QuakeNet is the worlds largest IRC network and caters mostly – but not exclusively – to gamers.

Without further ado, below are the questions and answers:

First, please introduce yourselves to our readers!

Hi! I’m Joe “meeb” Harris. I’m currently the head of public relations for QuakeNet, which is largest IRC network in the world and has been since around about the end of 2003. I’ve been an avid IRC user for nearly 10 years, and joined the QuakeNet staff around 8 years ago as a member of the network support team, moving on to joining the public relations and development teams later. I replaced Ferg when he found his time limited as head of the public relations team about 4 years ago, since then I’ve overseen the interaction of QuakeNet with external organisations such as game studios who run regular popular events including developer chats and assisting gaming groups.

QuakeNet, where did it all begin?

QuakeNet was formed 13 years ago by Oli and Garfield (both of which can still be found occasionally lurking in the dark recesses of the network!) who wanted to help organise games of QuakeWorld online. It quickly grew with the initial surge of online Quakers and became a central part of the deathmatch-organising scene.

Later on it developed into a more general network, but it still retains a massively strong gaming core.

How did it grow to where it is today, still being the worlds largest IRC network after 13 years in existence?

Entirely by word of mouth and third party advertising, as a completely non-profit organisation we have no resources to promote ourselves really other than to offer services that we think people will want to use! We must have done something right, given we’re still pretty popular.

What are your duties as staffers and how do they compare to those on smaller networks?

The staff on QuakeNet is divided up into multiple workgroups, each tasked with oversight of a particular area and given the authority to autonomously cover one aspect of the network operation. The larger groups cover network support, development, public relations, security, operations and human resources. There are multiple sub-groups under these such as the tutorial group, web development, script support and so on. Each group has a group leader, and the group leaders form another group. All groups work under the oversight of the operations team which consists of the administrators of the physical servers and oversee the core network decisions.

Most users would only interact with the user-facing groups, such as our excellent network support team headed up by the veteran “beard” Bazerka, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what happens behind the scenes. Members of staff are welcome to apply and join multiple groups (for example I’m an active member of three groups, and a somewhat idle member of another two); we have excellent volunteers actively working on all aspects of developing QuakeNet.

How can one support the network?

Pretty simply, by becoming an active user on the network! IRC needs you! If you work for an ISP or other provider with a serious stack of spare hardware you can apply to assist QuakeNet with an extra server and join other excellent sponsors such as Id software, port80, Multiplay (and many others) in providing the stable platform our network is based on. If you have a lot of spare time, you can contribute by joining the ranks of our staff and helping the network grow even further. You don’t get paid, but there’s a lovely warm feeling from helping hundreds of thousands of users communicate better (and you get to stroke snailbot).

I’m sure many users, newbies and veterans alike, would love to become staff on QuakeNet – any word of advice how they could accomplish that?

I’m not ashamed to say that we’re extremely picky, we have what can only be described as triple-stage rigorous hiring procedure. Anyone can apply via a link on our website, and their application is processed by the HR team. If your application matches the base requirements and there’s an opening in the team you are applying for you’ll get a one-on-one interview followed by an extensive trial in the group you’re interested in joining. After that, there’s a full group vote to accept you as a member.

You shouldn’t be put off by this, if you are accepted into QuakeNet staff you become a member of a dynamic network of a hundred or so active people from all over the world and tasked with key responsibilities and representing QuakeNet. Once you’re in the staff you can also apply to join other groups that you think you can contribute to, further expanding your role in the organisation of you want to.

Late last year, you introduced a server sponsored by id Software – how did that collaboration get started?

Id Software developers have made fleeting appearances on QuakeNet for many years, and recently started making a more regular home. This culminated with the launch of QuakeLive which has a permanent channel on QuakeNet since the start of the beta, where the beta testers could directly relay feedback to the developers. We opened a dialogue with some of the developers as we do with most important organisations on QuakeNet to see if we could assist in any way. They generously offered to host a client server but were unable to provide the direct resources to oversee the new server (it can take quite a lot of time to learn everything from the ground up to run a popular client server on QuakeNet, as well as ongoing responsibilities to keep it maintained). We reached an agreement where some existing administrators on QuakeNet would take on some of the responsibility of maintaining the server and they would provide the physical hardware and connection, we also welcomed SyncError as the primary operator for the Id Software server onto the QuakeNet staff.

This has been working very well to date, and we are happy to have Id Software as one of our core US client server providers along with Gameservers and Velocity.

Most software you create for the network (qwebirc, snircd, operserv) is released as open-source – why not the rest of the services, like Q and S for example?

This isn’t anything nefarious at all, I’m sure most of the staff on the QuakeNet development team would agree that we would happily release almost everything if not all our code as open source projects. As you can imagine the non-linear structure of a purely volunteer organisation such as QuakeNet can make some projects a bit complex to keep track of. With the open source examples you list, qwebirc is primarily developed by probably our most active developer, slug, and it’s entirely up to him how it’s licensed. Snircd is a fork based on the excellent Undernet IRC daemon (IRCd) and we are more than happy to provide the source.

