Activity Report 2021 - Operations

The operations team manages the provisioning and maintenance of the various servers and services Libera.Chat uses to provide IRC chat services. We keep the servers running, configured, and updated.

We’ve had a focus on improving automation this year. Building a new network from the ground up has given us the chance to make improvements that would have been seen as too disruptive in the past. Throughout the year we’ve worked to migrate more of our services to be centrally managed with a goal of reproducible deployments and network-wide consistency in configuration.

Libera.Chat is made possible by a wide variety of free and open-source software. While we’re obviously reliant on solanum and atheme, there are many other packages critical to running our network. If you aren’t already familiar with these projects, you might take a look: Debian, Etherpad, Gamja, Grafana, Kiwiirc, Mlmmj, Mumble, Nginx, Postfix, Puppet, RT, Tor, WireGuard.

The operations team is responsible for coordinating with the sponsors who make Libera.Chat possible by providing reliable servers and network connectivity. Our team is grateful to these sponsors for stepping up so quickly and making Libera.Chat possible this year when they were needed the most. Many of our sponsors can be found on our sponsors page, but even more organizations have thrown in their support to make this project possible.