As every year, some of us will attend FOSDEM.
This year, you will be able to meat czajkowski, kloeri, RichiH, SeJo and a FOSDEM-virgin: marienz (be gentle). If you have any praise, complaints, questions, spare beer or just want to connect a face to a name, you are more than welcome to poke us.
Hunt us down via IRC or the linked identi.ca pages and we will try to meet you.
After much time in development and testing, the move to ircd-seven is finally complete. The migration took place in the early hours of today, Saturday January 30th 2010.
I would like to express thanks to everyone who has helped us get here — those staff and users who have helped find and squash bugs, those who have done extensive load testing and those who have helped finalising documentation in preparation for the migration earlier today.
In particular I would like to thank the Charybdis development team and the ratbox contributors whose work left us with a brilliant ircd platform to build upon to create the more freenode specific ircd-seven. In no particular order my thanks go to:
dwr, Valery Yatsko <dwr -at- shadowircd.net>
gxti, Michael Tharp <gxti -at- partiallystapled.com>
jilles, Jilles Tjoelker <jilles -at- stack.nl>
nenolod, William Pitcock <nenolod -at- nenolod.net>
AndroSyn, Aaron Sethman <androsyn -at- ratbox.org>
anfl, Lee Hardy <lee -at- leeh.co.uk>
beu, Elfyn McBratney <elfyn.mcbratney -at- gmail.com>
Entrope, Michael Poole <mdpoole -at- trolius.org>
ThaPrince, Jon Christopherson <jon -at- vile.com>
twincest, River Tarnell <river -at- attenuate.org>
w00t, Robin Burchell <surreal.w00t -at- gmail.com>
And for leading the development efforts of ircd-seven, for putting up with my many quirky and often unreasonable requests:
spb, Stephen Bennett <stephen -at- freenode.net>
I’d also like to express my gratitude to the following freenode volunteers for the hard work they’ve put in to make the migration go as smoothly as possible. I’ve been amazed at the initiative and responsibility shown in this last phase. Your help has been invaluable and I feel privileged to work with you:
kloeri, Bryan Østergaard
Lorez, Mike Mattice
Martinp23, Martin Peeks
Md, Marco D’Itri
With the exception of port(s) 7000 and 7070 which are now being used for SSL, all other ports and DNS stay the same as it did prior to migration.
If you are a regular freenode user you will most likely be aware that there’s some user facing changes with the move to ircd-seven (and likely to have been annoyed by my global notices on the subject), you may wish to familiarise yourself with the updated FAQ and glance at some of these earlier ircd-seven related blog posts:
http://blog.freenode.net/2010/01/connecting-to-freenode-using-tor-sasl/
http://blog.freenode.net/2008/11/help-us-test-ircd-seven/
http://blog.freenode.net/2010/01/migration-to-new-ircd/
http://blog.freenode.net/2010/01/ircd-migration…-jan-30th-2010/
Again, thank you for helping out, however small or large your contribution may have been. We are celebrating the migration to ircd-seven with a special fundraiser “Give £7 for seven”. This campaign will end on February 7th, until such time you may read more and donate here. Any donation of £21 or any multiple of £7 over £21 will receive a freenode t-shirt.
To all our users, thank you for using the network, and welcome to seven!
With our change of ircd to the all new ircd-seven, we are trialling a new method of allowing users to connect to the network via Tor. This method brings a number of changes:
We have collected together scripts for irssi and mirc, while Conspire supports SASL natively. Scripts may be available for other clients in addition.
Download and install this script (cap_sasl.pl) and, after loading it, configure it using
/sasl set <network> <username> <password> <mechanism>
Supported mechanisms are PLAIN and DH-BLOWFISH.
A mirc script is available, taken from a forum post by Kyle Travaglini. You can retrieve the source here.
Instructions (adapted from that forum):
If you have any problems, either pop into #freenode from a non-torified connection or drop an email to support AT freenode.net.