The repositories not yet public are currently closed for a very simple reason, they’re not stand-alone services but modular services for our outstanding service platform / framework “newserv”, you can forgive the less than vibrant name given it’s happily hosting almost all of our current services! Newserv is primarily developed by one of our other lead developers, splidge, with contributions from other staff members. We of course need the complete sign off from all the developers involved to release a project, some have since resigned their positions on QuakeNet (and hard to track down), some are still deciding. This makes it pointless to release (for example) the sourcecode for the Spamscan module given it serves no use what so ever to anyone without the base to run it off.

Personally I am confident that eventually the remainder of our currently private code will be publicly available at some point, although don’t assume anything as opinions can change over time!

Recently, a large open-source focused network introduced the ability to have user-connections encrypted with SSL – are there any plans to do so on QuakeNet?

It is currently under discussion, but there hasn’t been a great deal of movement in the SSL area if I’m honest. I would suspect that eventually we will introduce an SSL option, but it’s not likely in the short term. IRC is typically regarded as a public medium so SSL encrypted client connections have a limited use at best. This might be pushed up the task list depending on external circumstances such as regional governmental internet monitoring, but I wouldn’t expect it quickly on QuakeNet. Generally the other use for SSL (certifying the IRC server is who it says it is) is negated by most other networks not deploying certificates from commercial authorities (and understandably so) – this again makes IRC over SSL less useful in general.

Many IRCds cloak userhosts (or parts of them) even without registering – why isn’t this done on QuakeNet?

We take user privacy seriously on Quakenet, and we provide excellent and easy to use functionality to mask your host if you choose to. We also allow full access from TOR exit nodes if you wish to chat truly anonymously, but we believe that this is a choice. You can easily configure your IRC client to mask your host as soon as you connect if you wish which provides the same functionality as other networks, we just don’t force the decision on you.

This allows our users some freedom to use custom vanity hosts for bouncers and bots as well as channel administrators to more accurately keep their channels in order by banning troublesome ISPs.

Q and its help is only available in english – do you have plans to change that?

Q actually supports many languages! This was a core feature of the “new” Q, codenamed Q9, that was deployed some two years ago (again mostly by splidge). We had some issues sourcing high quality translations for some of the Q messages, and it was decided to not delay the launch just to wait for the extra languages. I’m sure they’ll arrive at some point.

IRC can be a scary and to some extent dangerous place for unsuspecting users – what safety tips can you give them?

Much the same as most semi-anonymous online forums, don’t give away any personal information (at all!), don’t provoke confrontation, keep online and offline communication separate. If you do encounter any serious abusive behaviour you can contact the network support team in #help who will assist you with any problems, we have even filed regional police reports in extreme cases to help protect our users and QuakeNet.

If you could change one thing in the way IRC works – what would that be?

I would probably build in redundant links for clients and servers, resulting in a dramatically less violent ‘netsplit’. If I was designing the protocol now I’d include more common features expected in 2010 such as a standard for transmitting general media (avatars? streaming video? who knows). And snails, everything needs more snails.

There have been many polls and forum topics about a decline of IRC – what is your opinion on that and where do you think is IRC heading in the long term?

It’s natural that certain mediums become more popular while others decline. Given that IRC is a pure text group chat (as the popular bash quote says, it’s basically just multiplayer notepad) I think it’s a testament to the big IRC networks that they’ve been around for many years and still with active user bases. We tend not to worry about the physical number of users dropping off a bit from their peak in the early 2000’s, the users who do remain are extremely numerous and dedicated.

In the future, I think IRC still holds a unique place. No-where else provides the ease of collaborative communication online in an effortless medium with very well established clients and user management systems. The novice user might have replaced their IRC usage with newer web-based services or flashier methods of realtime messaging, but there still remains very few places on the internet where you can jump straight into such a massive and active community of people. You don’t really see many 50-person MSN chats.

We’ve recently had a substantial growth in one area of QuakeNet thanks to our simple yet powerful qwebirc web-based IRC client which seems to have introduced a new group of users to IRC, as well as provide a popular client being utilised by many other networks including a couple of the other “big four” IRC networks. (you can check pop directly onto QuakeNet with just a JavaScript-enabled browser at http://webchat.quakenet.org/ and if you run your own IRC network you can get the source code for the client at http://www.qwebirc.org/). In summary, we’re pretty positive about the future.

What do you use IRC for when you’re not actively “on duty”?

Mostly chatting with friends, ex-collegues and sharing the latest memes (how do you think they spread so fast, it’s not because of ‘microblogging’!). It’s only really the user-facing staff members that have to take shifts and be on-duty as such, the rest of the staff are usually available for network based discussion whenever they are online in a relaxed manner.

What can users expect feature-wise in the future on QuakeNet? What plans do you have for the network?

We have some light hearted fun planned for the near future, and we’re actively in discussion with several organisations to bring more developer-orientated live events to QuakeNet. We’re constantly rolling out improved versions of existing services as well as introducing brand new features, admittedly largely behind the scenes to the average user. If you notice a dramatic decline in irritating spam on the network, then it’s us doing something new!

In the timetabled future we have a new release of our IRCd in the works which merges in many of the changes released by the IRCu team over at Undernet as well as adding some more QuakeNet-specific features, and upgrades to some of our channel services. The new IRCd will contain some new features to help combat some current annoyances on QuakeNet, such as unsolicited private queries.

