www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

All about Internet Relay Chat

Monthly Archives: May 2007

Freenode and OFTC Networks Start Cooperation

About half a decade ago Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) separated from OpenProjects.net, founded by Rob ‘lilo” Levin, because of different opinions on fund raising and managing the project.

One year ago Rob Levin was hit by a car and died by the injuries. Freenode has since then made changes within its managing structure where users can have more influences in decision making and a more transparent organization in general.

This new cooperation between the two networks initially will be observing each others operations and swapping of of staff. What the future cooperation will be like, including a possible merger is not yet laid out. But both sides are interested in taking next steps.

The two networks have very different technical operation, and both fall under a different organization and have cultural differences. The size of both networks are different, 33,000 for Freenode against 3750 on OFTC.

One of the first steps being looked at is moving Freenode to a new IRCd. The current IRCd in use is a highly modified and difficult to maintain IRCd called Hyperion. Head of staff at Freenode Christel Dahlskjaer is currently looking at several options and has special interest in OFTC’s Hybrid-based IRCd and Charybdis (based on IRCd-ratbox).

DroneBL Going OpenSource

DroneBL has gone opensource on the 15th of May. This blacklist for tracking infected machines started out as a research project by Nenolod and a friend back in 2003, and is especially suited to be used on IRC networks.

It was developed under a company both friends had in networking equipment and firmware, with main focus towards security. “In late 2004, NodeRebellion went out of business due to lack of interest. At this time, DroneBL was shutdown, and the codebase was transferred to myself personally”, Nenolod explained to IRC-Junkie.

Until April 2007 not much development took place, but interest form the outside was still present, and the project was resurrected using atheme.org’s infrastructure. This was necessary as the previous sponsors’ server was rooted in November 2006. “Due to interest in the blacklist, I subsequently opensourced the code on May 15th.”

“I believe that open sourcing the blacklist software will result in users in the community becoming more involved with improving the DroneBL service”, Nenolod explains. ” So far, there has not been anything submitted, but I think with time this will change. Additionally, I think we’re the only currently active blacklist that has fully opensourced their backend software. I hope that other blacklist projects will take this as an example.”

Feedback from the user community have been positive, and interest has been increased. Nenolod’s expectations are that the opensource move will increase speed in development and improve the service overall.

“I would especially like to thank William “AfterDeath” Heimbigner for his help in scraping known proxy lists and listing positive hits in DroneBL. This sort of proactive effort I feel will give us an edge over netabusers.”

“Additionally, I would like to thank the people at IronPort which have been experimenting with our data. They have provided quite a bit of advice on ways that we can improve our service, which we look forward to implementing in the near future.”

The OPM which ceased operation in May 2006 (which we reported about on 7 May 2006) now recommends its users to switch to DroneBL.

Thanks to w00t for the tip.

Possible DoS Found in IRCd-Ratbox

A possible DoS has been found in IRCd-Ratbox. This IRCd is in use on EFNet and other smaller networks.

The discovery was announced on the Ratbox mailinglist by Lee H: “We have recently uncovered a potential DoS in ircd-ratbox that could result in resource starvation of the CPU.”

The bug dates back to very early version of Ratbox, which makes it a vulnerability that is presence in all flavors of the IRCd in use.

“We have now released ircd-ratbox-2.2.6, it is recommended that everybody upgrades — the attack is fairly easy to abuse.  Details follow in the next email”, Lee ends. Since then, Lee retracted to give more details about the exploit to prevent malicious users causing havoc.

Thanks to Kobi for the tip.

Oslo* server Duo Delinks from Undernet

The 31st of May the Oslo* server duo from Undernet will be delinked. They served the Undernet community for many years, and its staff was active in different help related channels, with #nastrand being well known.

IRC-Junkie had a short interview with one of the admins of the server duo, Bjoern. Bjoern Vik, living in Oslo Norway, has been working in the IP business for about a decade and became involved with Undernet in 2002.

“I used to manage a support center within the dial-up business for Internet and I saw that a lot of the employees there used IRC to communicate among themselves and in general” Bjoern starts to explain his involvement with IRC. “This was back in 1997 and i joined in as well. Main focus at first was to use IRC for the fun of it and the choice of undernet.org was more that the ones I knew where there. Later the use of IRC was more work related in that I was involved with organizations that had offices around the world and we where working on setup’s that was very “beta”. I found that a lot of know-how could be found around on IRC channels and people where more than willing to share knowledge”.

Bjoern have been hosting several servers spread over several IRC networks, both large and smaller networks. Bjoerns’ Undernet involvement came when the other admin Mr_Jobe called him and asked if he could help hosting a server. “[I] pulled some strings and we made it all happen”.

After a while the duo thought a second server could help take off some load from the first, and help Undernet as a whole as well, and the server-duo was born.

A change in contract with the current sponsor and change of interests of the admin team have led to the decision of delinking the duo. “Change of focus from their side and also the admin team of oslo* have come to a conclusion that we have spent a lot of time making this as best we can for the users and now no longer have what it takes to keep it up like we want” Bjoern explained to IRC-Junkie.

Will Bjoern and the others disappear completely from IRC and/or Undernet? “I have one more server on a small network where I still stay and I am sure I will pass by now and then also on Undernet”.

Syzop resigns his position on the UnrealIRCd project

Today, In an unexpected announcement on their homepage www.unrealircd.com and an email to all the official testers, Syzop has officially resigned his position as Head Coder and maintainer of Unreal 3.2*. “Having severe wrist issues (RSI) has forced me to have surgery, but the doctors don’t know if that will help” says Syzop, now former coder of UnrealIRCd project.

“I’m not sure if I’ll ever (be able to) get back, and if so, in what kind of shape or form (I certainly would love to get back)” explains Syzop. With Unreals’ recent “call for help”, I think a lot of people have been anticipating this would happen, but I don’t think any body knew it would be this fast.

However, Syzop wants to be sure to thank all the help he’s received and asks that if you are still interested in the UnrealIRCd project, to step forward.

As for Unreal3.2* & Unreal3.3*, Stskeeps will be the maintainer and do all of the administrative tasks. “I’ll still be selling my paid modules, but nothing else relating to the project for now” explains Syzop. For some, this may end up being a good thing, but for most of the IRC community, they fear what will become of the UnrealIRCd project.

Stskeeps wasn’t around to make any statements based on the many questions users are asking, but those of you who are interested should keep up with the website and forums. In a final message from Syzop, “Various people have jumped in to help with coding after my request last month, so I don’t think the existence of Unreal will be in any danger”. I guess only time will tell, but for those of you wishing all the best to Unreal and Syzop, all you can do now is pray, or help.

Article by Bricker