SurgeHost, SDXHost and ConnectTek Merged

In the past few months we have had our services bot on SDXHost, SurgeHost and ConnectTek where you have been able to request your free bnc’s and gain support. On Saturday 19th June 2010, SDXHost and SurgeHost have merged with ConnectTek. You will now need to connect to irc.connecttek.net to request your Free BNC or one of our other official networks.

ConnectTek is where all of our staff are most active so your best trying this network if you are in need of support.

Support Forum Launched

BNC4FREE would like to inform all its users that we now have a support forum ofwhich you can gain information about our services, post your problems, idea’s and suggestions, ban appeals and more. You can visit the forum at http://forum.bnc4free.com/.

BNC4FREE has also been on Twitter for some considerable time and some of our updates are posted there even if they are not posted here, you can find us by going on Twitter and search for ‘BNC4FREE’ or you can find us directly by visiting http://twitter.com/BNC4FREE.

BNC4FREE has recent inherited a server in Toronto, CA and may soon have a bnc server on it. We’ve realised that some users that live in europe are on servers in the united states and vice-verser so throughout the summer we will be giving users the oppertunity to switch to a server nearer to them (session limit permitting).

BNC4FREE would like to inform all BNC users on UnderNet (irc.undernet.org) that there have been considerable issues lately with connection throttling on some servers which has resulted in K-Lines. These are usually started by failing to send a Challenge Response. Please can you either make sure that your BNC’s default nickname isnt the same as you registered one of make use of the ‘perform’ module which can be loaded by using ‘/bnc loadmod perform’ and then add your authentication details. Use ‘/msg *perform help’ for information.

Revival and Updates!

BNC4FREE has lacked some dedicated and commited staff lately and this has led to the service becoming very un-reliable and buggy. As owner and founder of the service, i personally do not like seeing the service so un-reliable and unsupported and will admit that i havent been paying full attention to it myself. However, BNC4FREE is going to remain a free service for many more years and i am determined to revive the service back it to its stable and reliable state. I have already anticipated that this may take some time due to the fact the staff are inactive for one reason or another. The plan of action is generally as outlined below:

All servers are going to be closely monitored and checked for reliability. If a server fails, please can you report it to Russell via Private Message in #bnc4free on our main irc network (irc.surgehost.net). This helps to find patterns in its crashes or buggy periods and also informs us sooner rather than later. If any servers are seen to be continously failing, we will make arrangements to buy a new server and move all users from the buggy or faulty server onto the new server. Users will be contact via email in the event of this occuring.

Note: With regards to il.us.bnc4free.com and dk.eu.bnc4free.com, some of the user data was lost from both of these servers and we only have backups from February/March. We do appologize for this and this is due to lack of monitoring on our part. We will be restoring the backup of il.us.bnc4free.com onto our new server (tx.us.bnc4free.com) during the course of this week. All users that were on this bnc will be emailed informing them of the change. With regards to pa.us.bnc4free.com, we have had some news on whats causing our dedicated server to crash from 1and1’s Data Centre Team. Some of the users on this BNC will be moved to improve the entire servers stability. The relevant users will be emailed when this change occurs.

This week we will be opening staff applications ofwhich will be reviewed daily. Applicants that we feel would make good staff members will be immediatly placed on the staff team and monitored until we are sure that they can be trusted and dedicated to their staff position. Staff will be expected to help everyone involved with BNC4FREE and monitor the servers usages to prevent abuse.

BNC4FREE Operates on a few networks ofwhich we expect users that currently have a bnc with us to idle on. Currently, there are not many users abiding by this very small and simple rule. We dont ask for much, so it would be nice if you could just respect this rule and idle on the channel that we ask you to idle on as per our Terms and Conditions. You can currently idle in #bnc4free on the following IRC Networks:

• SurgeHost - irc.surgehost.net
• SDXHost - irc.sdxhost.com
• GTANetwork - irc.gtanet.com
• Rizon - irc.rizon.net
• ConnectTek - irc.connecttek.net

If you are idling on this channel on any other network, it does not count as abiding by our terms and conditions! So make sure you are one of the above networks!!