Thank you for the interview, do you have any parting words for our readers?

No problem! As some parting words I’d probably suggest you try embedding a qwebirc chat frame into your clan site or blog, it’s awesome. Oh, and remember to send some love to molluscs. Pop onto QuakeNet and say hello! You can find the PR team in #QuakeNet.

Thanks for reading,

//meeb

Thanks go to meeb for the awesome interview & QuakeNet for generally being great Live long & prosper!

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Interview with QuakeNet staff is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

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One of the more well-known packages you can use for such a task is called Anope which i’m sure you’ve already heard about and today i’ve interviewed the leader of the project, Charles “chaz” Kingsley.

Hello Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi there,

My name is Charles Kingsley and I’m the project lead for Anope IRC Services and also a contributing Network Administrator on the Teranova IRC Network and IRC Operator on Chatspike.

In *real* life, I work as an IT Consultant designing and building systems for businesses and educational institutions centric to the safe and secure ‘always’ available system model.

When did you begin using IRC and what was your “path” on it?

Phew, this was a long time ago now..

I started on a java chat site running “Chatspace” software some time back in the late 90’s where dialup was the way of life and soon developed an interest in hacking mIRC to pieces and making it do things it didn’t want to. (This of course required an offline IRC Server to play with as dialup back then was quota’d per month!)

I then found myself on Dalnet helping out in various channels before discovering that there was more to IRC than a single network. I can’t quite recall how but I ended up on Dragonlynk / IRCXP and was given my first oline around 1998/2000-ish and ‘taught’ how life was on a modified Bahamut.

As time went on, some of us from Dragonlynk/IRCXP spurred off and created our own little network of ‘home’ boxes connected together using free DynDNS.org services fondly referred to as “no-ip” net. – This the very foundations of what Teranova is today.

During this time, I also flirted with positions on other networks; often working with the people there to strengthen their position, improve security and try and impart a professional style of working, something I found at the time IRC lacked.

I found myself on the Anope IRC Network some time later having taken it upon myself to be ‘responsible’ for services on our network and a while after helping some folks out on there I was approached to join the then QA Team. Some time went past and as I found my feet I started picking away at things happening within the Team and increased my responsibilities until things went a little off the radar and the then original project lead left to progress his real life professional career and left someone else in charge. At this time I stepped up and took over running the ‘QA Team’ within Anope.

Some time later, leading up to our 1.8.0 stable release it was decided I would takeover the management of the team as our project lead had become engrossed in his studies at University and as I had (have) no life I was in a position to steer things forward.

That was almost 18 months ago and since then we’ve continued to go from strength to strength improving and refining our stable branch whilst rocketing ahead pioneering the roadmap for our development branch.

It’s been an exciting ride and continues to provide enough work for a team twice the size of the one we have so times are often tough but we’ll plod on and get on as well as we can. (*Hint, if you have skills or time (or both) please get in touch if you want to help).

How many people are working on Anope?

I am not someone who judges “work” based on code contribution so I will tell you that our team consists of 8 people, each with their own specialities, and each bringing their own contribution to the project.

Why did you feel the need to fork from Epona back then?

This was before my time but I can comment that based on my history lessons with Father Rob of the project him and dengel were maintaining a patchset for Epona (for Hostserv amongst other things) but that Lara (Epona Developer) vanished off of the face of the earth taking the coding repositories (with the most up to date patches), web presence etc with her which left a bit of a hole in the market.

Dengel and Rob at the time decided to start up Anope (epona backwards for those who hadn’t noticed) with their patch sets against the latest available release with the intention of checking this all back into Epona once Lara returned.

As time went on though, the amount of changes introduced made the application become less of a patch set and more of an overhaul so even once Lara returned to Epona so the project continued….

How much of the original codebase is still in Anope?

Phew, I have no idea, that’s a tough one.

It’s fair to say a large proportion has been altered over the years.

How much time did you put into the project and the support of it yet?

Now? I spend some hours each day I suppose reading #anope and answering if there are no nice support people around to answer the questions. I frequent the forums daily incase I’ve missed something not reported in #anope from the RSS feed and generally keep communications flowing between the team to see how we all are.

An important mention is that we are all volunteers with jobs and lives outside of Anope which is seldom understood when we tell people we simply do not have time to do x, y or z at this time.

Even though you probably heard this question over and over – when will Anope come with live SQL support?

Live SQL, yes, this is of course the big question coming from many people and for the sake of not wishing to commit to anything I can tell you it is roadmapped for 1.9.2 but this may slip as we’ve introduced a completely new database format already and in the interests of sharing the features and gaining feedback this may slip however we have taken some positive steps and have a working solution based on the stable (1.8) branch of Anope in LiveSQL mode in a large network at this time.

One of our team members has managed to build in LiveSQL into 1.9 for testing and review but at this time there is no agreed solution but we are looking at various methods of providing the flexibility without incurring too much of a CPU overhead.

More to come on this soon.

In the future, what can we expect from Anope?

Whatever people want to see.

