The srhuston.net network “started” quite a few years ago when CompuLinux wanted an IRC server he could call his own, where he could chat with friends invited to the service. When he started working for Rocinante, at one point CompuLinux mentioned having run his own server. Since Rocinante ran a server years before that, Rocinante first joined CompuLinux's server and then started looking around at software. Rocinante installed a copy of the server software CompuLinux was running, and they linked the servers. Eventually one of the other users on the network did the same, and they had three servers and services running on the network. Vydor shut his server down sometime before he moved to VA, and the network remained as two.
After a while, the network had some problems with services and the servers - they refused to properly sync no matter what, so services would op you and one of the servers would deop you right away. Rocinante looked at other services packages, and servers, and settled on Hybrid (since it had SSL - while they don’t talk about private issues, they may want to vent about people at work now and then and didn’t want the chance it could easily be sniffed) for the server daemon and ratbox-services for ChanServ/NickServ/etc. After getting Rocinante's setup and running, he gave CompuLinux the information for his config, CompuLinux restarted with the new server, and they linked up again.
All the while running the network, Rocinante always wanted it to be bigger. Bring more people in to chat, and possibly more servers if needed (He's not one who believes having 10 servers is great if you’ve only got 2 people on each one). He headed over to SearchIRC.com, and one of the posts he found on there got him to thinking. There’s a ton of IRC networks in existence… what does ours have to offer someone over the others? Friendly people, sure; but you can find friendly people anywhere. What does our network have that others don’t? This in mind, he didn’t bother advertising the network. He needed to figure out that answer first, then he could try to bring in more people.
Fast forward to May, 2008. Rocinante sees a post on SearchIRC for someone offering a server to link - doesn’t care what daemon is used. So he replied, mentions that the network is running Hybrid (they’d just changed over to Atheme services the previous week, but that was uneventful) and mention the idea for the network that he’d been trying to solidify. The idea: They're a place where people can go to learn how this all works! Yes, there’s a lot of IRC networks, but there’s a lot of people either new to IRC, or new to networking, who have no idea how it all goes together. Since the majority of the people who hang out in the main channel are very technically inclined (systems administrators mostly), we could “teach” other people how to run a network from the pure technical standpoint of it. Later that night, the person replied, and the network was under way. Raven connected the next day, and built a copy of Hybrid which was then linked into the network. After a few things Rocinante saw which he didn’t care for (including Hybrid’s lack of updates lately) he moved for a change to Charybdis, which they all now run.
So there it is - the history of how the srhuston.net IRC network was born. Maybe it'll get renamed at some point, if everyone can come up with a good name. And maybe the overall “mission” will change in time to something more or less specific. Maybe there won’t really be a mission anymore. But in the mean time, they've got the beginnings of something decent - even if most of the servers and services are still run on business class DSL links :>
--Rocinante, June 2008
