IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

The KVIrc team has issued an update of their IRC client although it’s technically still at RC2.

The update is recommended for all users of the freenode IRC network that experience problems with “Excess Flood” disconnects from the network, mostly due to autojoining a large number of channels where the client automatically issues a series of commands (/WHO, gets channelmodes and lists of bans as well as ban and invite exemptions) – neither of those events have been rate-limited in the past.

Just as announced, the migration away from the aged hyperion IRCd to the new ircd-seven started at 7:30am UTC – here’s a short summary of the events:

5 minutes early, christel of freenode staff announced via Global that she’s preparing the move:

-christel- [Global Notice] Good morning all! As you are aware we’re about to start the migration over to ircd-seven shortly, I am about to take a snapshot of the services database and copy across topics and channelmodes (bans, invexes etc). This means that any changes you make to channel modes or services after this point (on hyperion) will be lost. We’ll be a bit noisy as the migration goes on and will global to keep you updated. Thanks for your patience

ircd-seven, the IRCd that is going to replace the aged hyperion IRCd currently in use on freenode, is in the final stages of testing.

After being in the public testing phase for over one year, it seems it is finally ready to go into production use on the network.

In an announcement, freenode staff write that after “extensive testing by users and staff, we are now preparing for the switch-over which is taking place at the end of this month” and that they’d like to thank “those of you who have helped test, those who have botted the testnet and in particular those who have helped us find and iron out bugs”.

What many have suspected has now been confirmed – the root cause of the many netsplits on the freenode IRC network during the last days have been caused by ongoing DDoS attacks on their sponsors.

Freenode staffer JonathanD writes in their blogpost that they are experiencing a “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 whos infrastructure is hosted at the same locations as us” but also writes that they are “working hard to try curb the attacks as best they can.”

Not only was (and is) Freenode being hit by some bored kiddy – to add insult to the injury they’re currently experiencing major stability issues, resulting in many netsplits throughout the day.

As JonathanD writes in their most-recent blogpost they’ve been “facing some fairly major splits today as there have been issues between some of our major hubs” and that they’ve “rerouted these and are working on tracing down the cause of any other splits” and that their “staff are already hard at work on these issues and will resolve them as quickly as possible”.