We mostly are going off of our own steam creating features we *think* people want and fixing bugs etc but really the future is what everyone makes of it, the road map is deliberately short so we can include requests and ideas at every step.

Compared to other IRC services, Anope is…?

a solution for those who want to use it. I’m not someone who wishes to bad mouth or criticise other systems but we are simply responding to community requests for features and integrating our own experience and knowledge into providing a solution people want.

We’re fairly popular so we’re doing something right I reckon.

How can the community around Anope get involved and help you to evolve the services?

Well ……

We need translators for when we burn the existing language files carried forward into 1.9 from 1.8 as at the moment they are a limiting factor and can cause some stress if edited incorrectly.

We need multilingual supporters who wish to provide support on our forum (we will introduce international forums if these are necessary), and in specific geographical #anope.xx channels.

We need people to get stuck in and offer to test the software and contribute back their views and suggestions as well as providing information on bugs and glitches. We simply cannot test every single feature you may use on your network and in community spirit we could do with everyone helping everyone else.

Peer support is very important to a project like us; we’ve all asked questions someone else has thought was stupid at some point in our lives. We’re all human and working together is crucial.

If you could improve one thing in the IRC protocol, what would that be?

I don’t really have any improvements I can think off as we are able to do most of the things we want within Anope.

I am interested in meshing though, I can see that being particularly useful for geographically interlinked networks over different providers. This is something I do hope to see in the future.

Development aside, what do you use IRC for in your leisure time and which networks do you frequent?

Before, during, & I’m sure after Anope I’ll continue helping people with their computer problems and otherwise assisting them with their use of IRC whilst being able to relax and chill out with my friends.

I frequent Teranova.net (home of Anope Support, and a network I have been with since day 1), and Chatspike.net where I was today funnily enough asked to become an IRC Operator.

Two networks with very different atmosphere’s and I wouldn’t change either of them for the world.

I’ve also started to idle in the support channel on Geekshed.net to see whether I can help out there but the folks over there have it pretty well wrapped up so I can just sit back and giggle at Phil and his abuse of global!

There are numerous topics, polls and postings about a possible decline of IRC – what do you think about that and where do you think is IRC heading in the long term?

Statistics are just numbers, people have this way of going completely against statistics and doing things we’d never expect so I do believe that taking these polls and postings with a grain of salt.

We’re seeing downloads increase, from my idling in InspIRCd’s support channel I also see the number of people being supported increasing so I don’t really see a decline in the uptake of new systems.

Thank you for the interview – do you have any last words to our readers?

Thanks for the opportunity as always, a pleasure assisting someone who actively contributes on our network.

I would like to thank our sponsors ( www.anope.org/sponsors.php ) for their continued support with our project and also every single person who has ever helped Anope be it by downloading it, reporting/fixing a bug or just by taking part in our support system and we would welcome more of you

Hope you all have a nice week ahead.

Many thanks go to chaz for taking the time for this interview!

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Interview with Anope project leader chaz is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

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The bot software, named “psyb0t”, is the “first known botnet based on exploiting consumer network devices, such as home routers and cable/dsl modems”.

Exploiting routers is in some cases more “useful” than infecting PC’s – because “most people will keep the router on 24/7″ as opposed to their computers which “most people shut down [...] in the evening before they go to bed, or when they leave the office” nenolod writes.
In his paper (which was written back in 2006 and at that time he’s been “called looney for”) he also mentions another reason why targeting SOHO routers is a good idea:

Attacking the router will enable you to monitor network activity with a much higher level of stealth. As most people think the router is a dumb device which simply does NAT translation, it will not be considered a device with a high security risk. Most intrusion analysts at this time will not even consider the router as the place where the malware is hiding.

nenolod, amongst others, disassembled and analyzed the botnet binary, coming to the conclusion that the current incarnation we’re seeing now “was mostly a test botnet”. “Terry Baume discovered the first generation, which only targeted a handful of specific models. The current generation, would be the second generation, which targets a much wider range of devices”.

Version 17 of the malware contains “shellcode for 30 different linksys models, and 10 netgear models, as well as several kinds of cable and dsl modems (15 different shellcodes)” as well as a list of “6000 usernames and 13000 passwords” which is used for bruteforcing Telnet and SSH logins that are open to the LAN and sometimes even on the WAN side of those routers.

His efforts to shutdown the Command&Control channel the bot uses have been successful and the DNS, which has been hosted with afraid.org, has been nullrouted. In a conversation held on IRC he also mentions that the “current version is version 18, but he [the author - ed.] has changed the way he obfuscates the executable” which formerly was packed using the UPX packer.

The now defunct C&C  was suspected to control “100,000 hosts at the moment, but the ircd does not give us any information”. The bot in its current incarnation does “hijack DNS for rapidshare” and “phishes login info” which leads nenolod to believe it is more of a proof-of-concept right now and is going to grow more sophisticated in the future. Asked about the origin of the worm he says that several traces point to Australia being the country of origin and given some reports of increased telnet activity there he could be right.

The bot is able to scan for vulnerable PHPMyAdmin and MySQL installations, contains an update function and the usual flooding functionality. It also disables access to the routers control interfaces using iptables rules, denying access to the ports 22, 23 and 80. Also, he notes that the bot is “not linux-specific, a couple of the routers we have seen in the botnet are running VxWorks“.

