Hi all, we're moving irc.wikimedia.org to a new infrastructure [1]. This service is unrelated to the IRC network (Libera) we use for real time discussions. Instead irc.wikimedia.org is an IRC service for broadcasting recent changes events from public Wikimedia wikis to be used by various bots connected to per-wiki IRC channels. irc.wikimedia.org should not be used for any new bots (which should rather use Eventstreams[2]), but we still have various important bots relying on the legacy IRC-based infrastructure.

The current setup is full of technical debt and ultimately based on a patched version of a very old release of ircd-ratbox with a relay service written in Python 2.

We are replacing it with a modern standalone implementation in Python, which broadcasts IRC notifications in a format compatible to what is currently in use by the legacy setup: https://github.com/paravoid/ircstream

Last week during the SRE Infrastructure Foundations hackathon the ircstream production setup was created. All our tests have been successful, so on Thursday October 10 at 08:00 UTC we'll switch the irc.wikimedia.org DNS name to the new setup.

No changes are needed to any bots, but if you run into any issues after the switch, please notify us in the #wikimedia-sre-foundations IRC channel or leave a note at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T376014.

Cheers, Luca, Simon and Moritz

Footnotes: [1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Irc.wikimedia.org [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event_Platform/EventStreams_HTTP_Service