reintroducing capsul
capsul has a rich history. born through cyberia.club, our first server was literally cobbled together on the rooftop of my apartment complex. about 10 of us were there, perhaps a little drunk, and we covered the first 1u server in stickers. it's still around the clubhouse at layer zero - we named the server "baikal", after the deepest lake in the world, and a joke on "cyberia" sounding like "siberia". here is a picture of baikal from back then:
when capsul started, it wasn't even called capsul - it was called "cvm", which stood for "cyberia virtual machines".
i created virtual machines for people by hand with a small set of shell scripts, and those people paid me in cash. cvm was cool like that - covert, human, and communal. i'd take 60 bux, write it down in a spreadsheet, and spin up a VM.
some vms still have a cvm- prefix internally.
eventually, forest came along and blessed cvm with a self-service web interface. at this point, we renamed cvm to capsul. it took forest about a week to pump out capsul v1, which looked like this:
baikal + capsul ran many virtual machines for many people for nearly five years, with only a few minor mishaps along the way.
well, except...
atlanta
one time, the disks in baikal were basically about to explode themselves, and we were too embarassed ask the CyberWurx datacenter staff to try to help us fix it remotely after we had mailed them two different PCI-E SSD risers that didn't fit in the server chassis. So we had to fly to Atlanta (where baikal was in a rack at CyberWurx) to fix them. forest and i made a little trip of it:
in the end, we prevailed. we prevented a critical storage mishap, and baikal lived on for another several years.
EPIC emergency server migration 🤯
- baikal (our old server) could no longer handle the load, was constantly crashing
- rathouse (our NEW server) was already racked up and ready to go
- we wanted to wait until we could get backups working on the new system before we migrated... but real life had other plans for us
- capsul was fully down for about a day and a half
stripe doomsday
stripe cut off our credit card payments because the cyberia computer club's minnesota nonprofit status had lapsed after everyone who was doing the work of maintaining it faded away.
we had been the ones maintaining capsul for many years at that point, and in 2023, cyberia congress officially released capsul to be owned by us instead of being owned by the club.
so in order to get stripe payments working again, we "failed forward" and created a new legal entity that will be responsible for operating capsul: break software llc
future
okay, so it's 2025. we recently installed a new server (rathouse), and have renewed energy for this project. forest and i are getting more serious about trying to make capsul a real thing.
we've been talking with great folks around various smallweb communities -- the kind of folks capsul was originally created for, and who we still want to offer a great service to. it's always been like this; we use capsul ourselves, and our own wants and needs as admins of an independent community-hosting project have guided capsul's development:
- we needed better storage performance to make our chat server happy, so we adjusted the storage settings to speed up our disk reads and writes as much as possible.
- we still wanted to be able to back up and restore our VMs, so we integrated virtnbdbackup directly into capsul.
we want to make capsul the best lil cloud there is. not just another 5$/month rent seeking project; a genuinely better option which is more accessible, more fun, and still has the power and reliability to be much more than a toy.
we gave capsul a CSS makeover, a light theme, fixed some longstanding bugs, and updated all of our OS images, and we have a lot of ideas, but they're still baking.
if you wanna say hi, you can always send us email at support@capsul.org -- otherwise, we're always hanging out in matrix. :)
i'll try to post here at least monthly.
see you soon <3 <3 <3
love,