May, 2004:: The May releases of the core teams' public code are the last under the GNU Public License (GPL) [the 20040526 release] and the first under the BSD license [20040529 release].
October, 2003:: The current release includes material to do Arusha-friendly Kickstart installs on Red Hat Linux.
March, 2003:: The latest set of ARK tarballs (see download page) includes the first user-oriented ARK tool: tooldoc, which provides easy access to non-standard package documentation. For example, tooldoc vera tutorial would bring up the tutorial documentation for the `vera' package; tooldoc vera would list several possible documents that could be shown.
January, 2003:: There is a new mailing list about Large Scale System Configuration (lssconf-discuss -- see our mailing-lists page), hosted by Paul Anderson of University of Edinburgh. If you have a serious interest in the subject behind the Arusha Project, please join in the discussion.
November, 2002:: Our LISA 2001 paper (and talk) about the Arusha Project are now available from this web site. The slides from the 2002 Configuration Workshop are also available. Hop over to our papers page for full details.
November, 2002:: Will Partain (ARK developer) was at the LISA 2002 conference in Philadelphia, including the `Configuration Workshop', at which he gave a talk on `System configuration as institutional memory'.
July, 2002:: We now distribute a new `real-site' team's ARK configuration, verilab2; this is the actual Sidai-style setup at Verilab.
April, 2002:: Will Partain (ARK developer) now has a day job at Verilab, a very Arusha-friendly startup. This makes commercial `support' for Arusha work at least a possibility.
February, 2002:: Jonathan Hogg spoke about his Arusha Project (ARK) hacking experience the UKUUG Winter Conference (Feb. 13-14, in London). His slides are available in HTML and PowerPoint (sigh) formats.
December, 2001:: The Arusha Project went to LISA (San Diego, Dec. 3-7)! It was a real strain on Jimmy-bewigged Matt Holgate and Will Partain, as this picture shows.
November, 2001:: The Arusha Project was one of the first ten projects to get onto Sweetcode. (We're in the September archives.) ``Sweetcode reports innovative free software. ... Software reported on sweetcode should surprise you in some interesting way.''
October, 2001:: Matt Holgate has come up with a way to do NIS-less password distribution within a site. It's new and raw, should be approached with extreme caution (warranty neither expressed nor implied...), but is pretty cool nonetheless.
August, 2001:: A demo of an initial system for `presenting' ARK info on web pages, using Webware, [was temporarily available back then].
July, 2001:: There will be an Arusha Project paper at LISA 2001, the premier Unix sysadmin conference. Be there, let's collaborate!
May, 2001:: Freshmeat notices about the Project begin.
April, 2001:: An initial set of *-config packages (Sidai team) have landed; these give you a multi-platform once-per-site way of specifying many /etc configuration files, e.g. defaultrouter, hosts.equiv, inetd.conf, resolv.conf, shells, and many more. Documentation...
March, 2001:: We've got a first cut at an ARK configuration language guide! This follows the arrival of a new ARK ``engine'', the piece that implements said language.
June, 2000:: The first ARK snapshots landed at SourceForge on June 20th.
February, 2000:: The first instance of these web pages appeared on February 23rd.
January, 2000:: We set up the Arusha Project at SourceForge on January 31st. The ark-dev mailing list started shortly thereafter.
December, 1999:: The oldest Pythonesque set of Arusha bits that we have is tagged December 9th. The code that was known as ``ARK 1'' in early 2001 is a rewrite of this stuff.
October, 1998:: Our oldest ARK tarball is dated October 20th. It's written in Haskell, and bears no resemblance to modern ARK!
February, 1997:: The oldest set of bits that we have for something that can be considered an ``ancestor'' of ARK is a version of glamake, dated February 27th. (glamake was a Glasgow-only tool, concerned with building open-source software packages across multiple Unix platforms.)