Detecting the bot isn’t easy since you’d need to capture and analyze the traffic it sends and receives to find out if you are infected – which is impossible if the infected device does not have dedicated USB/Ethernet ports to configure them and it then “would require monitoring at the CMTS or DSLAM” level.

In his posting on the DroneBL blog nenolod writes that they “are looking into finding out more information about this botnet, and its controller. If you have any information, we would like to know.”

Update and patch your routers so they don’t swallow a blue pill

Update:

The botnet apparently has been shutdown by it’s owner:

* Now talking on #mipsel
* Topic for #mipsel is: .silent on .killall .exit ._exit_ .Research is over:
 for those interested i reached 80K. That was fun  , time to get back to the real life... (To the DroneBL guys:
 I never DDOSed/Phished anybody or peeked on anybody's private data for that matter)
* Topic for #mipsel set by DRS at Sun Mar 22 17:02:15 2009

nenolod writes in their blog:

While this information may or may not be true, we have received HTTP-based floods from IPs participating in this botnet.

We are still interested in this DRS person. If you have any information, please provide it to DroneBL. We will not disclose our sources.

Further reading:

http://www.dronebl.org/blog/8

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psyb0t – A stealthy router-based botnet discovered [Updated] is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

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First being released as version 1.8.5 there was a bugfix-release shortly thereafter as a bug has been found in channelmode +c which sometimes not only prevented control-characters as bold and underlined being sent but also stripped legitimate messages that contained certain arabic and hebrew characters.

We took the time to ask Epiphani – the Coding Teams Team-Leader – a few question about his IRCd and the history of it:

- The last release, 1.8.4, was over 2 years ago – why did it take so long for 1.8.5 (and now 1.8.6) to be released?

It’s mostly been two reasons:

1. We didn’t really have a lot of minor things we wanted to work on.

Bahamut has been stable and effective for several years, and while there is enhancements that we’d like to implement, those enhancements are more major changes than they are small updates.

We did have a few fixes come through the pipe, such as security fixes and minor other fixes (such as updated x64 support), and we decided to roll them into a patch release.

2. Life gets in the way of open source development sometimes.

At present, the team is mostly idle as life has started eating most of their time. I’ve had a few changes in my life recently that have allowed me to put more time into Bahamut once again, so I’m hoping we can revive some development.

We’ve also changed some of our processes (including a move from subversion to git) so we’re hoping to get more involvement from the community in the future.

- The list of changes introduced with this release does look small compared to the ones introduced with 1.8.4 – what, in your opinion, are the most important ones?

Mostly the security updates.

For example, we removed zlib from the distribution and made it an external dependency, due to security updates from the zlib people – we didn’t want to have to release every time zlib has an issue.

There were also a few fixes for “IP leaks” where hub IPs could be shown to normal users in certain edge cases.

- Are there any changes that are noticeable on the user side of things?

Nope, not in this release.

- When did the development on Bahamut start and why?

I believe the project kicked off sometime in late 1998, with the first public release in 1999. I can’t really remember, that was a good while ago. 

The Bahamut project came about due to some of the performance concerns around the former DALnet ircd, Dreamforge.

Back in 1999 DALnet was growing very fast, and the hardware we were running on wasn’t terribly fast.

We needed to be able to support over 6000 clients on a 250Mhz machine, and Dreamforge simply didn’t perform to those levels. Once we rolled out Bahamut, we started seeing much better performance.

I believe somewhere in 2001 we hit our record with around 45,000 clients on a single 900Mhz AMD Duron machine with 512 megs of ram.

- Is there anything you’d like to mention?

We’re always looking for contributors to Bahamut.

We have a wishlist of features, including ipv6 and other such things, that anyone is welcome to code up and provide patches for to the dalnet-src [at] dal.net mailing list.

We are mostly interested in people with the initiative to bounce ideas around on the mailing lists and go off and code!

The complete list of changes between 1.8.4 and 1.8.6 is below:

- Fixes for x64 – this is a combination of Kobi’s work and my own.
- Fixed m_part() and m_quit() to ignore part/quit reasons from squelched users.
- Fixed compiler errors with gcc4.
- Changed a debug message that could leak servers’ IPs to ADMIN_LEV. Thanks key!
- Fix configure tests for zlib removal.
- This patch is intended to mark SVSHOLDs as SBAN_SVSHOLD to stop them from being removed by a kill -HUP
- Fix several small issues where IPs would be displayed when they shouldnt be, from Kobi (kobi [at] dal.net)
- Do not display uplink of ulined servers, from Kobi (kobi [at] dal.net)
- Fix slight errors in m_who argument parsing, from kobi (kobi [at] dal.net)
- Do not display warnings about juped servers attempting to commit, from Kobi (kobi [at] dal.net).
- Fixed m_invite to honor umode +R and silence restrictions.
- Two small rwho fixes to option parsing, from Kobi (kobi [at] dal.net)
- Add hooks for several events
- Remove zlib from the distribution – rely on the library provided by the system.
- Fix msg_has_ctrls() so it doesn’t block non-control characters.

