Over the years, Marbled Fennec Networks has grown from a small hobbyist experiment into a surprisingly capable community platform. We’ve hosted projects, game servers, websites and countless experiments — and we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.
But as MFN evolved, so did the complexity of the systems behind it. MFN’s infrastructure has always relied on a deep stack of technologies: Debian Linux, Proxmox, pfSense/OPNsense, routing frameworks, BIND DNS and a lot of behind‑the‑scenes engineering work that most of us on the volunteer team never touched directly because it was outside of our knowledge. We mostly let our network engineer take specifications from us and make them happen- which is showing to have some strain over the years.
The truth to our projects splitting and MFN downsizing is simple:
Only one volunteer at MFN ever had the full technical knowledge required to maintain the networking and a majority of our infrastructure.
The rest of us — the people who now operate MFN — know how to:
- Maintain the WordPress website
- Manage our game servers through our panel
- Keep our small community spaces running for our various passions
But we do not have the background to safely operate the larger network, the routing layer or the virtualization environment that MFN depends on. When our sole infrastructure engineer expressed the need to step back and return to focusing on network engineering — instead of being the only person responsible for two entire projects — we had to make a responsible decision. We chose to reduce MFN’s scope to the parts we can confidently maintain:
- Our website
- Our game servers
- Our community projects
- Our history
Everything else — the network, the routing, the DNS, the infrastructure — was beyond our skillset. Continuing to operate those systems ourselves would have been unsafe, unsustainable and unfair to the community. This is why we asked FurrIX to take over the network layer, to allow our network engineer to pursue their passion and have less overall responsibility- but this change also gives our team the chance to learn how to handle the things we do host on our own. (And Adrian is still more than willing to walk us through things, thankfully!) FurrIX already had the technical foundation, the operational structure and the engineering expertise to safely run the parts of MFN that we could not.
We are simply operating at a scale that matches our abilities — and letting FurrIX handle the network‑engineering responsibilities that none of us were equipped to manage. This was a cooperative decision, made with transparency, respect and months of discussion. It allows MFN to continue existing in a sustainable form and it allows FurrIX to continue the technical legacy that originally grew out of MFN.
Thank you to everyone who has been part of MFN’s journey. We’re still here — just smaller, simpler and truer to our roots.
— The MFN Operators, Ty Dwagon and Riot the Yeen
