Moving IRC service bots to OFTC this weekend (was: Reevaluating choice of IRC network for our service bots)

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2021-05-21 19:29:46 +0000 (+0000), Jeremy Stanley wrote:
[...]
> Because the OpenDev Collaboratory exists to serve the projects it
> hosts, input from project representatives and the Advisory Council
> is critical in deciding major changes to services.
[...]

We've now heard back from three of the five confirmed Open
Infrastructure Projects (Kata, Zuul and OpenStack). This seems like
a sufficient majority to determine that we should relocate our IRC
service bots from Freenode to OFTC according to our long-standing
evacuation plan. The Zuul contributors indicated a preference for
moving as soon as possible, and OpenStack's leadership suggested
this weekend; it's a holiday weekend for many of their contributors
and their channels won't be as heavily used during that time anyway,
so gaps in logged discussions and notifications are more easily
tolerated. This also gives us a few more days to polish up the code
and config changes for our bots in order to ensure a reasonably
smooth transition.

For a majority of users, this move should be as simple as replacing
"chat.freenode.net" with "irc.oftc.net" in their client settings,
but read on for relevant caveats.

Nick registration won't be strictly required to join any channels
we're managing on OFTC, at least not initially (and hopefully never
unless spammers become a significant problem for us there), however
users are encouraged to go ahead and claim the nicks they want and
register them with OFTC's NickServ sooner rather than later:

    https://www.oftc.net/Services/#register-your-account

Do note that the SASL auth mechanism supported by Freenode is not
available on OFTC, but you can still send an identify message to
NickServ after connecting or set up certificate authentication for
your connection instead. See the OFTC Services FAQ for details on
these and other topics (like how to request control of an abandoned
nick if the one you want was already taken by someone else but is
apparently unused for some time):

    https://www.oftc.net/FAQ/Services/

There's also a marvellous write-up on the zuul-discuss mailing list
about using the Element WebUI to connect via Matrix's OFTC bridge,
for anyone who's interested in giving that a try instead of using a
traditional client and/or "bouncer" solution:

    http://lists.zuul-ci.org/pipermail/zuul-discuss/2021-May/001613.html

Please be aware that one of the tasks I'm personally planning for
over the next few days is to scrape a copy of all the channel topics
and apply them automatically to the channels we've pre-registered on
OFTC, so at least for now please refrain from changing your channel
topics to anything other than what you'll want them to appear a on
the new network. Further, there have been numerous reports of
Freenode staff taking over any channels which mention in their
topics that they're moving to a different network, therefore it
would help if some volunteers can stay connected to Freenode (most
modern IRC clients are capable of connecting to multiple networks
simultaneously) and joined to our more popular channels there to
help direct stragglers to our new home.

We'll have somewhat of a delay in bootstrapping channel-specific
operators since we want to push those through code review (in order
to avoid having to trust that people on a new network are really who
they say they are), so if you need a channel topic updated or a
problem user banned in the short term you'll need to reach out to
the sysadmins in the #opendev channel on OFTC for assistance until
we get the general admins and ops settled in.

I'll be following up shortly with a reply to the threads I started
on the project-specific discussion lists directing them to this
announcement. Further updates will be limited to the service-discuss
mailing list, so please respond here with any questions or comments.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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