This method of connecting to freenode using Tor supersedes all previous methods, including Tor-GPG. We hope that this method of connecting via Tor will help to make it somewhat more accessible to you!
On the 30th of January, 2010 at around 7:30 UTC, we will be moving to the new ircd-seven. If you haven’t done so already, now is a great time to look at how this may change things for you and what you may need to do as a result.
We covered a few of the changes in this article earlier, but this post adds a few things.
If you are a tor user, the way you connect will be slightly different. Connecting via tor will require you use “username:password” in your server password field instead of just “password” as is the case now.
If you currently have an arrangement with freenode to increase your connection count for a business, school, or other organization (also known as an iline), you may need to verify it is still in place after the migration. While we have moved the majority of these over to the new ircd, some older ilines where we do not have contact information may need to be updated. If you find yours is missing, join #freenode and look for any freenode staff to further assist you. All staff are voiced on #freenode.
If you are currently using dircbot, be aware that dircbot will be replaced along with the ircd as it has technical issues that make it unusable on the new ircd. Dircbots functionality will instead be included in the freenode utility bot “eir.” Documentation for the replacement is available here.
To mention one last time a few things:
Finally, if you are interested in supporting the pdpc and freenode, have a look here for a special fundraiser we’re running along with the ircd-seven launch.
Thanks everyone, and we’ll see you on the other side.
You may have noticed some unusual amounts of spam over the past few days, which has had an impact on a number of channels. This spam is the result of some malicious javascript being distributed on a number of webpages which causes visitors to these pages to make a connection to freenode and send spam. While we are doing what we can to mitigate the spam, we would ask that you take a careful look at any unusual sites or URLs you might visit in the near future to be sure you are not being tricked into visiting such a site.
If you have been banned from the network after clicking on one of these links, please email klines@freenode.net with your internet-routeable IP address. Visit http://myip.dk/ and include both the IP address and hostname provided on this site. It’s also helpful if you let us know what nick you were using at the time. We will address these requests as quickly as possible, but please be patient.
It is of course never a good idea to visit a link that’s not from a trusted source. If you must do so, look into using a browser with limited or no scripting support (wget from the command line is a great solution here on linux, as is links) or using something like no-script for firefox.
If you run a channel on freenode, you might want to consider setting +R to prevent unregistered users from sending to the channel as the spambots described here will not be registered. If you do so please consider being proactive about contacting unregistered users joining your channel to ensure they get the help they need, and feel free to send them to #freenode so network staff can help them register.
For users, now is an excellent time to register your nickname and setup your client to auto-identify. You can find information about registering here. Configuring your client to auto-identify varies depending on the client, but one easy way is setting up your client to send the nickserv password as your server password. Most clients have an option for this.
It is also worth noting we will be moving to a new ircd in just 13 more days, as described here. This new ircd provides a number of exciting new capabilities including improved capability to deal with spam of all kinds, including this most recent type which is entirely mitigated by improvements in seven.
In the coming weeks, we will be migrating freenode to our new ircd, ircd-seven. Presently, freenode uses hyperion and efforts have been underway for some time move us off this platform for reasons of stability and functionality. We are now almost there.
As users please be aware that during the migration all clients will be temporarily disconnected and will need to reconnect in order to move over to the new servers. For most of you this will happen as the old servers are shut down.
Please Note: While we will copy over channel modes and topics for registered channels (there will be no changes to the services database, all nick and channel settings with services will stay the same) we are unable to do so for channels NOT registered with ChanServ. If your project utilises non-registered channels for whatever reason, please make note of the topics and modes so you can make a manual transfer of these yourselves. For more information on registering a channel, see this post.
If you operate a channel on freenode and have any concerns, feel free to stop by #freenode to discuss any issues you might have. If you run any channel utility bots, you may want to test them on the current testnet. More information can be found here.
Important Changes
There are several significant changes users should be aware of in ircd-seven:
Channel quiets are no longer a modified version of bans but are now on their own list, queried with “mode #channel q”, and as such do not appear on the normal banlist.