BNC4FREE is currently looking for someone that Dutch that can finish translating our dutch version of the site at bnc4free.nl. The help would be much appreciated and rewards will be given to those that help! Contact russell[at]bnc4free.com if you think your the one that could do this.

Over the next few weeks, we will be introducing a few new servers and reviewing the whole way that bnc4free works. We will also be introducing web and email requests and upgrading our servers throughout the next few months. If you have any suggestions for BNC4FREE, you can email me at russell[at]bnc4free.com and it will be considered and looked into.

More Updates and Information will be posted pretty much daily so keep your eyes open and check back soon!

Further Problems…

Some of you may have noticed that our downtime is still ongoing with a couple of our servers. Today’s unlucky server is de.eu.bnc4free.com which seems to be down. This is due to the VPS that were running the server on terminating itself for some unknown reason. In conjuction with that problem, we’ve attempted to restart the VPS 3 times ofwhich is also failing.

So your probably wondering after the recent masses of downtime, is this problem going to be resolved or get any better? The truth…. yes it is! We have decided after the recent problems with il.us.bnc4free.com and de.eu.bnc4free.com which both happen to be on the same VPS Provider, that we are moving both servers. We currently have plans in place to move de.eu.bnc4free.com onto a VPS in Atlanta (U.S) during the course of this week. All accounts and data will be saved and transferred onto the new server. It’ll be like we never moved it! The only difference will be the hostname used to connect to the server ofwhich all users will be emailed of the changes where applicable.

In addition to the previous news about il.us.bnc4free.com, we have already resolved the issue with that server by moving it onto a VPS that we have in Denmark which has been kindly provided by Thomas. Due to a lack of backups on our part, we were unable to ensure that every account was transferred to the new server but we have managed to keep all the accounts that existed on il.us.bnc4free.com before 07/02/2010 and transferred them onto our new server accordingly. Users from il.us.bnc4free.com are now able to connect to dk.eu.bnc4free.com on the usual ports.

More updates will be posted throughout this week so please check back often!

Important Information regarding recent events

Virtually all of our user base will of noticed some recent and long lasting downtime caused by our servers. Our staff team would firstly like to appologize for this downtime which was caused by a fault in our security system.

In the meantime, we managed to lose a server (il.us.bnc4free.com) due to some problems with payment. Were attempting to get a replacement for that server sometime this week or next week at the latest and all the users that were on il.us.bnc4free.com will be transferred accordingly unless you already have a new BNC while il.us.bnc4free.com is down.

It has also become known to the management that our request process is a little slow and that staff are not processing as many requests as they could be on a regular basis. The management have discussed this issue with staff and we aim to improve our processing time in the near future.

During the course of this month and next month we will be changing our support system slightly so that users do not need to use IRC for support. The system we have in mind is very similar to support tickets and we feel these can be processed quicker and users will get a better response.

If you have any suggestion for BNC4FREE or would like to know more about this news article, please feel free to join us on our irc network at irc.surgehost.net - #bnc4free

New Management and Policy Change

Good evening faithful users of BNC4FREE, We are gathered here today to announce that one of our staff has been promoted to management to take the place of Alex (Sandro). The new management member is James/Ryankilla who currently resides on most if not all the networks we offer BNC’s on. Be sure to give him a belated congratulations when you next see him!!

Our policy has also changed slightly. In light of some recent issues with GeeksIRC and certain discussions with the staff of networks we have decided that idling now only counst on irc.surgehost.net! You do not need a bnc to idle on that network, you can simply type ‘/server -m irc.surgehost.net -j #bnc4free’ when connected to IRC to idle there. BNC’s and more can still be requested on all of our official networks such as GTANet, Rizon and Makaiwell.

We look forward to seeing you on our new network soon!

