridge the gaps in exchange for hosting some game servers for them., so hopefully we can make it through this period and come out okay.
One of the biggest changes to the project is the splitting of responsibilities and the creation of a subproject. In Q3, Marbled Fennec Networks had an offshoot know as FurrIX(https://furrix.zone) that was created in order to split off a team of volunteers who only focus is the network itself. The team working on the FurrIX project are only responsible for the upkeep and configuration of our routers, network plan, network leases and network management. Marbled Fennec Networks, the parent project, is still responsible for the main website, physical server management, game servers and public relations.
Something of note is that during this past quarter, we obtained a yearly lease on a /48 subnet in addition to the subnet we have been using. We also have setup our name servers and worked with our LIR in order to be able to handle the reverse DNS zones for the leased subnet, meaning that we now offer two possible prefixes for our project members and end users to make use of.
We have also brought on a third project backer who is slated to be cross trained on both projects and eventually will be placed in control of FurrIX’s daily operations. Sushi Glitchwolf was onboarded as of Sept 9th.
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Timeline and thoughts provided by Skylar Wylie Westbrooke.
Editorial support provided by Shay Ashlee Smith. (đžthank you!đž)
The MFN Project has been created and provided by countless volunteers
over the many, many years of operation; thank you all who helped!
People who have worked on MFN over the years past:
This is not an all inclusive list, just those who I can actually remember working withâŚ
- TyDwagon (Helps with server deployment, policy creation and guides operations)
- ZeMajor Neko (Pops in every so often to boost morale, sometimes breaks shit)
- Charles âChuckâ (Worked on the PowerEdge server way back when..)
- Dhovakin (Still on the project, provides some oversight)
- Kyru Huskove (Provided a lot of valuable insight on the network design, helps maintain the project)
- Kaozer, Snuggly Sergal (Critical insight, technical discussion and fun guy to hangout with)
- Garret (Early Minecraft Days, helped prop up a server or two)
- Joey (went by the name JoeyTech, got me into the Linux/GNU OS the hard way)
- Sam (Helped setup Minecraft 1.7.10 Modded)
- Drift Tide, Orcapelt (Gave moral support in 2021, no longer on the project, very warm and welcoming critter)
- Miss Moo (Helped with this document and gave some life lessons along the way)
- Mikey âSmol Foxâ (Disappeared with the xbox360âŚmade use of early OVPN deployments and gave feedback)
- Brandon (Minecraft moderator back in 2016 or so..)
- Sushi Glitchwolf (Tier one support dude)