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Monthly Archives: January 2010

Quassel IRC client releases version 0.5.2

The Quassel IRC project – “a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client based on the Qt4 framework” – has released a bugfix release of their IRC client which is now available as version 0.5.2.

This bugfix release mainly contains “build system fixes for recent versions of KDE and Qt” and “some issues with netsplit handling have also been fixed”. A bug that made the menu-bar vanish has been fixed and if you are affected you now can “use the context menu on the chatview to re-enable it”.

Due to the recent floodings of mass CTCPs to channels on freenode they added an option that allows you to forbid replys to certain CTCP types for the network you choose.

Developer Sput writes that “Since Freenode has fixed the problem the other day, using this should no longer be necessary for now” which is not entirely true – the fix itself is the addition of a channelmode that doesn’t allow channel-wide CTCPs (+C) which however has to be enabled to come into effect.

The download can be found here.

freenode migration to ircd-seven successfully completed

Just as announced, the migration away from the aged hyperion IRCd to the new ircd-seven started at 7:30am UTC – here’s a short summary of the events:

5 minutes early, christel of freenode staff announced via Global that she’s preparing the move:

-christel- [Global Notice] Good morning all! As you are aware we’re about to start the migration over to ircd-seven shortly, I am about to take a snapshot of the services database and copy across topics and channelmodes (bans, invexes etc). This means that any changes you make to channel modes or services after this point (on hyperion) will be lost. We’ll be a bit noisy as the migration goes on and will global to keep you updated. Thanks for your patience

Shortly after that she announced that a few servers will not immediately return into the main round-robin because they need upgrades:

-christel- [Server Notice] Hi, for users on calvino we would encourage you to make sure that your client is set to reconnect to main rotation (chat.freenode.net) as this server will not be immediately available after migration. Thank you!

-christel- [Global Notice] Hi all, services and channel states have now been migrated over to the new production network. We’re migrating utility bots/pseudoservers as we speak and we’re nearly ready for users. Users connected to calvino, crichton, kubrick, leguin and verne may wish to make sure they are re-connecting to chat.freenode.net as these servers will not be immediately linked on newnet as they are pending upgrades first. Thank you!

Just little over an hour later, christel posted an update via Global, declaring the switchover complete:

-christel- [Global Notice] Hi all, The migration is complete! newnet is up and running and you may now manually connect to irc.freenode.net, ports stay the same, however SSL listens on ports 7000 and 7070 if you wish to connect via SSL. We’ll be taking down hyperion servers momentarily and we shall see you on the other side! Thank you!

-christel- [Global Notice] The migration is complete and went smoothly, thank you for your patience while we transferred state from hyperion to seven, thank you to seven and charybdis developers for making ircd-seven happen and than you to freenodes infrastructure team for all getting dug in! Website FAQ is updated, as is our blog. You may wish to familiarise yourself with changes. Thanks!

The loophole that allowed users of the Firefox webbrowser to connect to the network via Javascript and spam channels has been fixed and a feature to block channel-wide CTCPs has been implemented in the new IRCd which is a major improvement and should keep the spammers at bay.

Another much-anticipated feature of the new IRCd is client- and server-side SSL which is now available on ports 7000 and 7070 network-wide. A possibly not complete list of new features and changes the new IRCd introduces can be found here, here and here.

Congratulations to the freenode staff team for the smooth migration!

Australian ISPs unite to disconnect botnet zombies

Yesterday a group consisting of major Australian ISPs – amongst them are Optus, Telstra, Vodafone, AAPT, Virgin, Hutchison 3G as well as Facebook, Google and Microsoft – announced that they prepare “a voluntary industry code to come into force this year” which could mean that “Computers infected with viruses could be “expelled” from the internet”.

The Internet Industry Association, which is made up of over 200 ISP and IT-related companies, is preparing that code in response to an ultimatum of the federal government.

Even though similar efforts have been reported in the past, Australia advanced to be #3 regarding botnet activity worldwide – only beaten by the U.S. and China. Interestingly, Australia wasn’t even to be found in the Top10 of McAfee’s Global Threat report 2 years ago

The sheer abundance of potential victims also explains why it is relatively cheap – 25$ per install – to get malware such as fake anti-virus solutions installed on Australian computers.

The internet industry’s voluntary code of conduct is being pushed by the federal Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy which wants to make the ISPs contact offending customers first before stepping up to more drastic measures like reducing the customers speed or changing their password so they have to contact the helpdesk.

As a last resort, the customers connection will be terminated if they fail to clean up the infection in a given timeframe.

If this gets done right it could very well mean a new era for all of us, meaning less spam, DDoS and other common nuisances found on todays internet.

What do you think about that? Should other countrys follow suit?

New ircd-ratbox stable release fixes crashbugs [Updated]

Developer androsyn just announced the availability of ircd-ratbox 2.2.9, a new release in their stable branch – shortly after the release of a new version in their testing branch.

Upgrading is strongly advised since this release fixes 2 crashbugs that can be triggered by users.

The functions that potentially can lead to a crash of the IRC daemon are said to be “/quote HELP” and “/links”, however the exact commands are not mentioned in the announcement – we will update this post once more details are known.

The downloads to the updated IRCd can be obtained here.

[Update]: The testing branch seems to be affected too by one of these bugs and has been updated to version 3.0.6.

ircd-ratbox releases version 3.0.5

ircd-ratbox, the “advanced, stable and fast ircd” which is “the primary ircd used on EFNet” just released version 3.0.5 in their testing tree.

The release is purely a bugfix release as there are no new features been announced to come with it.

The changelog is as follows:

- fix a bug with reading help files
- add debugging in for dealing with a kline removal bug
- fix /rehash tdlines and /rehash bans so they actually do something with dlines
- compute the number of file descriptors passed correctly on freebsd/amd64 (and probably others)
- check for compiler support for various warning flags and add them
- add -fno-strict-aliasing as this is now needed for gcc 4.4
- GNUTLS code now picks up new keys/certificates on rehash

The download can be obtained here.