IRC blocked on old tunnel

[bgamari1]

I've read in various threads that some tunnels may still have IRC blocked. Is it possible that my tunnel, 209170, falls into this category? I have no trouble pinging chat.freenode.net, but any attempt to connect to port 6667 times out. I have otherwise seen no connectivity issues with the tunnel.

[kcochran]

For a period of time, tunnels had IRC unfiltered by default.  Due to abuse, tunnels started having IRC filtered by default as of October 2011, with achieving Sage level in the IPv6 certification as the requirement to unblock it.  The tunnel ID you're referencing is more recent than two years ago, and therefore would be filtered.

[bgamari1]

I understand that this is the policy. However, you should understand that it is a severe impediment to tunnel use for many. I am a single individual whose job bears no relevance to IPv6. I started working through the certification process and made it to the Guru certification level. Unfortunately, the process presumes that one has a domain under their control; while I have a freedns.afraid.org domain, their top-level domain does not meet the qualifications for sage certification.

Would it be possible to unblock IRC on my particular channel or simply grant me Sage certification? I would sooner abandon my tunnel than spend money buying a domain just for functional IRC. If IPv6 roll-out is the goal of this service, it seems that these rather high barriers to entry are counter-productive at best.

[kcochran]

If afraid.org had a AAAA record for any of the defined NSs for afraid.org, they'd work fine for Sage.  Unfortunately, while they do have a AAAA for ns1.afraid.org, the nameservers that are above it in the resolution chain don't have AAAAs themselves (ns7, tungsten, granite, etc.)  My understanding is that they are aware of this omission, but I don't have any information on if/when a resolution is expected.

As to the IRC, if we didn't see so much abuse of it when it was available, we wouldn't have filtered it.  Same with SMTP.  Networks that don't deal with abuse issues wind up getting blocked, which puts that 'barrier to entry' outside of our control, so we took the measures which permitted us to retain that ability.