Bahamut IRCd can be downloaded from here.

Thanks go to Epiphani for the short interview and the wants-to-stay-anonymous tipster for the tip!

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DALnet releases Bahamut IRCd 1.8.6 is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

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- First, please introduce yourself to our readers so they get an idea who you are.

skullY: I’m a long-time UNIX user and administrator who works for a Silicon Valley startup.

My day job involves hating software (mainly Linux, Apache and MySQL) and I relax in the evenings by writing software to be hated.

Most of what I write is to scratch an itch, but a few things (amnesiac, nboard) see a wider release.

crapple(Zak): I’m a long-time UNIX user/admin/programmer working at a telecommunications company in Canada.

My day job involves hating just about everything mankind has dreamed up (mainly Linux, MySQL,’programmers’, religion in the workplace) and I relax off work hanging with some friends and doing the occasional barhopping.

I do most of my programming at work and occassionally I do some fun programming at home (cut’n'pasting device drivers from other BSD distro’s to OpenBSD, finding documentation/specs for certain drivers on occasion).

I’m generally a very lazy person outside of work

kreca: I am a Java/C++ developer living in Sweden.

Since the beginning of 2008 I have been running a company with a good friend of mine, focused on J2EE development.

We do product and consulting work.

- What was the reason for you to start writing on amnesiac?

skullY: Back when EPIC5 was still pretty new, but right around the time it went from unusable to usable (stability wise), Zak found out I was using EPIC4 with a home-grown script and started bugging me to help him make oblivion into an EPIC5 script.

Eventually I gave in just so he’d stop bugging me.

Zak: I was a longtime C-Toolz/ScrollZ and occassional BitchX user back in the day.

void had an EPIC4 script called oblivion and I was being curious about EPIC. EPICs scripting language was very different compared to ircII/ScrollZ as it was almost C-like in some ways.

Eventually I started doing some cleanups to oblivion for void, seeing that he is as lazy as I am and nothing was really getting done. He dissappeared from IRC and I did the last 3 oblivion releases that friends and people who knew where to look at could grab.

I was using EPIC5 pretty much since it was born and modifying oblivion to work on it was a request I had seen in #obv frequently. Basically, it got renamed to oblivion 2.0 for EPIC5 and eventually I managed to get kreca to join on the project as BitchX was going nowhere.

We made about 6-8 releases on oblivion 2.x until it started forking away from oblivion and we decided on a script name change to amnesiac. We generally just kept the cosmetics, so oblivion users will probably feel at home with amnesiac.

EPIC5 was way faster than any other IRC client I have previously used and so I did more rewrites and cleanups to amnesiac more or less for my own benefits – not so much for the userbase at that time.

Eventually our userbase started contributing difficult cosmetic work/formats/code etc. and I was really surprised about how many loyal amnesiac users we had. adam, violence, sirko – to name a few – really helped with adding functionality and cosmetic work that noone of us really wanted to do.

That’s probably when I started paying more attention to our userbase and their feature requests – after all, they helped make amnesiac the script that it is today

Though, I still pawn requests off to skullY and kreca when I win my guilt trips against them as I’m really lazy

kreca: I met Zak on EFnet and got into ircII scripting by submitting a few patches to cypress which was the predecessor to oblivion for BitchX.

Since development stopped and I realized how powerful the EPIC scripting language is, I’ve switched over to oblivion and started developing for that.

- So there are 3 scripters working on amnesiac – how do you coordinate development and what role does each one have?

skullY: Coordination might be too strong a word there.

We pretty much work on whatever strikes our fancy. We’re all pretty lazy, and the work tends to happen in spurts and bursts, so normally there’s not more than one of us working on the codebase at any given time anyway.

Periodically one of us, usually Zak or kreca, takes something from TODO-BUGS and works on it. We keep all known issues and things we want to change in there.

Zak: I pretty much try to pawn off feature requests to kreca, bugfixes to Zach, and THEN I modify the TODO-BUGS to remind myself of something that will probably not get done anytime soon, at least from me, as I find amnesiac to be very mature as IS.

Most of the feature requests we get are pretty complicated and not really something I care about, IE: userlists (That’s what IRC bots are for is my lazy excuse ;p).

We don’t really have any specific role and we just work whenever we want to.

skullY & kreca pretty much have the same ideas and goals of amnesiac as I do and if it’s something I’m not a fan of I can just revert the CVS commit if needed – which I have not had to do yet and probably never have to.

The reason why I like having 3 of us with CVS access is due to the fact I got tired of all these one author IRC scripts over the years. They never last long as the author usually has a life or moved on to another project so that the script gets unmaintained/stale.

With 3 people having commit access, chances are that it will more or less be maintained. I know that me and kreca have been busy the last 6 or so months and skullY was around to fix bugs.

I may like to add another person in the future as a backup for those times when noone of us is around

I think this is one of the main reasons why amnesiac has been around from 2003-Present. I don’t think many EPIC4/5 scripts have really been maintained for a number of years like amnesiac has – or that I’m aware of.

kreca: I would like to mention that we have two mailing lists set up aswell.

hackers [at] ircII.org – Code discussion / feature request
amnesiac [at] ircII.org – All commits are sent here for review and can be discussed aswell.

