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Monthly Archives: April 2010

Atheme services packages releases version 5.1.0

The team developing the Atheme IRC services just tagged version 5.1.0 of their services package.

The new release brings a lot of bugfixes, feature additons and enhancements as well as a slew of modules that have been contributed to the project by other developers.

Also, a few changes have been made to the available IRCd protocols, mostly improvements and additions concerning InspIRCd support but also a new module which provides support for the Ithildin IRCd has been added. Support for the legacy hyperion daemon, previously used on freenode, has been dropped and support for ShadowIRCd has been updated.

Various helpfiles for the available *Serv’s have been added and updated, the same goes for all the added contributed modules. A taint subsystem has been added which “allows developers to programatically define unsupportable conditions”.

SaslServ has gained the AUTHCOOKIE SASL method which allows for integration with Iris, an AJAX IRC client that is a fork of and aims to be a drop-in replacement for qwebirc which is “designed to integrate with the Atheme IRC platform (including atheme-web) and with IRCv3 client protocol compliance in mind”.

NickServ was expanded with CERTFP support which allows for password-less authentication via SSL certificate fingerprints. The converter for Anope databases has been improved to support newer versions of Anope and has been reworked to be a bit more robust when handling encrypted passwords.

The download can be found here and the complete changelog is available here.

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GeekShed suffers from DDoS

GeekShed, the “free to use and family-friendly Internet Relay Chat network”, is currently suffering from a large scale DDoS attack that cripples their infrastructure consisting of 15 servers.

Even though those servers are in datacentres that offer DDoS-protection and are hosted with a number of large backbones they cannot seem to withstand the sheer volume of ICMP and UDP traffic directed at them.

Some of the servers have been null-routed by the hosting providers, others have been null-routed by GeekShed staff to “prevent damage to other machines and customers” according to network owner Phil.

The cause, as usual, seems to be a disgruntled user that has been banned from Chris Pirillo’s channel #chris who then engaged in spamming the channel with floodbots and after the channel staff has put a stop to the spamming, resorted to throwing large volumes of traffic at the servers using a botnet.

Since its split from the Wyldryde network, this is the second time somebody felt the necessity to bombard the network with junk traffic after being banned from #chris, however that miscreant was put to jail-time after the incident.

Netsplit.de Graph showing outtages on GeekShed

Netsplit.de Graph showing outtages on GeekShed

GeekShed staff are currently trying to sort out the situation and are working on restoring service for their users but since there is only so much one can do on the receiving end of a DDoS attack, service will be “intermittent” as Phil has posted on GeekSheds official website.

Note: At the time of publishing it seems the network is back in normal operation.

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ratbox-services updated to v1.2.4

ratbox-services, the services package for ircd-ratbox, have released version 1.2.4 in their stable tree.

ratbox services logo

ratbox services logo

Version 1.2.4 is mainly a bugfix release, one feature addition that this new version got is that you now can specify both the UID/GID and the path it chroots to on startup with a parameter.

Other than that, some inconsistencies with ChanServ enforcing topics have been rectified and it now “enforces topics whenever it is in the channel”. The handling of read-errors received from servers has been fixed as well as the configure-options of both MySQL and PostgreSQL which now take a path to a binary that will provide the compiler with information it needs to compile the respective support in.

The complete changelog for ratbox-services 1.2.4 can be found here and the download can be obtained from here.

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AndChat Android IRC client 1.2.9 is available

A new version of the Android IRC client AndChat went live just yesterday, so lets have a look:

AndChat Channelview

AndChat Channelview

Version 1.2.9 brings a few feature additions, a fix for a crash bug on “selecting [a] name in user list screen” and various other small improvements.

Unspecified issues with orientation changes have been fixed and the code regarding the scrollback buffer has been worked on to prevent accidental loss of it on pressing the D-Pad. To indicate new messages that currently are not in view, AndChat now displays blue arrows and the scrollbars have been hidden to save some screen estate and only show up when the text-area is pressed longer.

The app now has a setting for the number of reconnect-attempts it should make and switching between servers is now possible by pressing the volume keys.

The complete changelog for version 1.2.9 can be viewed here and the download is available from here.

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Quassel IRC client updated to 0.6.1

Developer Sputnick of the Quassel project just posted an announcement for version 0.6.1 of their IRC client.

Quassel IRC client Logo

Quassel IRC client Logo

In case you wonder where the announcement of 0.6.0 went, he writes that they skipped it because “shortly after tagging, we’ve discovered two serious bugs in that version. One could make the monolithic client try to select the PostgreSQL backend rather than SQlite; the other would lead to a crash on startup in some setups”.

In the announcement, he cites the following as the most notable new features:

  • Completely reworked client/core connection featuring the long-awaited reconnection and Solid support as well as a streamlined UI
  • Support for the new DBus-based system tray of KDE and, in some distros, Gnome (StatusNotifier spec)
  • Improved notification handling
  • Support for inputting formatted (colored/bold/…) text
  • SASL auth support (replaces NickServ e.g. in Freenode)
  • Several new languages and improved translations for already existing ones
  • Build system improvements

Version 0.7.x is already in development but he says that they will “maintain the 0.6.x branch in feature and string freeze at least until 0.7.0 is released” which means they’ll backport bugfixes where it makes sense but won’t introduce new features in the 0.6.x branch to “make packagers of freeze-loving distros happy”.

The complete changelog can be found here and the download can be obtained from here.

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