Important Server Upgrade

There will be an important server upgrade being rolled out on all of our servers this weekend due to a critical bug that has been found. Currently the bug has the ability to take the bouncer servers offline for up to 5 minutes until our auto restarter takes effect which can be very inconvenient for our users and has already been used on peach (by mistake).

We are also looking at fixing a number of other backend issues in this upgrade in order to make our servers perform better and possibly handle more connections effectively. Due to the lack of time between now and the planned date for this critical upgrade, we may not be including many new features however there will be an upgrade in the near future that will include new modules and features.

The upgrade will be taking place on Sunday 19th May 2013 and will require a restart of ALL SERVERS. To avoid too much disruption and so that we can monitor the upgrade effectively, each server will be allocated a time frame when we plan to upgrade it and restart it. The current timetable is as follows:

These times are subject to change before Saturday 18th May 2013 so please ensure that you check often and are aware of the times that servers will be offline briefly for restarts.

Inactive and Unused Account Deletion

Any inactive accounts on all of our servers will be deleted during Saturday 18th May 2013. Your account will only be deleted if the following criteria is met:

• Your account has not been accessed for 60 days or more
• Your account was accepted more than 7 days ago and has never been accessed
• Your account is on QuakeNet, Undernet, Rizon, EFNet, Mindforge or Freenode and has not been used for 30 days
• Your account was suspended and you have not appealed it in the last 7 Days

These accounts will be deleted by 17:00 GMT+0 on Saturday 18th May 2013. If your account matches one of the above criteria, you will either need to login to avoid deletion or if in the event that your account is suspended, contact us on IRC to resolve the issue. Thanks.

Information on Requests

All requests that were made 30 days ago and of which the email wasn’t verified have all been cancelled.

There should be a status update on Pear tomorrow. Please bear with us while we try to resolve this issue with our hosting provider.

Grape has moved and Coconut has merged

Earlier today a decision was made that Grape would be moved and Coconut would be merged into Grape. The main reason for this is that both servers were not being fully utilized and network speed on a number of the servers has become a concern for us as were often looking for budget providers that have a fantastic speed.

On the 13th April 2013 the replacement server was bought and 3 days were spent testing its network speed and general performance. On Tuesday 15th April the decision was made to move Grape there and merged with Coconut. Since moving, it has been incredibly obvious to us that the network speed is faster compared to our other servers given that on our fullest servers it usually takes 30 minutes to reconnect users to IRC after a restart or move, but this server managed to reconnect almost all users in around 5-10 minutes. Users from the United States will notice a considerable lack of latency and should get an exceptionally good ping to this server, even from Europe the ping and speed is beyond expected.

We hope that users from both Grape and Coconut will benefit from this server merge and move.

Inactive Accounts & The Spring 2013 Feedback Form!

Earlier this week, Inactive accounts were removed from our servers. These accounts were accounts that had not been active prior to February 1st 2013 or had never been used and were taking up necessary sessions on networks such as QuakeNet, Rizon, Freenode, EFNet and IRCNet. We are now able to accept more requests specifically to QuakeNet due to a large number of sessions being freed up on that network.

In other great news, as of the 8th April 2013 we will be cracking down on the amount of abuse that is occurring on our services. This will affect people who are persistently using multiple accounts, attempting to request multiple accounts, using proxies, Tor’s or shells to request, using proxies TOR#s or shells to access our bouncers and abusing our bouncers via many other methods. To ensure that you are complying with our terms of service, please ensure you have read http://bnc4free.com/?page_id=13 fully and carefully otherwise you may find your account suspended/removed within the next week if you are not complying with these terms.

Lastly, I have decided that BNC4FREE could benefit from feedback from our current users and even users who have used our service in the past. Such feedback will help us to know what we need to improve, what area’s work well and which area’s aren’t performing as they should be. We’ve decided the best way to do this would be to create a feedback form where you are able to rate each area or section of BNC4FREE. The form also gives you the option to describe why you think an area doesn’t work well or to describe any problems you have had with that area or to comment on why you think an area is doing well. The more feedback we get, the more helpful this will be to us and will help us know what to improve in future. You can fill out this form at http://bnc4free.com/feedback

More information regarding the service and an update on things will be posted in around a week. Stay tuned for more information.

