Back in 2000, Mark Eichin and Sam Hartman got together and explored the ideas behind “all of the Project Athena infrastructure we keep replicating in our startups” with an eye towards pre-packaging them for easy customer deployment (and our own future benefit.)
The services included
- Version Control (CVS) - we were targeting software startups
- Documentation Intranet (WEBRCS but it probably should have been a wiki.)
- User Database (LDAP and Hesiod)
- Authentication (Kerberos)
- Shared Filesystem (OpenAFS)
- Mail (postfix)
- Local Network (DHCP, DNS)
Configuration was synchronized between subsystems (though we aspired to having an enhanced Moira manage all configuration.)
The startup itself lasted about a year, with a couple of customers providing useful integration experience. The technology survived; for example, the improvements to the Debian packaging of OpenAFS (including the newcell script) went directly back into Debian and are still maintained today, and the overall structure is still used in Boston-area software startups to this day.