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freenode is dead, long live freenode

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

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!

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Posted in community, development, different, freenode, infrastructure, pdpc, projects, technical | 7 Comments »

Connecting to freenode using Tor: SASL

Friday, January 29th, 2010

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:

  • The only Tor hidden service is: the new p4fsi4ockecnea7l.onion.
  • You will need to have a registered and verified NickServ account to connect using Tor. Beyond this, no further steps are necessary.
  • You will need to use a SASL mechanism to identify to the server.

We have collected together scripts for irssi and mirc, while Conspire supports SASL natively. Scripts may be available for other clients in addition.

irssi

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.

mirc

A mirc script is available, taken from a forum post by Kyle Travaglini. You can retrieve the source here.

Instructions (adapted from that forum):

  • Place SASL.dll and sasl.mrc into your $mircdir.
  • Load sasl.mrc into your remotes.
  • Press F2 and configure the network, before connecting as usual.

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!

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freenode Network Services Cleanup and Changes.

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

As announced previously, we have recently (as of Thursday, June 10th) pruned our nickserv and chanserv databases.  We also performed some additional updates and modifications.  While the most obvious change of this will be that any nicks older than 60 days have been dropped, there have been some additional changes implemented as well.  In addition, we have added a new webchat service for users who wish to irc from behind a firewall disallowing a more direct connection.  You can try it out here!

First, we have made a modification to make it easier to identify, as long as your client supports a server password.  Previously, users were able to identify by using a registered nick and sending the password for that registered nick as their server password.   You can also now identify on connect regardless of nick by providing both your account name and password, as follow: “/connect irc.freenode.net 6667 :mquin uwhY8wgzWw22-zXs.M39p.”  This will identify you upon connection.

As a result of this change, we have removed the requirement to group an alternate nick before requesting an unaffiliated cloak.  The requirements for a cloak are outlined here.

Group Contacts are welcome to check in with us within the next 4 weeks to resolve any issues that may have arisen as a result of the pruning.   If you are a group contact, and have any issues as a result of this maintenance, feel free to drop in to #freenode and ask for assistance.

As always, thank you for using freenode, and have a great day!

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[Scheduled Maintenance] Services database clear-out.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

This is just to let you know that we will soon be performing a fairly substantial cleanup of the NickServ and ChanServ databases.

We’ll be dropping all expired nicknames. As explained in the FAQ, nicknames on freenode expire after 60 days. Nicks that are at least two weeks old and that were last used less than two hours after their creation are also considered to be expired.

There are a few things you should know about this cleanup process:

  1. It will take place at 9am UTC on Thursday  11th June 2009.
  2. It may take a little while. We prune the database infrequently and it’s grown fairly large sine the last time.
  3. A channel for which all contacts are expired will be deleted. If your channel is active but your contacts are not, please let us know by midnight Wednesday 10th June (again, UTC) and we’ll try make special arrangements.
  4. We will try avoid expiring project cloaked user nicknames.
  5. Grouped alternate nicknames which are considered to be expired will be dropped.
  6. If you’ve not used your grouped nick much, or you haven’t used it recently, it may be expired.
  7. Please make sure your bots identify to NickServ or its registration may be lost.
  8. Be sure to do the canonical setup so you don’t lose your nicks and channels. Please follow these canonical nickname setup instructions to make sure that your nicknames and channels aren’t lost through disuse.

Please make sure your nick(s) are set up properly before Thursday and that you’ve spoken with freenode staff to resolve any outstanding channel and nick issues. Thanks for your understanding, and thank you for using freenode.

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2008/2009 fundraiser campaign update

Monday, March 9th, 2009

[UPDATE]

 We are down to only £241.60 needed after matching!  Thank you for your generosity!

[END UPDATE]

So close, yet so far away…
As you are probably aware, we are coming up on the end of our 2008/2009 fundraising campaign.  First, let us thank all of you who have already donated. We appreciate every one of you!  While we are very close to our goals, we just wanted to take a moment to update everyone on just how close, and what exactly it means.

