Placing the Statistics Website on Hiatus

Hello everyone, just a quick announcement regarding the existing statistics website. In short, the current dashboard will be discontinued, at least for now. The aim is to not have it permanently retired, but that depends on what the future holds.

Moving to InspIRCd 4

Hello, everyone! Quick announcement for those who may not have seen the chatter about this in #lounge. InspIRCd 4, the next stable release of the IRC daemon used on Techtronix, was released on June 29th. That invites the natural question: when is the network being upgraded?

Deprecation of NickServ ACCESS and Miscellaneous Options

Hello all. I wanted to discuss some upcoming features that will be deprecated and removed. I will write more beyond the jump break, but here is a quick rundown:

1. The NickServ ACCESS feature is being removed. This feature allowed the whitelisting of hostmasks in NickServ so that it would not require authentication.
2. Various NickServ and ChanServ miscellaneous configuration options are being removed. This allowed setting custom fields such as social media accounts. Going forward, the only supported field will be 'URL', already sent to users when they join channels.

Restrictions on Publicly Known VPN Connections

Greetings all. Will keep the general announcement short and sweet, but will leave details below for those interested. As of this week, connecting using a known VPN provider will require SASL authentication, or the connection will be rejected. This is due to the influx of spam received recently.

Introducing the New Techtronix Web Chat Client

Greetings, everyone! Hope you all are enjoying the new year so far. I wanted to talk about something I have soft-launched in the wild for over a month - the new web client for connecting to the network from the comfort of your browser. Do not worry, though: it is still powered by KiwiIRC.

Celebrating Ten Years of Techtronix!

Yep, I hinted at this a few weeks ago in #lounge but it is true: Techtronix officially celebrates its 10-year anniversary today.

Operating System Upgrades

Hello all. This is an announcement detailing some upcoming server downtime coming to the network soon. The cause of this downtime will be operating system upgrades.

Unexpected Downtime on Ratchet

Hello all, this is just a short notice that Ratchet, the network's hub server, is currently offline due to an unexpected issue originating from the hosting company. As mentioned in the previous announcement, access to a few network services will be impacted in the meantime:

• NickServ, ChanServ, and other services hosted on services.techtronix.net
• Account Web Panel
• Statistics Web Panel (StatServ)
  

Maintenance on Ratchet

Hello all,

This is a short announcement to state that the network's hub server, ratchet.techtronix.net, is currently down for maintenance. The hosting company is currently conducting a few migrations in their datacenters, and the network is affected by this.

Insecure Connections Have Been Retired

Greetings everyone! I wanted to make a quick announcement in follow-up to my previous post discussing the state of insecure connections on the network.

Reminder: DST Root CA X3 Certificate Expiration Today

I saw this making the rounds on IRC and in the news, so I thought I should provide a similar notice as Techtronix uses Let's Encrypt for the certificates used for TLS on the network.

Upcoming Changes to Insecure Connections

Hello, everyone! Wanted to discuss something that I briefly mentioned in #lounge recently. Since it concerns connection options for the network, I figured that it would be a good time to write a post about.

The Return of Ballista

Hey folks, quick update on the status of client servers, or one in particular: ballista.techtronix.net

Upcoming Changes Regarding Connection Security

Hello everyone! As per usual, I am once again back to write about something regarding the network. This time, though, it is more of an open-ended "think out loud" type of announcement.

Announcing Services Web Control Panel and Statistics

Hello guys! It has been a few months since the last post, but I have been working on some things that I would like to share. In short, I would like to announce the (re)availability of the online services control panel (manage your NickServ account online), as well as the new availability of the online IRC statistics panel, powered by MagIRC.

Changes in #lounge

Hello, all! It has been a while since my last post talking about the upcoming changes to the network in January. Unfortunately, this post is a little less upbeat, I guess.

Merry Christmas! Also, Some Upcoming Changes

First off, I would like to wish everyone a nice Christmas this year and thank you all for continuing to use Techtronix. It's because of you guys that this network continues to exist, as a network with no users would be rather depressing 😉.

Upcoming Maintenance on Ratchet

Hello folks! I just wanted to write a quick notice about some scheduled maintenance that is upcoming for Ratchet.

Upgrading to SHA256 for Certificate Fingerprints

Hello all! 🙂

As part of my effort to upgrade Techtronix to InspIRCd 3, I also wanted to take this opportunity to talk about client certificates and how they will be affected by the network upgrade.

Discontinuing the Flash Policy Daemon

Hello all! I just wanted to write a quick announcement concerning the Flash policy daemon (flashpolicyd) that is currently in use on Techtronix to service Flash-based IRC clients.