[Foundation-l] Re: irc.freenode.net -> chat.freenode.net and patience

Sat Dec 17 12:07:59 UTC 2005

Florence Devouard wrote:
> Hi
> 
> If you are of the same type than I, you may have had troubles to connect 
> to any of freenode channels for the past 15 hours or so.
> It seems some irc clients mention the problem, others do not do anything 
> except for endlessly looking for the channel and not finding it (that 
> was my case).
> 
> It seems to be a spambot attack on freenode. You may try the channel 
> chat.freenode.net. It works.
> 
> Nevertheless, discussions are difficult to keep up with, due to users 
> endlessly automatically quitting and joining. Private channels are at 
> least working :-)
> 
> I only post this here to avoid being confused with a spammer, so please 
> have the information circulate as needed :-)
> 
> 
> ant

[12:59] 	<lilo>	Anthere: I believe we have the problems taken care of now
[12:59] 	<lilo>	Anthere: major clonebot attack
[13:00] 	<lilo>	Anthere: the freenode website contained a news article, 
and several major pages had information
[13:00] 	<Anthere>	link ?
[13:00] 	*	lilo hopes people will look on the website if there's a 
connectivity problem, as it may save them worry and help them get 
reconnected sooner
[13:00] 	<lilo>	http://freenode.net/
[13:00] 	<Anthere>	k
[13:01] 	<Anthere>	thanks
[13:01] 	<lilo>	there's also http://freenode.net/news.shtml
[13:01] 	<lilo>	but if you just go to the main page there's enough 
information
[13:01] 	<lilo>	Anthere: luckily, in the process of replacing the main 
rotation we were able to sniff out an approach to attacking the spambots
[13:02] 	<lilo>	Anthere: and we're just implementing that now
[13:02] 	<Anthere>	I'll post that information, so that people do not 
believe *their* computer is the problem :-)
[13:02] 	<lilo>	Anthere: it's not guaranteed to work forever though; I 
think we'll be slowly phasing in the new hostname as a way to be a 
little less high profile for conventional spambot attacks
[13:03] 	<lilo>	Anthere: we do have a new approach to try to find 
distinguishing characteristics for the clonebots, but there's no 
guarantee it will work every time
[13:03] 	<Anthere>	there was another attack pretty recently, was not it ?
[13:03] 	<Ryo_>	lilo: thanks for the work on the servers
[13:03] 	<lilo>	Anthere: there's been a spambot infestation for months; 
the spambots were tweaked on Friday and ended up on different channels

That should summarize the issue....

Anthere