Supporting the project

The freen­ode project ex­ists to pro­vide an in­ter­ac­tive en­vi­ron­ment for co­or­di­na­tion and sup­port of peer-di­rect­ed projects, in­clud­ing those of free soft­ware and open source. Our net­work is cur­rent­ly im­ple­ment­ed us­ing In­ter­net Re­lay Chat (IRC). Our aim is to help im­prove the com­mu­nica­tive and col­lab­o­ra­tive skills of our par­tic­i­pants and to main­tain a friend­ly, ef­fi­cient en­vi­ron­ment for project co­or­di­na­tion and tech­ni­cal sup­port.

The sim­plest way in which to sup­port the project is to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing the pri­ma­ry projects that have cho­sen to reg­is­ter as groups with freen­ode.

In­di­vid­u­als can also vol­un­teer as net­work staff and or­gan­i­sa­tions could con­sid­er host­ing a serv­er.

The freen­ode project needs sol­id, well-­con­nect­ed hid­den hub and pub­lic leaf servers. We look for mul­ti­-homed con­nec­tions with sig­nif­i­cant band­width avail­able — client servers should ex­pect to sus­tain around 2-4Mbps of traf­fic, with much high­er peaks. To­tal us­age for client servers is usu­al­ly around 320 gi­ga­bytes per month, while hid­den hubs are gen­er­al­ly much low­er over­all. There­fore, we are un­able to con­sid­er of­fers of host­ing from home ca­ble/DSL con­nec­tions.

We ap­pre­ci­ate your in­ter­est in help­ing the net­work grow and your will­ing­ness to con­tribute to that process. The freen­ode net­work is not a con­ven­tion­al IRC net­work. Servers are host­ed, not linked. They are main­tained re­mote­ly from cen­tral sites. New con­fig­u­ra­tion files are gen­er­at­ed via an au­to­mat­ed script at a cen­tral lo­ca­tion, and new servers are ei­ther staged as bi­na­ry files or re­com­piled on the serv­er ac­count, de­pend­ing on ar­chi­tec­ture and oth­er fac­tors.

While we will hap­pi­ly ac­knowl­edge your con­tri­bu­tion pub­licly, we do not, as a gen­er­al rule, pro­vide O-­lines or op­er­a­tor priv­i­leges to our serv­er hosts. Host­ing can­di­dates are re­mind­ed that the util­i­ty of any giv­en serv­er de­pends on ping la­ten­cies and oth­er fac­tors which may be be­yond our con­trol. Servers may need to be delinked or re­hubbed at any time and we can­not al­ways pro­vide no­tice be­fore a serv­er is delinked.

Re­gard­less, host­ing a serv­er helps the freen­ode project and the com­mu­ni­ties and we are grate­ful that you are con­sid­er­ing it.

System Specifications

The fol­low­ing ta­ble lists min­i­mum sys­tem re­quire­ments, and, where ap­plic­a­ble de­sired spec­i­fi­ca­tions.

Required	Desired
Pentium 4 or better dedicated server	64-bit multi-core
2G RAM	2-3G or more
Debian stable

System Software

We man­age and up­date soft­ware us­ing a cen­tral­ized con­fig­u­ra­tion man­age­ment, for which we will need root ac­cess. We may cre­ate user(s) for the ircd, change core file lim­its, file de­scrip­tor lim­its, and oth­er mod­i­fi­ca­tions as nec­es­sary to sus­tain IRC con­nec­tions from thou­sands of users. We also need servers for non-ir­cd roles.

Other Requirements

While the servers are con­fig­ured and main­tained by the freen­ode in­fra­struc­ture team and we do not re­quire ac­tive in­volve­ment from fa­cil­i­ties spon­sors for the day to day run­ning of the net­work, we ask that:

• Spon­sors en­sure that we have up­-­to-­date con­tact in­for­ma­tion, on and of­fline
• Spon­sors stay sub­scribed to the freen­ode-spon­sors mail­ing list (low traf­fic, an­nounce­ments only)
• Spon­sors en­deav­our to, where pos­si­ble, give us am­ple ad­vance warn­ing about net­work, hard­ware or soft­ware up­grades and main­te­nance which may af­fect the net­work.
• Spon­sors com­mu­ni­cate rea­sons for un­ex­pect­ed down­time/main­te­nance ASAP.

Applying to Host a Server

Be­fore ap­ply­ing to host a serv­er, you may find it help­ful to speak with net­work staff. Feel free to mes­sage a freen­ode staffer with your ques­tions. Re­gard­less, the for­mal ap­pli­ca­tion process be­gins when you sub­mit an email con­tain­ing the fol­low­ing in­for­ma­tion to email ad­dress hosting@freenode.net:

• Ge­o­graph­i­cal lo­ca­tion of the serv­er — City, prin­ci­pal­i­ty and coun­try. In­clude any "lo­cal colour" (near­by land­marks and sites) that seem per­ti­nent.
• Host­ing En­ti­ty — Who should we cred­it for the serv­er? Pro­vide the name of or­gan­i­sa­tion and URL as ap­pro­pri­ate.
• Con­tact In­for­ma­tion — Please in­clude names and email ad­dress­es of con­tacts, as well as tele­phone num­bers, snail mail ad­dress­es and con­tact hours (in­clud­ing time zones).
• Hard­ware, Soft­ware, Band­width and Host­ing — Please de­scribe the sys­tem you are of­fer­ing for host­ing. Please go into as much de­tail as pos­si­ble, pro­vid­ing us with de­tails of rout­ing and NOC avail­abil­i­ty.
• IP ad­dress — this will al­low us to per­form la­ten­cy and route check­ing.
• You and freen­ode — please ex­plain what makes you/your com­pa­ny want to pro­vide host­ing for freen­ode, and what, if any­thing, you wish to get back from spon­sor­ship.
• Serv­er Name Pref­er­ence — The serv­er nam­ing mo­tif is "sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy au­thors". Van­i­ty names may be pro­vid­ed, but canon­i­cal serv­er names and stan­dard­ised ge­o­graph­i­cal names will be used ex­clu­sive­ly by freen­ode. If you have pre­ferred au­thors, let us know and we will try to ho­n­our your pref­er­ence.

freen­ode's spon­sor li­aisons try to re­spond to all serv­er ap­pli­ca­tion re­quests with­in two weeks. Please al­low this time be­fore chas­ing your ap­pli­ca­tion.

All ap­pli­ca­tions will be giv­en the same con­sid­er­a­tions and we re­gret that we may not al­ways be able to ac­cept a serv­er of­fer for what­ev­er rea­son.