---
author: mrmist
date: 2012-06-09 17:38:33+00:00
slug: services-upgrade-and-database-prune
title: Services upgrade and database prune
category: freenode
category: infrastructure
category: technical
imported: yes
robots: noindex
---
Hi
The long-awaited upgrade of services which we [blogged about a while ago](http://blog.freenode.net/2012/04/database-prune/) is now planned for this coming weekend, the 16th/17th June. 

We anticipate up to an hour of services outage for this upgrade and prune to take place. We will notify the connected users closer to the time through the use of WALLOPS and/or globals, but please do plan ahead accordingly for a period of services unavailability. 

We will be moving to Atheme 7, so, amongst other improvements, this will see the introduction of certificate-based authentication to services.  

To use certificate based authentication, you would need firstly to generate a certificate, then add the certificate to your client, then tell nickserv about your certificate fingerprint.  We'll explain more about this in a future blog entry or on the freenode website in the near future.
