Following our successful switch of cloaking on our web gateway (http://webchat.freenode.net) to show the full IP address of connecting users (see this blog post), we have decided to transition our old and relatively unused Java client (pjIRC) to our webchat service. This will be done via a HTTP redirect.

Only around 30 users at a time can be found from the java client, hence as time goes on it makes less and less sense to continue to support this platform. We’ll be decommissioning the Java client on Sun 8th August.

Other pjIRC instances which connect to freenode will be unaffected. We are simply removing our version of the program.

If you’ve any concerns, queries or comments we’d love to hear from you either in #freenode or via support at freenode.net.

While talking online is great, meeting in person presents brand new opportunities… and we would like to meet you!

In 4 days (on June 19th, 2010), a number of us as well as members of the community in general will be meeting up for a conference in Rochester, NY, at Rochester Institute of Technology.  We are greatly looking forward to this awesome new opportunity.

Fosscon features 14 talks and 4 workshops. Below are just a few examples.

Free and Open in Education; More than just Software – Charles Profitt

Making the Most of Communities – Bryan Ostergaard

OpenStreetMap – Richard Weait

Linux in Business – Karlie Robinson

Resume Building Workshop with RIT’s Office of Co-Op and Placement

And many others, as well as Bird of a Feather sessions and an exhibition hall full of local users groups and interesting organizations.

We hope to see you there. Visit http://fosscon.org/ for more info or http://fosscon.org/register to sign up.

For a long time, freenode has utilised a Group Registration system to give groups (such as companies and open source projects) the ability to manage channels in the primary namespace (ie, channels beginning with a single “#”) and to give contributors to their projects cloaks. Perhaps more importantly, the system allows groups to retain control of their identity on freenode. It is because of this aspect of Group Registration that filing a Group Registration Form (GRF) has been necessary for projects to acquire primary channels which have been already registered. For the same reason, we ask those who register new primary channels to file a form.

A great number of fantastic projects use freenode. Only a small subset of staff are able to handle GRFs, and in combination with the large volume of forms filed we have developed a significant backlog. We realise that because of this backlog, certain groups are unable to claim channels on freenode which should rightfully be theirs. While we appreciate that many projects have been waiting months or years for a form to be processed, we must consider GRFs filed in order to obtain channel ownership for a legitimate project to be a priority – if you’re in the former position and not the latter, I hope you can see why.

At this stage, we are hoping to move through these priority requests in the coming weeks (and, depending on volume, months), before moving on to other requests. If you are a prospective group contact who has filed a GRF form before and you fall into the priority group (to be clear: you are in the priority group only if you need the GRF to be processed in order for you to gain access to the #group or #project channel on freenode), please email us at grfprocess at freenode dot net. The email should contain your IRC nick and your group’s name – no other personal information should be sent. We will soon be in touch regarding “next steps”.

If you want to help us to provide a top class service to groups, please consider getting involved with development of our new Group Management System (GMS).

Finally, a quick word of gratitude to those who have been waiting for GRFs to be filed for a long period of time. Thank you for your patience – we will move on to processing your requests as soon as we are able, and will let you know when via this blog and network wallops. Thanks for choosing freenode

Webchat has always presented an interesting problem, mostly for the staff of various channels as well as the network itself, but indirectly for all our users as well.  All webchat connections come from the IP address of the webchat service.  This results in them having to be handled a little bit differently from other connections.

To begin with, there needs to be a way for network or channel staff to identify individual connections, as well as where they originated from.  The way this has previously been handled is by encoding the IP of the source (the IP someone uses to connect to the webchat) in hexadecimal form in the ident field of the user.  The webchat users are “cloaked” (that is, their real hostname, which would be that of the webchat server, is replaced) with a unique string identifying the connection.  This method allows channel staff to ban or quiet a webchat user via the unique connection string, or via the ident information.

While this works, it’s confusing to many. The unique connection string changes every time a user makes a new connection through webchat. Therefore, we’ve changed how we do the cloaking so IPs are shown in cloaks. This makes it much simpler for channel staff to see what is going on, and who is who. For now, this change only applies to those using the freenode webchat at http://webchat.freenode.net. The effect is to change a cloak of the form “gateway/web/freenode/x-iiqzrxiqfnnglqji” to the form “gateway/web/freenode/ip.171.205.239.16“.

