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UnrealIRCd Survey

As the #1 most used IRC daemon on most networks, UnrealIRCd as we all know is a great daemon. It has many features, easy configureation and good irc support. But as IRC grows (or dies depending on how you look at it), there are more and more IRC daemons being released. With all of the long time IRC users learning to code, they decide to branch out either from the unrealircd source or from another IRC daemon source. With that being said, UnrealIRCd is slowly moving down the popularity list.

So to improve the UnrealIRCd, Syzop (Bram Matthys), has decided to launch an online survey.

This survey is not only for those who have dealt with UnrealIRCd as a developer, but for anyone and everyone who has ever been on an IRC network, that runs UnrealIRCd, either as just a user, an admin, or a developer. The results from the survey will be used by the UnrealIRCd development team to know what areas to focus more time on in the Unreal3.4.x series

The purpose of this survey is to give us a good idea of how people think about UnrealIRCd, how it’s being used, and – even more important – in what areas we should improve.
–Syzop, Project Leader. Developer/maintainer of UnrealIRCd 3.2.x and 3.4.x

So if you like, dislike, or want UnrealIRCd to be improved in any way, shape or form, this is your time to fill out this survey. It takes about 15 minutes of your time to complete (only if you end up having to answer all 33 questions), But some questions are skipped depending on your answer for some questions.

If you have 15 minutes to spare right now, we encourage you to visit http://survey.unrealircd.com

InspIRCd Updates & New Website

After quite a prolonged downtime, the InspIRCd website and Wiki is back up again, although not under its original domain any more but is now hosted on GitHub.

There have been new releases in all current branches as well as a new Beta release in the 2.1 branch.

Users of the 1.2 versions are strongly advised to upgrade their IRCds at least to version 1.2.9rc1 due to the recently found vulnerability and, if possible, they should update to InspIRCd 2.0.x as the 1.2 branch is nearing its end-of-life if no new maintainer is found.

People interested in maintaining the InspIRCd 1.2 branch should get in touch with the developers via their IRC channel on Chatspike.

InspIRCd 2.0.5 Vulnerability [Updated]

There has been a vulnerability reported in InspIRCd 2.0.5 and possibly other versions of the IRC daemon.

The problem lies in the buffer handling of dns.cpp, can be triggered by remote users and might result in arbitrary code execution according to the advisory.

 

There currently is a workaround in the form of a config setting, namely to set

to yes.

 

There also have been pull requests on GitHub by Atheme developer nenolod which fix the underlying code, although those – as of now – haven’t been pulled in yet.

 

The fixes above have been pulled in and the official sources have been moved from Gitorious to GitHub.

 

Due to the serious nature of the vulnerability, watch the development of this closely and even though there currently are no reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

 

The advisory can be found here and one of the temporary InspIRCd websites (which is currently still down after a break-in into ChatSpike/InspIRCd servers) can be found here.

 

We’ll keep this entry updated on any new developments regarding this issue.

UnrealIRCd 3.2.9 – New stable version after 2 years

UnrealIRCd, the IRCd that still dominates the usage statistics of all IRCds, has seen another stable release and is now at version 3.2.9.

After 2 release candidates and with 212 changes and bugfixes – almost the same amount as the last three stable releases combined – among which is a “substantial amount of new features” as Syzop writes in their announcement.

He thanks everyone that made this release possible but especially mentions binki who did a “considerable amount of work to make this release possible”.

And indeed, there is a large amount of changes – for example:

  • Extended Bans (new modes introduced, ban stacking behaviour)
  • Extended Invite Exceptions / Invex
  • New Channelmode +Z which works in conjunction with +z (SSL only) and is set once every joined user is on SSL which might not be the case during netsplits/-joins
  • Remote MOTD support
  • Remote includes caching so that an old version of a remote include is loaded in case the webserver containing the include is down
  • /rehash -global – rehashes all servers at once
  • STARTTLS – connect to a “regular” port SSL encrypted
  • IPv6 clones detection support, defaults to /64

A small excerpt of the bugs that have been fixed:

  • Low connection frequencies (connfreq) no longer pose a problem due to reworking the corresponding code
  • IPv6 related fixes
  • an obscure crash bug that only occured rarely on outgoing connects

Work on UnrealIRCd 3.3 already has begun and is, according to development plans, the replacement for the often retried and ultimately failed rewrite which was to be released as UnrealIRCd 4.

The release announcement can be found here and the full changelog for changes since UnrealIRCd 3.2.8.1 is here (you need to scroll all the way down).

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Hybrid releases 7.3.0

Earlier this week, Jon Lusky released a new version of ircd-hybrid. The version number has now reached 7.3.0. Among the changes you find a new Bulgarian translation, a fixed IPv6 implementation and channel modes O and S for opers-only respective SSL/TLS-only clients. Server administrators now get to choose whether they want to use SSLv3 or TLSv1 to secure connections. All spy-notice modules that previously covered reports for usage of STATS, TRACE, MOTD and ADMIN have been replaced by server-sided notices. The old LazyLinks concept has now been removed, as it was half broken. The WATCH command known from UnrealIRCd and Bahamut has been added. In addition to that, a few minor cleanups and bugs leading to crashes have been fixed.

Hybrid is used together with Ratbox (which is a fork) and CSIRCd on both EFnet and IRCsource. It has been forked many times and it’s known for its stability and quality of code.

By looking at the SVN repository it seems like the developer team behind Hybrid is working towards a 8.0 release, featuring better services support while still keeping simplicity.

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