- How much time has each one of you spent on developing the script and how many lines of code did you contribute?

skullY: LOC is a really poor measurement, especially in our case.

We started with the oblivion script several years ago, which gives us a few thousand lines of code head-start.

However, amnesiac doesn’t really resemble oblivion anymore and the majority of it has been rewritten.

I’d say my LOC count is negative, if you don’t include the modules I added. Mostly I simplify and remove code or fix bugs when I’m not adding modules.

As for time, I can’t really say. Maybe 10-20 hours/year, except for the occasional burst. For example, I think I spent a total of 80 or 90 hours implementing remote.m. I’ve put in less than 2000 hours total over the last 3-4 years I’d say.

Zak: LOC really is a poor measurement, especially in an IRC script sense as we tend to borrow, rip, improve various code from the EPIC5 scripts source and from other scripts that we have permission of the author to do so.

In fact, I don’t think programmers really do much in the sense of LOC, I think we’re more or less cleaning up/rewriting functionality/code moreso than adding code – LOC for me is pretty much negative.

I have contributed *maybe* 10-20hrs/year, however I have a habit of going in spurts so that 10-20hrs might be done in, say march of 2009, and nothing else really happens from me [for the rest of the year] – except for the occasional bugfixes and adding patches users have contributed.

kreca: Not much to be added here. The last few months have been slow since I’ve had a lot of work to do.

- What made you use EPIC in the first place since there are plenty of other clients out there?

skullY: Back in my day, we only had two choices for IRC: ircII or EPIC. I was learning how to write annoying IRC scripts and using PhOeNiX.irc, and EPIC provided more and better aliases and functions, so the choice was obvious.

In those days we sent humorous messages in response to CTCP pings, as was the fashion. Dang kids, get off mah lawn!

I continue to use EPIC because other clients haven’t been able to be “better”.

I used BitchX for a while, but it was too crashy and that drove me back to EPIC. I’ve never been able to get along with GUI clients.

The new kid on the block seems to be irssi, but between misbehaving clients from irssi users and the fact that it uses PERL for scripting I’m pretty turned off by it.

Zak: Adapting to a new client is a pain in the a**.

I started with ircII/ircII based clients and I can’t see myself using anything else. I tried to show IRC to a friend a couple of years ago in mIRC.

That was so difficult that I added him a shellaccount and showed him the basics of EPIC5/amnesiac – He still uses it today after failing to like a number of GUI IRC clients.

I tend to use the tools that suit me and EPIC5 has a lot of nice features and functionality for my tastes. And if I need something fast, chances are I can script it up quickly or evaluate something in EPIC – it’s more than enough for my tastes.

After coming from a C-Toolz/ScrollZ environment the scripting language for ircII is a bit gothic and sometimes difficult. I’m quite turned off at irssi mainly because of PERL and [...] the license wasn’t something I wanted as well.

kreca: hop (Jeremy) is putting a lot of work into EPIC and has made a lot of improvements with EPIC5. He’s always open for feedback and feature requests.

This makes it a lot easier as a scripter when you’re stuck in a corner.

- What, in your opinion, is the advantage of the ircII scripting language over PERL/Python/Ruby/TCL and maybe even mIRCs scripting language (MSL)?

skullY: What’s the advantage of a shell script over those other languages?

It’s not only something you can type into interactively to test ideas (Python has that) but it’s something that you actually do type into interactively, every day.

This imparts a familiarity that simply can’t be matched.

One of the languages I used before I learned “real” programming was ircII. It was easy, I just type commands into a file!

As I learned and grew as a programmer, I found that ircII/EPIC kept up, allowing me to use the advanced concepts I was learning, even though the syntax was pretty wonky.

Today, however, EPIC5 has taken that to the next level. I find now that as I grow, EPIC5 is growing with me.

It has shed much of the earlier syntax and functional wonkiness that came from ircII and is now what I consider the UNIX users ideal IRC client.

Writing EPIC5 scripts feels more like C to me than anything else – with less bookkeeping.

Zak: Nothing to add here

kreca: There has also been work in bringing in other languages to script in EPIC – which I believe is still in the experimental stage.

- How is your script “better” compared to the others available for EPIC and what do you consider a “major selling point” of amnesiac?

skullY: Right now, we’re basically the only complete and maintained script for a user who wants to use EPIC5 without writing their own script.

I’d like to think it’s because we’ve made all the right choices to keep users happy so no one has felt the need to write a competing script.

We’re also very modular and customizable. Our goal is to provide functionality to the user, but otherwise let them make things look how they want.

For example, my preference is for my client to basically look like a stock EPIC4 client, so I go through some pain to make it look and behave that way.

This work translates into better theme support all around, which benefits everyone.

Zak: A lot of our users are european, so if someone likes various cosmetic formats within reason (which are not too spammy colour-wise and wish for ISO-8859-1 friendly themes/formats on EPIC) – it may be worth trying out.

This was surprisingly one of the hardest things we had to do: to try adding various cosmetic work with colour that would not interfere with their terminal or make it look ugly as heck.

Recently hop mentioned adding UTF-8 support into EPIC5 via iconv(), so this way may pave the way for better UTF-8 support in the future – though we do have a module for UTF-8 support.