We would like to point out that this does not in any way reduce the privacy of users of webchat: it has always been possible for anyone to directly convert the encoded ident string back to an IP address. In addition, the real hostnames of clients have always been visible unencoded in the “whois” output for the user.

In addition, we have made a small but potentially significant change to how the “ident” is shown. This has become necessary so that, with future versions of our ircd, we can properly limit connections per IP address via webchat. For a typical freenode webchat user, the full hostmask previously had the form “~abcdef1@gateway/web/freenode/...“. Many historical webchat bans and quiets are set as “*!~abcdef1@gateway/web/freenode/*“. The change that we are making will break these bans. We have removed the ~ from the ident for all webchat connections (not just freenode’s webchat), giving a full mask of the form “abcdef1@gateway/web/freenode/ip.171.205.239.16“.

As such, channel ops are advised to adjust their bans into the form of either “*!abcdef1@gateway/web/freenode/*” or “*!*@gateway/web/freenode/ip.171.205.239.16” as soon as possible.

A further result of this change is that those hosts from which a large number of legitimate users connect to freenode through the webchat service may suffer refused connections due to breaching the limits. If you find youself faced by an error of the form “Too many connections”, please email iline at freenode dot net with details of the IP address affected (which can be obtained from www.whatismyip.org), the name of the organisation, and the number of connections expected, so that we can place a limit exemption. Please note that if you have a message of the form “Gateway connections are currently blocked” or “Gateway connections are currently being throttled”, this is a different matter for which an I:line cannot help.

We hope that these changes make connections through the freenode webchat easier to manage for channel ops and more transparent for all users.

For many years now, freenode has offered projects and userbases on the network the option of registering themselves as “Groups”.  Each of these groups has one or more designated people as their “Group Contacts”, who are the point of contact for freenode-staff<=>group liasion, and are thus able to contact staff to request that cloaks be set, or to request assistance in administering channels.

We now have several hundred registered groups on freenode, and many more groups for which registration requests have been submitted.  There is a rather large backlog of these requests, but this will reduce dramatically once GMS has been completed, tested, and deployed (on which note, if you think you can give some time to help code it, get in touch!). An aim of the groups policy is to foster good relationships between groups and staff.

This is where the Groups Advisory Board (GAB) comes in – immediately, for approved GCs!  This is a way in which we would like to give groups a role in influencing the direction that freenode, and the PDPC, will follow in the future with regards to group and project related policy.  The GAB is completely optional and brings with it no committment. It is open to all group contacts who would like to be members. The GAB is effectively a consultation forum where staff can get feedback from groups. As well as improptu discussions on IRC, discussions will take place on a mailing list and occasional, optional IRC meetings will be arranged. If you’re interested in giving your group a greater voice in the management of freenode, speak to staff in #freenode, or drop an email to support NOSPAM at freenode.net, and we’ll sign you up to the freenode-groups mailing list and invite you to #freenode-gab.

Thanks!

There are two pdpc-related events coming up in the Northeast US we’d like to make you aware of. The first is the second “geeknic++” camping trip, to be held May 21st-23rd in Worthington State Forest, NJ.  Last year, there was much fun to be had as geeks (and their families) from all over the Northest gathered for 2 nights of camping in a New Jersey State forest.  This year there is a new location, but more of the same fun.  See http://geeknic.org/?p=91 for details. The trip is only $20 for adults, and kids under 18 are free.

Second, is our very first fosscon, a free and open source conference organized by and for the foss community.  This event will be held June 19th in Rochester NY.  Lots of interesting speakers are lining up but there is still room for more if you have an interesting topic of your own, and sponsorship opportunities are still available.  Visit http://fosscon.org for more details on this exciting event.

We hope to see you at one or both of these great events!

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:

• 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!

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:

• Usermode +u is no longer present. You are able to join more channels without it.
• Channel mode +R is no longer present. “/mode #channel +q $~a” will have the same effect. If you find, post-migration, that your channel which was previously +R no longer has that mode, please check your quiets list: “/mode #channel +q”
• SSL will be on ports 7000 and 7070. You can grab the root ca certificate here.
• Post-migration, ChanServ may be in some channels she normally does not inhabit. This will be a hang-over from the mode transfer, and will be temporary until services is restarted.

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.