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 actuallyâŚ
didâŚanything 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.
â
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.
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 and 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 strangely as
âDusted Sherbetâ and Iâm not 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 am 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”
â
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 (Helped with server deployment, policy creation and guides operations)
- ZeMajor Neko (Pops in every so often to boost morale)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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..)