chaz of the Anope project announced version 1.9.2 of their services package in the development branch.
New features since the release of 1.9.1-p1 are the “modestacker” which allows setting and removing several modes by services in one line, the binary databases have been replaced by flatfile plaintext ones and an option for persistent channels which keeps BotServ bots in the channel even when it is empty has been added.
Anope now supports linking over IPv6 and also reconnects automatically if it detects the uplink has died. Where it was only possible to have one encryption method of your users precious passwords, you can now set to have two or even more – useful if an application which interfaces with Anope only supports old and broken hashing algorithms like MD5. InspIRCd development also continued at a high pace and this release now supports linking to the 2.0 versions of their IRCd.
Finally, this release features something that closely resembles Live SQL: Anope reads from a special “commands” table which contains normal Anope commands and is executed as a FIFO-style queue. The database gets updated immediately when commands are issued and commands executed from SQL are also near-instant, however developer Adam says he has “an evil plan for that”. chaz writes in his announcement that this feature will be “further developed/re-engineered in 1.9.3″ but he says it’s a “good start”.
Since the whole Live SQL thing is a new feature and even though it was thoroughly tested, the announcement contains a few words that you should take precautions:
As always, we encourage early adopters of development releases to exercise caution and take frequent system back ups knowing full well it might destroy your plans on a Friday night. We have been running 1.9.2 on Teranova for some time now and only uncovered a few unseen bugs. (This was on both Unreal and subsequently our migration to InspIRCd 1.2).
Networks that are running their services daemon on Windows will be missing out on the whole Live SQL business – apparently MySQL support on Windows is broken but it’ll be added when 1.9.3 is released.
Another thing to look forward to is that there will be a webinterface included in one of the upcoming releases and the developers note that they “welcome suggestions on our forum for functionality this could include”.
Probably trying to reduce the possibility to be hit by a similarly disastrous hack like it happened to the guys of the UnrealIRCd project, chaz writes that future releases “may include further security measures such as GPG/etc” in addition to the provided MD5Sums.
Even though the changelog seems rather short there have been changes to no less than 279 files with 31458 insertions and almost as much deletions according to this diff stat.
The announcement which includes the download link and further instructions regarding the upgrade process from 1.9.1 and MySQL-support can be viewed here.
[Update]: Anope 1.9.2-p1 has been released as a direct result from a few bugreports. Issues resolved include Windows-specific problems and fixes to the database converter – if you’ve experienced problems with either you’re advised to update.
The project is also seeking contributors for their upcoming releases – whether you’re a coder, webdev or a tester – if you feel like helping the project out you should get in touch with them.
[Update 2]: Patch release 2 has just been made available on the Anope website: InspIRCd 2.0 support has been extended, full m_customprefix (allows custom prefixes to be created) support being one of the added features in this release. Users of Anope 1.9.2 and 1.9.2-p1 are advised to upgrade since both versions contain a bug that may crash services when a nick expires.
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