After the migration, we will have ssl access available on the production network.
Identifying upon connection works as before but there are two new ways to do so: specifying username:password in the server password field will allow you to login to a specific account, and SASL authentication is also available. Using SASL varies by client and is not supported in all clients.
The CAP command:
A brief summary:
For those implementing support for it, a full specification is at http://www.leeh.co.uk/draft-mitchell-irc-capabilities-02.html.
The IDENTIFY-MSG capability still exists but there is a new way to activate it. It is now part of the CAP mechanism. A script for irssi that understands both hyperion’s and seven’s identify-msg capability is available at http://adipose.attenuate.org/~stephen/ircd-seven/format_identify.pl.
The n= and i= prefixes are not used, instead ~ is prefixed to a non-identd username as is common in most other ircds.
For further information on changes that might impact you please visit http://freenode.net/seven-for-hyperion-users.html
As always, thank you for using freenode, and see you on the other side!
We are currently experiencing heavy DDoS against several locations at which some of our servers are hosted. The attack is ongoing and cause a lot of disruption, both to users of the network and unfortunately to projects/companies/individuals whose infrastructure is hosted at the same locations as us. Our sponsors and our sponsors’ upstreams are working hard to try curb the attacks as best they can.
We will try keep this page updated with any significant information as and when we receive it, however, users of the network will also be able to receive (infrequent) status updates via global notice and slightly more frequent updates via wallops for those who have chosen to go +w (/umode +w or /mode yournick +w) will enable wallops in your irc client should you wish to see these. Global notices do not work on a opt-in basis, and are restricted to information we deem important, however for those of you who have absolutely no interest in what’s going on with the network you may /ignore *!*@freenode/staff/* notices in order to prevent global notices from displaying in your client.
We apologise for the inconvenience this no doubt causes for you and your project(s) and we would like to thank you all (in particular, our very generous and dedicated sponsors) for the patience and support while the issues are still ongoing.
As you are probably aware, we’ve been facing some fairly major splits today as there have been issues between some of our major hubs. We’ve rerouted these and are working on tracing down the cause of any other splits. Please be aware, our staff are already hard at work on these issues and will resolve them as quickly as possible. Included here are 2 global notices about this matter.
-christel(i=christel@freenode/staff/exherbo.christel)-
[Global Notice] Hi all, we appear to be having some
connectivity issues with our main US hub, as a result of
this we are temporarily without services, if this affects
your channel please contact staff in #freenode for
assistance. We’re looking into the issues as we speak. Thank
you for your patience.
-christel(i=christel@freenode/staff/exherbo.christel)-
[Global Notice] Hi all, we’re having some major issues with
connectivity at the DC hosting one of our hidden hubs, I’m
going to re-route around it, which will cause about twice
as much noise as the splits already made. Apologies for the
inconvenience.
These and other issues are a large part of the reason for the upcoming migration to ircd-seven, and we still need your help in that regard. We are still in need help testing the new ircd and working out the bugs. If you would like to help out, have a look at this posting for information on how you can test the new ircd.
Thank you for using freenode, and have a great day!
We are aware of the recent DCC spam attempts, and we are working on this issue. In the meantime, please do not paste the full DCC text you recieve in #freenode (or any other channel) as in many cases it can cause you to appear as a problem yourself.
Instead, feel free to report it by first verifying (using the /whois command) that the sender is still online, and then reporting the sender in #freenode. Please be aware that #freenode is a general help channel and we need to keep it clear of general chatter in order to support the many users of freenode. If you wish to discuss anything other than an immediate support request, please find a more appropriate channel for the topic.
On this topic, please be sure to only accept DCC requests from trusted users and to be cautious about them at all times. You may wish to consider filtering out the DCC requests using your clients ignore functions, or enabling umode +C to prevent CTCP messages from being received. If you would like help with these topics feel free to stop by #freenode or your clients support channel.
As always, thank you for using freenode.