Status Update: Strawberry

At this moment, Strawberry is currently up. There is nothing wrong with the server itself. The main IP is currently null-routed and therefore you can not connect to the server. The null-route lasts untill about 7 AM (UTC) on Saturday. The server was DDoS’d for the second time, we are currently thinking about decomissioning this server and moving it to a different host because our current host isn’t happy with the DDoS attacks.

Update: Strawberry is back. It took a bit longer than expected. All users on the main IP of Strawberry which are connected to networks that do not offer host mask cloaking have been suspended in order for us to check if any of them was the cause of the DDoS attack.

Update 2: Strawberry is currently being moved to a new server, same host though. This server has 128MB RAM more and uses different virtualization software which makes it possible for us to protect the server better and thus ensure a better uptime.

Inactive and Unused Account Deletion

Any inactive accounts on all of our servers will be deleted during Saturday 16th March 2013. Your account will only be deleted if the following criteria is met:

• Your account has not been accessed for 60 days or more
• Your account was accepted more than 7 days ago and has never been accessed
• Your account is on QuakeNet, Undernet, Rizon, EFNet, Mindforge or Freenode and has not been used for 30 days
• Your account was suspended and you have not appealed it in the last 7 Days

These accounts will be deleted by 17:00 GMT+0 on Saturday 16th March 2013. If your account matches one of the above criteria, you will either need to login to avoid deletion or if in the event that your account is suspended, contact us on IRC to resolve the issue. Thanks.

Status update regarding Mango & Pear, and new servers

Dear Users,

Mango and pear server are currently up. HOWEVER the BNC server running on them isn’t. When these are started, mango and pear will be functioning again. (lets hope Pear is more stable). Therefore, you do not need to request a NEW BNC. Besides that we have added 3 new servers. Coconut, Peach and Grape. These are currently available.

Kind regards,

BNC4FREE management

New Servers

Dear BNC4FREE Users,

Today we are likely to add 3 brand new servers. 2 servers in Germany, 1 server in the USA. These 3 servers, have a total of 13 IPv4 addresses. However it is likely that Mango or Pear might be moved onto these server. Even if that happens, we will still have vacant IP addresses and thus certain networks will be possible to request a BNC for again. We hope to have informed you properly with this post.

Kind regards,

Peter

Information regarding Recent Downtime

As is obvious to most, There has been increased downtime on Pear, Mango and Kiwi within the last week. There are several issues, some that were unavoidable as to why this occurred.

In the case of Pear, it would appear that no emails regarding the invoice being due for us to pay it were sent, therefore we didn’t know it was late and the server became suspended. As of yet, we have not been able to get this un-suspended by the host and are currently looking into why no invoices were emailed to us.

In the case of Mango, it would appear that the same provider upon realizing that this one invoice was overdue, suspended all the services we had rather than just the one that was overdue. Once again, we are trying to resolve that issue.

In the case of Kiwi, there appears to be a strange bug with either the bouncer software or software on the server that is causing the bouncer to crash during DNS Look ups. This generally happens when a user connects to an IRC network although there is no specific user causing the crash. We attempted to fix this by running it in debug and blocking any signals that would possibly cause the bouncer to crash. However, in doing this it seems that our bouncer completely froze when it hit this bug during debug and used up all the CPU and Memory on the server, forcing us to reboot the server. There may or may not be future downtime of this server depending if the issue arises again. We are continually looking into what started this bug occurring during the last 2 weeks.

There is also a new server being added between the 1st-4th March 2013. If all else fails with Kiwi and other servers, we may be able to move some users onto the new server once it is online. We apologize for the inconvenience these downtime issues are causing for some users.