For some more explanation about what is going on:
I plan to retire the current server over the next couple of years. I set it up in 2011 when I was a junior sysadmin and there are a lot of things which are not great about the way it's configured (although it works). For several reasons, IRC made the most sense to move off first.
Rather than being hosted on a single IRC server, we now have a properly distributed IRC
network, composed of four servers located in London, Frankfurt, Chicago and Atlanta. We are using geolocation-based DNS to route users in Europe to London and Frankfurt, and users in North America to Chicago and Atlanta. Users in other continents may be routed to any of the four servers.
Primarily, this provides improved availability because we have redundant servers. If one server goes down, clients will reconnect to the other one in their vicinity. I plan to use this reliability improvement to use IRC as part of a monitoring system where alerts about problems with any part of FES are announced in an IRC channel.
As another advantage, I have just rolled out an automated patching script to all the IRC servers, so that the European servers will automatically patch and reboot during European nighttime, and the American servers during American nighttime. Because we have two servers in each continent, this will not cause an outage; anyone connected to the server being patched will simply reconnect to the other one.
In the spirit of openness upon which FES is built, all of this configuration is publicly available on GitHub:
https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/ansible (server configuration)
https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/cloudformation (geolocating DNS)
We also now have our own OpenBSD package repository, because I had to patch sic to support TLS to be able to use it for monitoring the health of the IRC network:
https://assets.tfes.org/openbsd/6.4/packages/amd64/You can use this repo on your own OpenBSD systems with the public key from GitHub:
https://github.com/TheFlatEarthSociety/ansible/blob/master/roles/base/files/tfes-64-pkg.pubAlternatively, our patch for the OpenBSD sic port is available here, and you can build it yourself:
https://assets.tfes.org/openbsd/6.4/packages/sic-1.2p1tfes0.patch