Resurrecting tor-sasl

edk on 2016-09-05

As many of you will no doubt be aware, freenode used to run a Tor hidden service, providing anonymous access to the network. Unfortunately, this had to be disabled due to concerns about abuse.

We regret that it has taken some time to resolve this issue but we are now almost ready to deploy some software updates that will allow us to re-enable the gateway. We've made one important change: password-based SASL authentication is disabled over the Tor gateway, so you'll need to generate a client certificate and add its fingerprint (/msg NickServ CERT ADD) over a regular connection before connecting.

We'd appreciate your help testing this setup on our testnet. Further instructions can be found in #freenode there. (if you already have a certificate set, the hidden service is at ircs://testnet67chdulhs.onion:6697)

Expect the occasional interruption—even if nothing exciting happens, we still have a few configuration things to take care of. The test network may be reset, rolled back, or shut down at any time.

Thanks for your patience, and thank you in advance for helping to bring Tor access back as fast as possible!