:: Ekhwan - Brotherhood of the Dawoodi Bohras :: Hikmah @ Ekhwan Blog ::

Six years with NextGen - mumineen.org Team surfing the WWW, writing articles, moderating a huge community like DBNet and publishing the web. It has been a long race and good horses are never tired. The same time I had spent with promoting my hosting business and devoloping internet solutions for people. As technology evolves and as we see shifts in paradigms we learn and get nurtured by experiance in the school of life.

The year 1427 H was a turning point for mumineen.org we had a server melt down soon after Ashara and we started to think about aborting our unmanaged servers donated by Ali Dhoon to shared hosting. One of our team members suggested Dream Host and here we are. We have shifted most of our site to Dreamhost with a new site design in mind with more goody features and stuff for our visitors bu the mailing list is really missed. Ezmlm is missed by all the mods and all are sure that mailman sucks to the very last bit.

Ezzi.Net has generously provided an opteron for mumineen.org and we are not quite sure what we are to do with it. Another server is an Athlon with a CPanel installation as promised by Ali Dhoon. This is a new server we are planing to provide jamaats hosting on.

I configured the server and created a single reseller with Bohra.net domain and created DNS entries through WHM. Unfortunately the DNS was broken and the IPs that AHP had given me were not for our use.

I talked to Dan for repairing the DNS but he didnt. All he did was remove the wrong IPs and alot a few more for our use. Dan was not of much help with the DNS and the dnsstuff was also showing the errors. The next step was that I took the innitiative to go through CPanel documents, blogs and forums to figure out what was wrong and finally fixed the DNS and completed the security tweaks that were needed for the server. We added 2 more domains for jamaats to use, jamaats.net and jamaats.info. Another domain was attalim.net which we intend to use for the madrasas. Finally I am through with the server set-up and the service was launched on Friday, 18 August 2006.

One thing pending is the Reverse DNS (PTR) record which I cannot figure out. Maybe someday I might be able to fix it.

Above all it was a good learning experiance and I found many free SSH providers in the proccess which helps me hop my local proxy and use the SSH host as a proxy to surf the web. YG has written a how-to for that and I shall post it on the blog soon.

It has been a long time since I have been part of a community project and have learnt a lot from the gurus there. The project has been an issue of debate since the past year or so as there is little that has been done from the part of the already tight volunteers. The project has been live since 1997 and wow thats eternity when it comes to the age of the Internet. Now we stand questioning that whether or not its worth the effort.

My friends, some of them who have worked hard enough to keep this project going and have contributed their time heftily "working in the trenches" have also been questioning the worth and value of their time.

Recently, we had asked our community members to comment on what they would like to see from the project and what were their expectations from the project. To my astonishment, no one even bothered to comment. One of them asked for a lot of content. Let me sketch my feelings on the entire scenario.

Community projects are for the community and by the community. People wish to have a lot more from the projects that are devoloped for the community but forget that they need to put a lot of input themselves when it comes to reaping the gains. Where we stand the community grows in terms of quantity but not quality.

If you want your community to grow and reap benifits from it then you should consider contributing activly to its growth. Content does not come from mere writers. Quality writers are needed and then those who would take the innititive to publish that content. What about those who have to keep the infrastructure intact to make the content available. Does the community lack people of such expertise or is there a different reason why talent does not want to contribute to a community project where there is less exposure to the world of fame and glamour.

Lets face it we are not enthusiastic enough to work our way through.