GNOME Community,
the GIMPNet Operators Team and the GNOME Sysadmin Team have been
working together recently to finally migrate the IRC network they
manage to a newer ircd with enhanced features (such as SSL) and proper
IRC services (Nickserv, Chanserv).
We are proud to announce the network is finally ready for public
testing. Please read on if you are interested in participating on its
launch.
The new network is currently composed by 6 servers and another one
(irc.poop.nl) will join its ranks soon:
irctest0.acc.umu.se
irctest2.acc.umu.se
irctest3.acc.umu.se
irctest4.acc.umu.se
irc.eagle.y.se
irc.gimp.ca
Connecting to any of these servers can be done on the following ports:
6668 (non-ssl port)
6697 (SSL port)
An irc-test.gnome.org and irc-test.gimp.org DNS entries have also been
added to the gnome.org and gimp.org DNS zone files. You can safely
connect to one of them and your client will do the rest. Servers
are using a certificate having one DN (currently being the FQDN of the
host) so connecting to one of the two DNS entries above with SSL
verification turned on will result in an error as the DN won't match.
That is expected, in case you are willing to verify the SSL
certificate (on XChat make sure the 'Accept invalid certificate'
flag is not set, on irssi make sure '-ssl -ssl_verify' is appended to
your connect command) make sure to connect to a single server on the
list above with the proper flags set. The Operators Team is currently
evaluating whether the network can be moved under one main wildcard
certificate (in the form of irc[0-9].gimp.org).
Once connected, make sure to register your nickname by querying
NickServ. A 'help' command can be issued to NickServ when a query
window has been created. The 'help' will provide you the needed
information for succesfully registering your nickname. If you are a
GNOME module maintainer or you lead a certain team or group and are
interested in registering a channel through ChanServ please do so.
The same 'help' command output provided by ChanServ will provide you
the appropriate syntax for registering your channel. Please DO NOT
abuse the registration of new channels and please get in touch with the
Operators Team for requesting the cancellation of a registered
channel / nickname in case an abuse has happened.
Your points of contact for reporting issues or other related queries
are:
#opers, for a direct chat with the Operators Team
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=sysadmin&component=IRC,
for reporting a bug at GNOME's Bugzilla
A few more details about the new network we are introducing:
1. It might definitely happen for your client to connect to the
network through the SSL port and ending up on an empty channel.
Don't be scared as that's expected as in most cases the ircd runs
on the same server as the current production network. Note the
current production network is not SSL-capable.
2. Most of the servers (while just irc.poop.nl was in the past)
are now IPv6-capable.
3. All nicks and channels registered during the public testing
will be kept.
4. Another announcement will follow when we will be close to
switch over to the new network. The announcement will have
all the references and details for you to properly migrate
your client to the new network.
5. The public testing duration is expected to be 2 weeks and
unless any critical issue arises we will move forward and
perform the switch over to the new network. See point 4. on
this regard.
IRC plays an important role on the communications of the GNOME Project
and allows every single GNOME contributor, developer or user to get in
touch with the GNOME community as a whole and we totally believe the
new network we've been building will improve the way you were used to
manage your nickname, your channels and your privacy thanks to the
newly introduced SSL capability.
--
Cheers,
Andrea
Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman
Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av
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