But that is only good for joins, parts, msg, notice and publics at this time as far as I can recall (I actually never tried it myself – one of our users kindly let us add it into amnesiac).

kreca: Yes, theming really is a strong point of amnesiac. This has been completley rewritten from oblivion.

- Is there a way to get involved with developing amnesiac and how could one contribute to the script?

skullY: Like most open source projects, we’re always happy to receive patches.

For people who can’t code, we could use bug reports, better documentation or just basic evangelism to get people using the script.

Zak: I agree with the above ;p

kreca: Same here.

- Do you or have you used any other clients besides EPIC and if yes, why?

skullY: I currently use something called “Rooms” on my phone, mainly for testing and using the remote module, but I wish there was something better.

I have in the past used ircII, BitchX and ScrollZ, but never for very long.

Zak: I have always used some sort of ircII based client. I was using C-Toolz/ScrollZ for a number of years before switching over to EPIC.

I’ve also used ircII and BitchX but not for very long.

kreca: BitchX and mIRC in the beginning =)

- Development aside, what do you use IRC for in your leisure time and which networks do you frequent?

skullY: I mostly hang out on EFnet. Sometimes I’m on freenode to ask questions.

I wouldn’t really say I use IRC in my leisure time. It’s more a background thing while I’m doing something else.

Zak: I mostly hang out on EFnet and a network me and some friends made awhile back – which is still young (ErrNet).

irc.ircII.org, irc.deathwish.net and irc.slipgate.org – to name a couple of servers.

I’m generally more active on EFnet when I’m at work, else I’m usually on ErrNet – though it’s more of a background thing when I’m doing something else.

kreca: I hang out on EFnet and ErrNet aswell. Occasionally I log on to freenode.

I use it to keep connected with friends and ask development questions when it comes to specific subjects.

- There are numerous topics, polls and postings about a possible decline of IRC – what do you think about that and where do you think is IRC heading in the long term?

skullY: I haven’t gone anywhere and neither have most of my friends.

Seriously though, I’m not really worried. I’ve been hearing about how IRC is dying the whole time I’ve been using it. First it was ICB, then ICQ and AIM – and now Jabber (hah) is going to kill it.

In 20 years, when the kids are using their new-fangled ThirdLife MMOIRC, we’ll still be seeing topics, polls and blag postings about the decline and fall of IRC.

Zak: I think IRC has been dying since ‘93 – or so I keep hearing ;p

I don’t think IRC is going anywhere anytime soon – I know I’m not going anywhere and this really isn’t something I’m worried about

kreca: Nothing to add here.

- What are your future plans for amnesiac? Are there any nice feature enhancements planned for the future that one would want to know of?

skullY: In the development tree (and latest snapshot) I have a new remote module which lets you connect to your main EPIC client using another IRC client.

I need to finish it still and it has some limitations, but I’m using it a few times a week and the basic functionality seems to be working well.

Combine that with the relaysmtp module and your mobile provider’s Email -> SMS gateway and you have a complete solution for using IRC from your phone – including offline message notification.

In the future there is a lot of cleanup and under-the-hood improvements to be made. In particular, I’d like to merge our formats with EPIC5’s /set FORMAT_* support so that we can easily exchange formats with other scripts.

I believe that would also cut down tremendously on the number of /on’s we need, which means a lower memory footprint all around.

Zak: I would possibly like a better working userlist or another rewrite of it, though it’s not really something of my interest – it’s one thing some of our users frequently ask about(namely Xavier).

So I may get around to having a working userlist sometime this year or better – one i can rip^H^H^Himprove ;p

Hopefully there soon is an official first release of amnesiac 2.0 as we haven’t had a real release in a couple of years now. Although snapshots are semi-active, some of our users really don’t upgrade unless there’s a new release or a bug that’s fixed in a snapshot.

kreca: I have plans to make the tab completion more modular for users to define their own use patterns.

This would make it easier to add complete command tab support for EPIC aswell as users could add their network-specific commands for tab completion, like ChanServ and NickServ commands.

- Is there anything you want to add?

skullY: For anyone that’s new to EPIC in general, but EPIC5 in particular, they should know that while we (EPIC5 developers in general, not just amnesiac devs) keep everything as up to date and modern as we reasonably can, most of us take a longer view towards releases.

We try to code for long-term use so our users don’t have to upgrade very often and so that when they do upgrade things don’t break.

This helps to create stability in our software.

As an example, my main client right now is still running EPIC5 0.3.7 because I haven’t wanted to restart it. I’m running the latest development version of amn on top of it, which I can reload/upgrade without restarting my client.

This combination has been running for 156 days nonstop (since the machine last rebooted). Uptimes of more than a year are not unheard of.

You don’t get this kind of stability releasing every week or even every month.

Zak: I’m very sarcastic, cynical and lazy – just FYI

- Thank you very much for the interview

skullY: You’re welcome. I hope your readers enjoy it.

Zak: Welcome

Thanks for the interview (and sorry for taking so long to edit & publish it i might add)

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

amnesiac: a script for EPIC5 – Interview is a post from: IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Deutschland license.

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