Reintroducing Capsul

Summary

reintroducing capsul 29 Mar, 2025 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... atlantaone 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... ...