While the goal of £5,000.00 seems rather arbitrary, the reality is quite different.  Our current target will enable us to keep the charity status we’ve had in the past, which among other things enables our sponsers to realize certain tax benefits.  This helps cover the costs they pay in providing us the servers which are of course vital to freenode.  While the graph on the freenode.net homepage indicates that we have £2300 to go, this does not include the potential £1700 of matched donations from Canonical — which means that the actual amount we need you to help us raise totals only £600!  At present, we have just a few weeks left to raise this but we are so very close, so if you would like to be generous now is the time.

Now, while the number is imposed by the charity requirement, our needs are not.  Quite a few users have made it known they would like to know more about what we will do with any funds not used directly for current pdpc costs.  Among other things, we are looking at hosting live conference events in Europe and the US, as well as some efforts to extend the sort of services we offer to the projects currently using our facilities. In addition to this, we would like to look at ways of improving the reliability of the freenode network by hosting a few of our own hubs and backup services systems.

As a reminder, all donations received at this time (up to £1700) are being matched by Canonical, so every donation you send is doubled!  We are hugely grateful for their help and generosity in our efforts, and would like to thank Mark and Canonical, and the entire Ubuntu community once again.

As always, thanks to each and every one of you for using freenode.

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New servers

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Hi all,

Over the past couple of months we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to add a couple of new servers to freenode’s rotation. Namely, lindbohm (IPv6: denis) and hubbard, sponsored by Stockholm University and Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club, respectively. Thanks to all of our sponsors for keeping the network online.

If you’re interested in sponsoring a server for freenode, take please take a look at our website to see what the process entails and don’t hesitate to ask me (Martinp23) or christel for any further information at all.

Thanks for using freenode! :)

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[Maintenance] Downtime warning — lem, orwell

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Hi all,

Tomorrow evening, November 3rd 2008, at 22:00GMT we will be undertaking some routine maintenance on two of our client servers, lem and orwell, both servers have already been taken out of rotation. The downtime window is set to one (1) hour, but we anticipate that the upgrades will take less time. At time of posting we have approximately 2,000 users across the two servers, and while we will urge users to connect to a different server prior to the upgrades we realise that not everyone will be able to act on the notice in time and as such we expect to see some disturbances on the network at the time of the upgrade.

Thank you for using freenode!

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50,000 Active Users

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Howdy, folks! At 19:40 UTC+1 today, freenode reached 50,000 active users online, which is a record for us!

Freenode reached 40,000 users a little over a year ago, so we’re really going from strength to strength! Thanks to all of you who’ve helped us build our community over the last year, and we’d like to invite you to #defocus to help us celebrate. :)

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Who Are freenode Staff? (Part 1 of ?)

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

As you have undoubtedly noticed by now, freenode recently changed services. Along with this new look, we thought it would be a good time to formally (and perhaps not-so-formally) announce the addition of new staff. You’ll find below a list of all our current staff, and in this post and some that follow, we’ll give you a tiny snapshot of the new (and some of the old) members of our circus^Wteam.

Current freenode staff:

AndrewB
chb
christel
cybersystem
Dave2
denny
DLange
dmwaters
Exstatica
Ganneff
Gary
jenda
JonathanD
Karlprof
kloeri
Lorez
Martinp23
Matt
Md
nalioth
njan
numist
PhilKC
pinpoint
PriceChild
RichiH
seanw
Sejo
skenmy
SportChick
Stx
stylus
tomaw
Udontknow
vorian
weasel
werdan7
wimt
Yaakov

And now, for a little insight on a couple of individuals:

