Hi, Freenode has been having a rough time lately due to a series of DDoS attacks which have been increasingly disruptive to collaboration. Fortunately there's an alternative.
OFTC <URL:http://www.oftc.net/> is a robust and established alternative to Freenode. It is a smaller network whose mission statement makes it a less attractive target. It's significantly more stable than Freenode and has friendly and responsive operators. The infrastructure team has been exploring this area and we think OpenStack should move to using OFTC. This would obviously be a big change, but we think that with the following process, we can move fairly smoothly: 0) Establish channel and bot registrations on OFTC. This has already been done (for all the channels listed on the wiki and all the bots managed via the infrastructure program). That actually puts us ahead of Freenode where we still haven't managed to register all the channels we use. 1) Create an irc.openstack.org CNAME record that points to chat.freenode.net. Update instructions to suggest users configure their clients to use that alias. 2) Set a date and time for a cutover, at least several weeks out. Make multiple announcements about the move on mailing lists, blogs, etc. 3) Set channel topics in OFTC to remind people that the move has not yet occurred. Nearer to the cutover date: 4) Ask a few people (perhaps some core members of each team) to join OFTC a few days early to be there to assist anyone who shows up there and is confused. 5) On the cutover, change the CNAME and links to web clients in the wiki. The infrastructure team will switch IRC bots (including channel logging) at the cutover time as well. Send reminder announcements. 6) Ask those same people from #4 to stick around Freenode for a few weeks after the cutover to assist anyone who shows up there and is confused. 7) Set channel topics in Freenode to remind people that we have moved to OFTC. If there aren't objections to this plan, I think we can propose a motion to the TC with a date and move forward with it fairly soon. -Jim _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
