Irssi, freenode, nickname temporarily unavailable

Well everyone will have noticed [1] by now that Freenode has moved over from their old hyperion irc daemon to ircd-seven. Of course no migration go without their teething problem. One of the problems that seem to return is the following and I have seen many reports of this over the last couple of day. Not to mention having to struggle myself with this. I found the solution after a bit of googling this morning:If you have problems connect to any of Freenode’s servers and get the following message:

“Nickname is temporarily unavailable”

Even if you are disconnecting afterwards and reconnection, it won’t let you use your nickname, even when it appears to not be on-line.  The situation can be fixed by the following four commands:

1) Connect as normal with your irc-client

2) Identify to your nick:

/quote NickServ identify $nick $password

3) Turn off the old nick enforcer

/quote NickServ set enforce OFF

4) You might need to release your nick from being held by services:

/quote NickServ release $nick $password

After this you should be able to reconnect, re-nick or reconnect. After you have sucsessfully reconnected to Freenode, you should be able to turn the nick enforce feature back on.

[1] – Well those using IRC and Freenode anyway ;)

9 thoughts on “Irssi, freenode, nickname temporarily unavailable

  1. “/quote NickServ” ?

    You’re not sending a raw “NickServ” commands to the server. Use “/msg NickServ”

  2. It’s enough to release your nick in such case (no need to reset the enforce flag):

    /msg nickserv identify
    /msg nickserv release

    Now you can reconnect.

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