  • christel: If by now, you don’t know christel…well, where have you been?! For the last couple of years, she has been the head of staff of freenode and has seen it through many changes. No, freenode is not yet pink (though if she had her way, it would be entirely pink – you can thank some of the male staffers for preventing that so far). She did once say that if she were to leave a job in a flamboyant manner, she’d simply go to work in pink body paint. Her secret desire has always been to become a Russian spy…however, being from Norway, she’s had to settle for being self-employed and an irc mogul in her spare time. She got her start on irc nearly half her lifetime ago, creating havoc on EfNet and running up her dial-up internet bills.
  • vorian: One of the more recent additions to staff, vorian’s first experience on irc was starting up a Local (Ubuntu) Community team in 2006. Though married (for 10 years!) and with four children, he clearly wasn’t busy enough. A long-time wolf-bot addict, vorian has announced his goal for the future of freenode – creating a unified wolf-bot game where everyone plays by the rules, pays strict attention, and always has a minimum of 8 players per round (this replaces his former goal of becoming a jet pilot AND nurse for the navy).


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A very brief mention of upcoming changes..

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

As you are probably aware we are in the process of rehauling the IRCd and Services software running on freenode. While hyperion and theia have served us well for a significant amount of time they are also starting to struggle under the weight of our rapid growth (we recently hit 43,000 users, which is a number we hadn’t anticipated – that’s 15,000 more users than we had a year ago).

We are of course pleased that our numbers are growing and that more and more people and projects are finding a use for freenode; it’s a fantastic feeling to be able to give something back to the wider FOSS community.

Services wise, we’re currently testing new services on testnet and are close to letting you all loose over there for wider testing before we introduce the new services to the production network. Now, there will be a few changes, and while most of them won’t be noticeable, I felt it was a good idea to remind you of a couple of things.

  • Expiration policy. In accordance with freenode policy a nickname which has been unused for 60 days or longer is classed as expired and can be dropped. At present we occasionally do a DB clean-up and remove unused nicks, but individual drops are also done by request when a user wishes to use a nick which has expired. Now, I’d like to stress that for a registered nick to remain registered and not expire you will need to identify to nickserv at least once every 60 days. So if you don’t wish to lose your nickname in a DB clean-up or a manual drop, please ensure that you identify.
  • E-mail address. Our current services package does not require a valid e-mail address for registration, and we currently only require a set e-mail address before setting up a generic cloak. When new services go live this will change and a valid e-mail address will be required for registration. I would therefore like to encourage you to set a valid e-mail address in your nickserv info at your earliest convenience. This can be done by issuing the following command: /msg nickserv set email you@domain.tld. If you want to set your e-mail address as private (visible only to yourself and freenode staff) you can do so: /msg nickserv set hide email on

If as many people as possible can follow the above advice I’d be grateful – it would make the migration a lot easier for us, as well as for our users.

Expirations and e-mails aside, we’ve had a lot of feedback from projects and users who would like to see some changes to the services package – among other things a web-based frontend to services has been mentioned over and over again, particulary for project management. Group contacts would like a way to manage their project namespace, set project related cloaks, and the like. We are looking into OpenID and how to help users and projects which want to more easily integrate, for example, bugzilla and similar with their IRC infrastructure. We’re also trialling a new procedure for verifying group contact forms that may help to reduce the backlog somewhat; over the next few weeks we’ll be trying it out with a portion of the current queue.

In addition to everything I’ve mentioned, we’ve heard some really great ideas and suggestions for further improvement originating from our users, so I thought I’d ask you all what you would put on your wishlist. What can freenode do to better serve the communities? How can we improve irc as a communication and development tool for your project? For your users? I’d love to hear any ideas you may have and would love it if you dropped me a line to ideasATfreenodeDOTnet

Before I wrap up, I’d like to apologise for the instability of the network over the past few days. We have been under a pretty heavy DDoS attack, though hopefully it has all settled down by now. I’d like to thank our fantastic sponsors for the swift manner in which they dealt with things their end, for their continued support and for pulling together to ensure that we have the data required to pass on to the relevant authorities.

It’s pretty rare for us to be on the recieving end of an attack like that, and I sincerely hope it will turn out to be an isolated incident.

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