What's the History Behind CUGNet?
In 2002, CUGNet started it's life as a server in the DeVry University Computer Users' Group (CUG) at the Addison, IL campus. CUG had a small closet on the campus that was converted into a small computer gaming room that was completely independent from the DeVry network. Over time, the CUG was able to garner a public IP address and the ability to host a server out to the internet. It is from this action that CUGNet was born.CUGNet was chosen as the system was supposed to be a location for members of the CUG to host their own personal websites, as well as internally act as a Samba PDC for the Windows machines on the CUG Network. The system soon started to take on users outside the CUG Membership, however, as the Addison Linux Users Group started using the system as their own server for introducing new people to Linux (the machine ran Debian Potato at the time).
The machine continued to gain users and it's uses expanded until the server was compromised in mid 2004. DeVry consequently took the machine off the internet as they deemed the system a security concern, even after the system was reloaded.
CUGNet was reborn, however. In early 2005, one of the former CUG admins working for the University of Chicago rebuilt a Sun Sunblade 2000 server to Ubuntu 6.06 for sparc. As a side-project to see what packages were available, a LAMP stack and other services started coming online and he started granting logins to the server. This was such a success that after he left the University later that year, he secured a rack server and was able to get onShore to host the system for free. onShore was happy to provide their services for no charge with only a few minor restrictions.
In the beginning of 2008, it started becoming apparent that CUGNet was starting to grow beyond the services that onShore was willing to offer. As a result, in mid 2008 the environment was re-architected with VMWare on new hardware, and was then co-located at Raqz in downtown Chicago. Several users donated to the cause as well, making the transition monetarily easier. We called this CUGNet 2.0.
In late 2008 the VMWare Server infrastructure was upgraded to version 2.0, which allowed for the virtual machines that were providing services to be upgraded to 64-bit. Over the course of the next 6 months however, increasing problems resulting from how VMWare Server 2 handles memory and state saving caused us to re-evaluate how the systems were being handled. It was determined that OpenVZ was the best solution and in early February 2009, the system was again reloaded and re-architected for OpenVZ.
So now we are running what has been widely referred to as CUGNet 3.0. We're proud to offer the services we do with a small volunteer staff and we are continuing to add more services all the time. We hope that you find a good use for our services, learn a thing or two (and possibly teach some of us), and most importantly...have fun!
