A bit of History

The DuckCorp Story

DuckCorp was born in 2000, from Duck's will to construct something more personal out of the CoinNetwork student house's LAN. At that time, it was merely a simple website, advertising a few personal projects. Later, several machines, gathered with various parts from people willing to dispose of them, used the 'duckcorp.org' domain name and provided services for CoinNetwork; this was the begining of the DC's sponsoring mission. Duck then met Rtp, and they began sharing about system administration topics. As they were willing to administrate CoinNetwork better, they began working on the infrastructure and tools together. Rtp created RtpNet, and received the magical SSH key to be a full DC administrator (so did Duck for Rtpnet indeed). They developed a software prototype aimed at managing the most important services of a distributed web of servers (LMS, LDAP Management System), which helped reducing the daily burden of CoinNetwork's administration a lot. After a while working hand in hand, they both found a job and moved to a new home, still helping each other when possible. Currently, RtpNet and DuckCorp have different goals, and follow their own path.

On the way, DC found friendly sponsors (in order of appearance):

• Nerim (first Orfeo's housing, IPv6 block, indirect sponsor via Hivane)
• Hivane (global connectivity, secondary NS and MX)
• Sivit (special accommodations for Toushirou's housing and connectivity) (Nerim again, as it was acquired in 2009)
• Alionis (Orfeo's previous housing)
• Jaguar Network (Orfeo's housing) (acquired Alionis in 2015)

Thanks a lot pals :-).

The MilkyPond Project

MP is an historical share of an IRC network between DC and RN when they both stopped working on the CoinNetwork project. They were willing to cooperate but with the important changes that occurred in their lives, only IRC was kept as a communication link.

With time going, DC began recreating services, with the main server Orfeo being kindly sponsored by Nerim, which was used by RN and later by other associations or individuals. Nothing much is done in the name of MP until 2007, besides adding a Jabber server.

In early 2007, RN hired a server, Lechat (Dédibox), and was willing to participate more in the share. At the end of the year, T1R joined to help improving the IRC Network.

In September 2007, RN was not able to provide services anymore, as it was too much of a burden. Nevertheless, it is still sponsoring the milkypond.org domain since then.

Key Dates

• 2000-05-22: DuckCorp is created
• 2003-04-25: IANA PEN 16829
• 2003-07-09: RtpNet is created
• ~2003-10-20: RSA key exchanged between DC and RN (date is from the exif info, but Photoshop is in the way)
• 2004-06-12: MilkyPond is created (after DC and RN stopped working on the CoinNetwork project)
• 2005-04/05: Orfeo RAM upgraded (512Mo->1.5Go) (blocked to ~800Mo until highmem in kernel)
• 2005-05: IPv6 Ready (using a tunnel)
• 2005-11:
  • the users' mailing-list started
  • major mail system improvements (SMTP auth, improved antispam, webdesk)
• 2005-12-08: Orfeo moved from the Nerim's Ivry datacenter to the Nerim suite in the LDCOM Courbevoie datacenter
• 2006-01 to 2006-06: Orfeo problems due to an XFS bug
• 2007-04: IPv6 Ready (native IPv6)
• 2007-07: Tōshirō bought and being prepared
• 2007-08-08: Nerim's boss shutdown Orfeo violently; quickly repaired and setup behind a mere ADSL (helped by Nerim friends), but BLACKOUT for most services
• 2007-08-13: Tōshirō installed in the Sivit suite of the Redbus datacenter, services progressively back online
• 2007-09: LDAP infrastructure (again)
• 2007-12:
  • Orfeo-NG bough and installed in Alionis suite in EQX (Equinix) datacenter
  • T1R enters MilkyPond (for the IRC network)
• 2008-07: VCS rework, Portal (Restricted Access Helper), Projects Manager (Redmine)
• 2009-03: Banya bot (mail gateway for DNS modification, part of the CyborgHood project)
• 2009-09: Orfeo moved to Alionis VBO datacenter
• 2010-03: Thorfinn acquired (Nerim VDS)
• 2010-04-24: stratum 2 NTP server publicly advertised and in the pool
• 2010-05-22: 10th Anniversary !!!
• 2010-05-29: 10th Anniversary party with users/sponsors/friends
• 2010-10: DNS TSIG and DNSSEC
• 2010-11: Toushirou reached Gbps (with a reboot to work around a firmware bug)
• 2010-12:
  • power outage at VBO, kernel bug preventing Orfeo to restart (IPMI-related)
  • Jinta (VM provided by mm), replacing T1R secondary IRC server
• 2011-01: problems with backup and capacity
• 2011-05: improved IMAP and SIEVE support, shared and public folders
• 2011-06: launch of the Ducklings Volunteer Activities
• 2011-08: new web service: news feeds (tt-rss), IRC on web replacement, XMPP on web, file sharing (Jyraphe), new web stats (Piwik)
• 2011-10: Jinta is dow for good
• 2012-01: Korutopi is born (backups)
• 2012-02: handly mail retraining through IMAP
• 2012-08:
  • short electrical outage affecting Orfeo
  • file sharing replace by a "cloud" oriented broader software (Owncloud)
• 2012-11: XMPP problems -ejabberd cluster bugs)
• 2012-12:
  • Daneel is dead
  • MOSH support
• 2013-06:
  • Nerim's sponsoring is over => many things to change and end of the IPv6 broker service
  • Minetest server
• 2013-10:
  • Thorfinn moving from the legacy Nerim Root infrastructure to the Sivit/Nerim virtualization plateform
  • Orfeo reached Gbps
• 2014-01 to 2014-02, lots of maintenance and consolidation:
  • web hosting major upgrade
  • Daneel is back alive (so do supervision)
  • Toushirou's having bad load problems
  • new XMPP server (replacing the wonky ejabberd cluster)
  • new blog plateform
• 2014-03:
  • Thorfinn moving at Hivane
  • Jinta revival (Hivane VM) in order to unload Toushirou

Admins

Active

• Arnau [~2004-12 to now] (fallback admin since 2010-04-27, fully active during 2014)
• Duck [begining to now] (leader)
• Pilou [2014-04-02 to now] (fallback admin in charge of hardware/breakage rescue until February 2016, full-time admin since then)

Emeritus

• Finger [2006-07-05 to 2008-02-04] (assistant)
• Mmenal [~2004-12 to ~2006-07]
• Rtp [2003-10 to 2007-07-15, kernel assistant when needed]

Evolution

No real traces were kept, so old numbers are mere rough guess.

• 2000 -> 2004
  • more than 60 users served in the CoinNetwork LAN, nearly no external services besides a basic website and IRC
  • services targeted for the CoinNetwork LAN
• 2004 -> 2007
  • a few users (probably around 20) and 2 entities (RtpNet and HurdFr) hosted
  • more Internet-oriented services (complete mail software suite, MLs, Web hosting, DBs, RCS, ...)
• 2007 -> 2010
  • more users (nearly 70 users in 2010, a few not very active) and 2 more entity hosted (TheBrain and Andesi)
  • more services (Jabber, user-friendly antispam, LDAP, IPv6, ...)

Photos

Look at the gallery.