Freenode ops take control of 700 channels

Re:Freenode ops take control of 700 channels by kyrra on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @09:25AM (#27290200)

To pile on, Google uses internally for incident response [0]

> Google has found IRC to be a huge boon in incident response. IRC is very reliable and can be used as a log of communications about this event, and such a record is invaluable in keeping detailed state changes in mind. We’ve also written bots that log incident-related traffic (which is helpful for postmortem analysis), and other bots that log events such as alerts to the channel. IRC is also a convenient medium over which geographically distributed teams can coordinate.

Also, irc can still be up when Chat, Hangouts or other tools are down. It's simple tech that is easy to interact with.

[0] https://sre.google/sre-book/managing-incidents/

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Re:Freenode ops take control of 700 channels by CydeWeys on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @10:48AM (#27291169)

Worth pointing out that IRC isn't necessarily the first choice for coordinating a response, but it is a great low-dependency, independent fallback. IRC runs on a stack that is completely independent from the rest of Google prod (it's just a Linux machine running an IRC daemon). So when almost everything else goes down, so long as basic network routing is still working, IRC is still up.

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Re:Freenode ops take control of 700 channels by kyrra on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @02:28PM (#27294266)

Point taken. For smaller incidents, Chat or Meet are regularly used. But larger (cross-team or maybe infra related) are handled in IRC.

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Re:Freenode ops take control of 700 channels by hobs on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @10:57AM (#27291314)

Apple hosted and used its own IRC for decades and sadly I saw the last of it die off ~ 2010 for any support uses.

iChat internally at a site was not a replacement.

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