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Monthly Archives: May 2005

EFNet Switches to OpenChanfix

EFNet’s global voting body has voted to switch its Chanfix reopping service to the opensource OpenChanfix.

“EFnet has traditionally been a network of multiple implementations”, OpenChanfix coder Garion explains to IRC-Junkie. ” We are running several compatible ircd versions, and that seems to do well. When it turned out that the maintainers of the current chanfix didn’t have the time to fix bugs and add features, Beige and I decided to write our own chanfix. Apparently the EFnet admins prefer this implementation over the current chanfix, because they voted to use OCF from now on.”

One of the big benefits of OpenChanfix is that each server admin is able to add/modify his own opers in OpenChanfix, instead of having to rely on a “god”-user.

“Another advantage is that OpenChanfix is a bit more picky about who to give ops when reversing a channel takeover, thus making it more likely that the channel is returned to its “rightful” owners instead of ending up in the possession of the takeover people again”, Garion explained.

The OpenChanfix team recently has been expanded with Alan “alz” Milford, who has been helping to port OpenChanfix to ircd-ratbox, as the service is more stable on that ircd instead of running on ircd-hybrid.

Together with the vote for the service, also a new services team have been voted for; Garion from the OpenChanfix development team, Hardy to represent the Canadian EFNet portion, Mofo for the European portion and finally Entropy for the U.S.A..

Troublemaker Forces GameSurge to GLine ISP

“Due to problems with a recurring trouble maker and no response from Sprint’s abuse department, so far, which we have attempted to contact for the past three weeks, we have been forced to block this range from our our network”, the GameSurge website announced.

Cradly from the GameSurge team explained to IRC-Junkie that the gline was eventually set “due to a user who  would use dynamic ip addresses to evade g-lines.  Because we didn’t  receive a response from Sprint to our initial abuse complaints, we decided on the ban.”

The user made it a game to evade the ban, both on IRC and on GameSurge’s forum.

Once the ISP was glined, other customers complained at the ISP for not being able to connect to the network, which got the abuse department of Sprint to act and resolve the issue with the user in question.

“After verifying our complaints about the user, Sprint assigned the  user a static ip address which allowed us to enforce a g-line for  only that user” Cradly explained.

“Ultimately I think  it was an exercise that proved once you find real people in a company  like Sprint, they’ll go out of their way to help with abuse issues.”

It is not the first time a large IRC network had to decide to gline a whole ISP becuase of the abuse of a few, or a single user. Undernet had to resort to banning whole of Turkey on its forum due to the abuse of a single user last year. Also Undernet had to gline the large Canadian ISP Videotron due to continuous abuse.

InspIRCD Wiki Page Defaced

“During the day today, several wiki pages were defaced, We found a lot of ‘Increase your testosterone’ links, and someone spamming ShadowIRCd” the InspireIRCd Wiki section announced.

Rather than an exploit which have been abused, the defacement was able to take place to the way the Wiki was configured. Brain, of the InspireIRCd project, explains; “we would edit pages (as sysops) then lock the pages when we were done. This meant that any pages which were currently blank and not in use were writeable by anyone, as ‘scratchpad’ space. The idea of this was to let third party module developers write help pages for their modules, then once they were happy with their pages, we would lock them and link them into the docs.”

There was not a single defacement. The first defacement was done by an automated way and was spamming a testosterone product. The second defacement was done by a person who spammed the ShadowIRCd project.

“We discussed the defacing in length with the people involved with this other ircd and using the ip address tracked the defacing down to a third party who was intent on giving both projects a bad name”, Brain explained to IRC-Junkie in a reaction.

“Our wiki pages now require signup to be edited”, Brain concludes.