Christmas & New Year

Hey, christmas is coming up and with a new year on its way were also updating all of our services and improving the quality. Between the 18th and 30th December there is going to be alot of maintenance and quite a bit of server downtime. Some of the new things coming to bnc4free are:

• Enhanced DCC Features (also fixes it since its currently buggy)
• The Ability to hide amsg’s from specific channels (as in hide ones from other people)
• The Ability to fake your idle time on IRC Server by making the bnc send a packet every 30 seconds
• New AutoReply feature which replies to queries sent to your BNC (Useful for Opers)
• New Feature that will send private messages and highlights to your iPhone/iPod Touch via Colloquy Mobile or Prowl
• Security Fixes to stop servers reconnecting endlessly if non existant or unavailable (Fixes Crash Bug)
• Security Fixes to block failed logins after a set amount of attempts (Fixes Crash Bug)
• Fix for Freenode BNC’s
• Built-In Information Systems - Ability to grab google results, weather from around the world, use a calculator and more via a new module!
• Highly Improved Logging which allows us to censor or block certain pieces of text from being sent (Similar to IRCD’s Spam Filter)
• The Ability to Get the Latest BNC4FREE News via Twitter and update your own statuses + watch others via a new module!
• Brand New Webpanel with updated and new features (BETA)
• Several Security Fixes to ensure hijacking of BNC Servers is impossible

We haven’t come up with any definate timetable as to what will be implemented and when but all updates and upgrades will be completed by January 1st 2010. Please check back here soon for more updates on the proposed timetable.

Maintenance Planned

Hi, just to let you know that we have plans to upgrade 3 out of our 4 servers with a new operating system. Currently they run a mixture of Debian 4.0 and CentOS however we will be upgrading them all to Debian 5.0. This ofcourse means that the servers will be re-imaged so the BNC’s we provide on the servers will be down until we are able to restore the backups. Were looking at about an hours downtime on each server however it could be more depending on issue’s that may arise. The upgrades are taking place over the next few sundays and will improve the security and stability of our systems. The update timetable is as follows:

• il.us.bnc4free.com - 22nd November 2009
• de.eu.bnc4free.com - 29th November 2009
• uk.eu.bnc4free.com - 6th December 2009

I’d also like to appologize for the downtime on our pa.us.bnc4free.com server which we believe was caused by someone forcefully gaining access to the server and causing some havoc with it. We’ve taken a few security measures to prevent this from happening again.

We have recently been running public applications for new staff to apply which seems to be doing quite well. If you are still interested you have until Saturday to apply. You can apply by visiting here

Important Server Change!!!!!

Hey, here at BNC4FREE, we’ve been working to improve our existing services and ensure that a quality service is presented and used by all of our customers and clients. In an attempt to better our services, we have some proposed server changes taking place this weekend.

Our current server hosted in Texas by Alex is being removed for reasons that he and i would prefer not to disclose. We will however be moving all users and accounts onto a brand new server in Illnois hosted by me (Russell). The move will most likely occur on the 1st November 2009 and will take roughly an hour. The server will be offline for this period of time.

We applologize for any inconvience that this change causes but we will try to rectify any immediate issues as soon as is possible. All user account data and passwords will be retained as it was on the Texas server after the move has been completed. Hostnames will be updated so that the old hostname points to our new server however we strongly advise that you use il.us.bnc4free.com after the move.

With regards to client and server pings, this move shouldn’t affect pings or lattency too much, however you might notice around a 10 - 20 ms difference on some servers.

We aim to make this transition as smooth as possible however there may be some problems. If you encouter any problems after the move then please contact us on IRC. More Updates will be posted here once the move is done.

Thanks

[UPDATE]: The server move is now completed, all the users on tx.us.bnc4free.com need to reconnect on il.us.bnc4free.com - We were also made aware that some of you were still using our NL hostnames (nl.eu.bnc4free.com), this has also been changed to il.us.bnc4free.com - Please update your records!

Inactive Accounts Deleted

We have recently noticed that we have alot of bnc’s on our servers and this has been causing some excessive delay when users have tried to reconnect to servers and made the connections very laggy. In order to resolve this we have deleted any bnc’s that havent been accessed via IRC since the beggining of September. The lag issues should now be resolved seeing as we deleted over 20 BNC’s on the server that was lagging the most and numerous other bnc’s on our other servers.

If your account has been deleted, you are free to request a new one but please be active!! Inactive accounts are a waste of our resources. Please remember that this is a free service and that the servers are paid for by donations and the staff themselves.

We also have a new forum board which has kindly been providided by staff at the XtremeGeek IRC Network ofwhich the BNC4FREE Staff will use to deal with any support or issues you have with your accounts aswell as answer any questions you may have. The forum can be accessed by clicking here