The Birbhouse (2019–2026)

Birbhouse has been a long-standing effort of combining rented and owned servers across countries and groups to provide a reliable network for its members. We went from a single box at 1984 ehf to 12 different ones across 8 countries and 3 continents that range from short-bursts for handling scene rendering to essential infrastructure for running both internal and public-facing networks.

Unfortunately, many of us running these servers have been put into increasingly awkward positions. As such, Birbhouse is going to take its last flight and then enter hibernation. This decision does not come lightly by any means, but is something that, nevertheless, we've all agreed, as the people maintaining and footing the bill for everything, is for the best.

We've established the following timeline for winding down, as well as mitigating as much damage as possible:

• For users of the Flamenco clusters in Los Angeles and Seattle, you'll be able to still use these with your regular credentials and hostnames (incl. those ending in birb.fr).
• For users of the Forgejo instance, the instance will be maintained through the end of March 2026. Thereafter,
  • private repositories will be archived and e-mailed to their respective owners
  • public repositories will be redirected to and archived using stagit or a similar Git page generator
  • plans to replace Forgejo with suisei will continue, with people who previously used the instance being invited back.
• For users of the managed DNS servers, the primary nameserver (loon.birb.fr or your respective primary glue record) will persist.
  • For users of managed DNS servers resolving to osprey.birb.fr, the DNS server will be maintained through the end of March 2026.
  • For users of managed DNS servers resolving to toki.birb.fr, the DNS server will persist.
• For users of the MTA servers in Germany, Greater Tokyo Area, and Seattle, as well as the IMAP server in Germany, the servers will be maintained through the end of December 2030. Notification as to continued support thereafter will be sent to users via their primary inboxes with at least six months of notice.
• For users of the object storage cluster in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the servers will persist.
• For users of the time servers provided in Seattle and San Diego, the servers will be maintained through the end of December 2027. Thereafter, the aggregate NTP and PTP servers will be moved from San Diego to Seattle. The unauthenticated aggregate and unauthenticated stratum-0 will be no longer offered at the end of December 2026.
• For users of the Seafile instance in the Greater Tokyo Area, the instance will be maintained through the end of May 2026. Thereafter, an artificial limit will be imposed of 50 gigabytes per user.
• For users of websites ending in lmao.ch not otherwise referenced, these instances will be made into a read-only archive and shut down come the end of February 2026.
• For websites resolved by osprey.birb.fr, these websites will be migrated to a new server by the end of March 2026 and will no longer support Rsync for updates, instead providing a reduced shell with SFTP access instead.
• For users of services not otherwise mentioned, it is safe to assume that these services will persist. This includes the Galileo SDRs in Denmark and Switzerland and BeiDou SDR in the Greater Tokyo Area.

We thank you for six years of your trust and your understanding as we navigate the ending of this chapter for us all. We hope to come together again in the future to continue providing our services.

Cheers from: Alex (and the animation wizards), Astral, eXo, Mirren's, vee

Some people may have an issue with any of the services ending above, and as such, we've provided a list of the best alternatives we can muster.

• For users of the Forgejo instance, consider Codeberg or a similar Forgejo instance. You should avoid:
  • GitLab, for its owners' ethics
  • GitHub, for its numerous issues regarding data privacy & security, ethics, as well as its owner's (Microsoft) ethics
  • Sourcehut, for its owners' (namely DeVault) ethics
• For users of the managed DNS servers, consider pairing the servers with a secondary DNS service such as those offered by 1984, Mythic Beasts.
• For users of the unauthenticated NTP servers, consider hosting your own stratum-0 antenna (we use a Masterclock and PCTEL antenna) or using your national time provider.
• For users of the Seafile instance, consider using JottaCloud or Koofr.