Month: June 2021

Midsummer Special

Off by 1 (week). Gilt noch, würde ich sagen. Deshalb treffen wir uns zum letzten Treffen in diesem Sommersemester am Montag, den 28. Juni, zum ungezwungenen Gedankenaustausch.

Themenkandidaten sind moderne Alternativen für altbekannte Unix-Commands (wie z.B. grep, find, top), unseren neuen IRC-Server und auch sicher die Libera vs. Freenode-Debatte. Wer ein spannendes Projekt hat, welches gepitched werden möchte, sollte nicht zögern, es bei unserem Treffen vorzustellen.

Das Treffen wird wieder online über Jitsi stattfinden. Um teilzunehmen, muss im Browser nur die URL https://fhLUG.at/meet aufgerufen werden.

Was: Semesterabschluss
Wann: 28. Juni 2021, ab 19:00
Wo: https://fhLUG.at/meet

Weitere Details und Berichte sind auf https://fhLUG.at zu finden.

In kleiner Runde wurden wieder eine Vielzahl von Themen besprochen, unter anderem:

Es war wie immer sehr spannend. Wir sehen uns wieder im Herbst, hoffentlich auch wieder vor Ort am Campus!

Why Our IRC Moved to Libera Chat

As you might or might not have noticed, lately there has been a lot of discussion on the interwebz regarding IRC networks.

In May, Libera Chat split from the former Freenode network. Accusations were made on both sides of the argument, but many (FOSS) projects already moved away from Freenode to Libera Chat. Our small and cosy channel #fhLUG didn’t make the move immediately, not wanting to politicize the issue. We decided to stay and see how everything works out. Freenode was still the network with the most users at the time and we wanted to be discoverable for our visitors.

On May 25 – the International Towel Day – several channels I was part of suddenly had their topic changed by freenode staff, dropping access lists and creating “mirror channels” without any ops. As it turns out, this not only affected a handful of channels, but 700+ others which had the word “libera” in their topic. Not very classy, but whatever. I was still willing to stay. We eventually got some of the channels back and #fhLUG was not affected (The Neo keyboard layout‘s channel #neo, however, was).

Fast forward another 3 weeks to June 15. Without warning, except for a global network notice a few hours earlier, all user accounts and all channels were deregistered/dropped by Freenode, then active connections forcefully disconnected. Less than 12 hours later, all old servers were fully shut down and no longer available. We no longer have access to our channel, all our user accounts are gone. We cannot trust a network whose owners purge user accounts and channels on a whim without warnings or announcements. As of yet, there has not been published an official statement explaining why this happened or what the plan is/was.

Complaints by understandably frustrated users are mostly met with kick-banning the users or scoffing at them, telling them to go back to Libera if they do not like how Freenode handles its users.

Well, that’s what we are doing. We are no longer interested in participating in such a chaotic network. You can find our IRC channel at Libera Chat. All our regulars are already there. If you aren’t, join the network and say hi.