This project is to set up and manage an IRC server that has Opportunistic Encryption enabled. The server will become part of the freenode IRC network, on which many open source projects have homes. This will provide for privacy between clients and the server.
As a secondary purpose, this project represents experimental deployment of a hopefully very busy system. It is hoped to gain additional operational experience with Opportunistic encryption and make recommendations for future work.
It is anticipated that there will be some new bugs or limitations in the current software discovered. I.e. problems that will need to be addressed in some fashion in order to continue running the server. This is the purpose of the contingency days.
If the scale of the problem is too large, then there will have to be some sort of back-off. This will need to be a subject of negotiation at the time.
If contingency days are not used, they will not be billed.
Bandwidth will billed by the hosting company. Amounts are provided as a guide. It is likely that the system will not initially consume very much bandwidth.
The system will initially accept both private (OE) and cleartext (no-OE) connections. Over the course of the year, the system will be configured such that, when short on resources, it will prefer OE connections.
The system will run Debian 3.0 (Woody) GNU/Linux, with a Linus 2.4 kernel, and FreeSWAN 2.01 or higher. Debian is preferred for ease of application of security patches.