About freenode: IRC Servers

IRC Servers

Our main server rotation is chat.freenode.net. IPv6 users can specify ipv6.chat.freenode.net. Pointers to freenode currently include irc.ghostscript.com, irc.gnu.org, irc.handhelds.org, irc.linux.org, irc.kde.org and irc.redhat.com. Please see our acknowledgements page for the generous groups and organizations who have helped us to provide this service.

If you're running Tor, access is available via our hidden service.

NOTE: The network needs servers. We are in particular need of servers on the Pacific Rim and in the Americas. If you think you might be able to help our community in this way, please take a look at the server hosting page and email us at hosting at freenode dot net. Thanks!

The following table lists freenode client servers, server names indicated in italics are currently NOT linked to the production network. Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Asia/Pacific Rim Taoyuan, TW	chat.ap.freenode.net tolkien.freenode.net
Australia Brisbane, AU	chat.au.freenode.net asimov.freenode.net
Europe Frankfurt, DE Helsinki, FI Milano, IT Oslo, NO Umeå, SE Moscow, RU Manchester, UK Vilnius, LT Evry, FR Stockholm, SE	chat.eu.freenode.net kornbluth.freenode.net orwell.freenode.net calvino.freenode.net gibson.freenode.net leguin.freenode.net lem.freenode.net wolfe.freenode.net sendak.freenode.net jordan.freenode.net lindbohm.freenode.net	ipv6.chat.eu.freenode.net calkins.freenode.net crichton.freenode.net simak.freenode.net mccaffrey.freenode.net denis.freenode.net
United States Corvallis, OR Madison, WI Irvine, CA Los Angeles, CA Missoula, MT Newark, NJ Fremont, CA Washington, DC San Diego, CA	chat.us.freenode.net niven.freenode.net zelazny.freenode.net brown.freenode.net anthony.freenode.net kubrick.freenode.net heinlein.freenode.net verne.freenode.net clarke.freenode.net card.freenode.net simmons.freenode.net	ipv6.chat.us.freenode.net weber.freenode.net

Accessing Freenode Via Tor

The current Tor hidden service address for freenode is mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion For users of Tor with gpg keys that don't mind being identified by them, we offer another hidden service of 5t7o4shdbhotfuzp.onion The latter hidden service is authenticated with a nick and password combination and subsequently will not get blocked during periods of general tor abuse. Mailing tor at freenode dot net with your nick and a password hash signed together. The required hash can be generated with either

on irc: /quote makepass <password>

at a shell prompt: mkpasswd -H md5

This will get the process started. Also, if you'd rather your hash be encrypted, you may encrypt to 0x035D6B1D. The canonical way to do this would be to execute something like:

echo '<nick> <passwordhash>' | gpg --gnupg -sea -r 035D6B1D

We have to have a copy of your public key in order to verify the signature, so make sure to include a copy if it's not available on the keyserver network.

Latencies are improving all the time and can be quite reasonable. You can always find a pointer to our Tor hidden service in freenode.net DNS, in an unresolved CNAME record, irc.tor.freenode.net, which can be retrieved, for example, via the *nix shell command:

dig +short irc.tor.freenode.net cname

If your IRC client can handle socks5 with remote dns, you can just connect to the .onion address directly. Otherwise, use Tor's "mapaddress" feature to fake it. (We do not recommend that you use Privoxy with irssi. It's unnecessary. Just use the 'mapaddress' approach and torify irssi to start it up.) Add a line to your torrc, as in this example:

mapaddress 10.40.40.40 mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion
mapaddress 10.40.40.41 5t7o4shdbhotfuzp.onion

Be sure to HUP (reload) Tor if you change your torrc. After you've made the change, just connect your torified IRC client to the IP you specified in your mapaddress statement for the freenode service. Tor will do the conversion for you internally and you'll connect to freenode. In addition to providing location privacy, the Tor hidden service gives you end-to-end encryption, providing benefits similar to those of ircs / irc-ssl.

That's all it takes. We appreciate your accessing freenode via the Tor hidden service. If you'd like to help us maintain quality access, please consider providing "middleman" bandwidth to the Tor network. Just set your host up as a Tor server and specify how much bandwidth you want to provide. You don't have to be an exit node—you can set your exit policy to "reject *:*" and still help us make up for the bandwith we use for freenode's hidden service.