IRCNews

SolidIRC stable once again

X-Ception — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

SolidIRC has seemingly been having a heap of problems in the not so distant past and now it would appear those issues are gone and the network is stable - at least according to the announcement. The stability issues have been blamed on numerous things:

Software bugs
InspIRCd config errors
Provider issues
etc etc

See the snippet below for further information, snippet taken from the original announcement:
There were too many reasons at a time which caused the splits and we had find any single one of them. Those reasons were software bugs, stability issues at our serverproviders, configuration mistakes because inspircd is doing things slightly different than unreal, and some more. As all problems existend at the same time, it took me much time to investigate whats happening and where are the problems.

Last but not least, i want to thank the communities who decided to stay at SolidIRC, even with the annoying problems we had. Its good to see that people appreciate our work, and honor it by staying here not only in good times but in bad times too. Thanks you.

Denora dev issues

X-Ception — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

It would appear that Denora is having a real hard time with the popular development platform/groupware system Redmine with it having somewhat constant problems, while initially this announcement was made to announce that it had been fixed that has now been changed back to 'its broken' announcement rather promptly due to the fact the problems which we're assumed fixed soon reared their little heads once again.

Here is the a short bit of text from the original announcement:
Some of you might have noticed that in the past days our project management system at dev.denorastats.org has been down. Severe software problems related to Redmine led to this unfortunate yet needed decision. And not for the first time since we introduced it.

In an attempt to give Redmine one last chance, it has been updated and tweaked, and is being closely monitored. Should problems continue to arise, Denora will be forced to switch to another project management system.

We apologize for the disruption and hope to be able to keep the whole thing running smooth and stable.

SPUnet Maintenance

X-Ception — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

SPUnet Communications has announced that during the next few days upgrades will be done on their IRCds and some optimization done in the process the maintenance starts on the 3rd and is expected to be fully completed for the 11th of November.

Below is a snippet from the original announcement:
There will be IRC downtime for the next few days to fix the IRCds and optimize their performance. There will also be more module implants to help IRC Operators further manage the IRC Network. This maintenance has started on the week of November 3rd and should go up to no later than November 11th.

Smuxi Twitter integration

X-Ception — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Smuxi author meebey has announced the integration of his multi-platform IRC client Smuxi with the ever beloved Twitter, the integration came about according to the announcement on a day of just hacking around with the code to get something working and the result was quite a good one as you can see from the screenshot he posted on the Smuxi website

Here is a snippet from the original announcement:
After a successful hacking weekend I am happy to announce that Smuxi has a cool new feature. With the next Smuxi release you will be able to receive and send tweets from/to Twitter. For those who don't know yet what Twitter is, it's a micro-blogging tool which I am using heavily for the past few weeks/months. Smuxi supports the friends timeline, replies view and direct messages

Freenode bot goes nuts

X-Ception — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:06:32 +0000

Freenode have confirmed via their blog that a bot did indeed go nuts and start zapping users for the sake of zapping users, another user in #IRCReport had already pointed out that a huge chunk of users had been killed off freenode (axod) and then later assumed it was a rogue bot or something ... which turned out to be the case (cookie for you)

The Freenode explanation and resolution is a touch long so here are a few snippets from the post:
You may have noticed a large number of people disconnecting from freenode with the reason ‘Nick collision from syn.’ We feel we should explain what happened.

For those of you not already familiar with her, syn is a utility bot that, amongst other duties, regulates gateway access to the network. This could be web gateways such as CGI:IRC or our own webchat, NAT gateways, or some conferences and shell services. One of the things that she does, for web gateways in particular, is to match the reported IP address (hex-encoded in the ident field) against network bans, and deny the connection if a match is found.

It was this particular part that had an unfortunate pair of bugs resulting in the incident you observed. Firstly, in using sscanf() to detect a hex-encoded IP address in the ident field, the validation was not quite strict enough — any ident that *began* with a series of valid hexadecimal characters (the digits 0-9 and letters a-f) would result in a number being decoded. In normal circumstances, this would be relatively harmless as the resulting IP is clearly invalid — in most cases, it would begin 0.0.0., and not match any network bans.

The post goes on to state that castrating the developers of the bot is welcomes as well as the staff, so feel free to grab your blunt scissors prior to doing so.

bitlbee server issues

X-Ception — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:02:21 +0000

It would appear that bitlbee have not had the best of days with the main server, based on whats been announced in the official post - some scheduled maintenance on a power supply seemingly went horribly wrong and as yet no resolution has been found with the server still being offline. Although an update was published stating that the server would be moved (via a backup) to a virtual environment until the issues with the main server could be resolved.

here is the official post in full:
im.bitlbee.org is currently down for what was supposed to be a quick reboot to switch power supplies. Sadly things don't seem to go that well, and five hours later the machine is still down.
Unfortunately there's not much else I can tell since I don't own the machine. It's after midnight local time by now so possibly it's going to be down at least until local morning.

Of course there are still many more public servers available. Unfortunately BitlBee accounts are not yet universal though, so you will have to recreate it if you switch. (Fixing this is on our TODO for a long time and some code already exists.)

Mibbit new features and growth

X-Ception — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:47:59 +0000

Mibbit have announced via the official blog some new features which should give the client a bit of a neater look and feel as well as some error and alert information boxes which according to the announcement use lightbox - so no further additional requirements have been added to the client. Aside from the new features comes the report of new records with Mibbit now hitting 8500 connections to its client, an astounding number really given Mibbit is still an infant in the client world.

Obviously with growth comes the requirement on the client being stable and online as much as possible, while mibbit has been rather stable in that respect a few reboots and restarts have crept in and caused a touch of downtime... Along with the new features comes some ideas to actively address the minimal downtime they had via reboots

Here is a snippet or two from the official post as well as a released screenshot:
A couple of features that snuck in while you may not have been looking – errors/alerts now popup in a lightbox modal type dialog, and you can setup your chat to look a bit more rounded (Not in internet explorer)

We’ve also been spending more time to ensure that Mibbit stays up – even if the hosting co decides to reboot all the servers

ReplayIRC announced upgrades

X-Ception — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:00:00 +0000

ReplayIRC a network which has been working full tilt recently to get both the website together and now seems the focus has shifted to the servers themselves with the IRCd's scheduled for an upgrade. A snippet from the announcement reads like so:

With by how it appears, the next (final) release of our IRCd from EvilNet is upon us! This is mainly a build for bug fixes as well as additional mode tweaks. That said, all servers except for NoX.ReplayIRC.com and RBP.ReplayIRC.com are disabled from the DNS round robin.

I cannot honestly remember if we announced the updates to the ReplayIRC website when they all came around but in the event I didnt you should definitely pop along and check out the website - its looking great!

http://replayirc.com

Blitzed turns 9

X-Ception — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Blitzed the very network that brought us cool projects such as BOPM, Listsync and a custom version of operstats has official turned 9 years of age. The network has almost hit one of the milestones most networks will never see and thats a decade of being online with very little troubles - one more year and they hit the X.

9 years however is a huge acheivement in its own right and the network has continued to push forward as it aims to be a better and more robust network, here is a snippet from the official announcement:

The Blitzed IRC Network has completed a day of celebrations in honour of its 9th birthday, on October 31st 2009. Peaceful demonstrations were held across the world to commemorate being one of the longest-running and most stable networks on the planet.

congrats to all at Blitzed

Linkinus feature announcement

X-Ception — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Linkinus a commercial client for OS-X has previewed one of its new features that's currently scheduled to be in the next release of Linkinus, the new feature will introduce log pruning to the client allowing those that dont wish to keep every single log since the dawn of time on their system to do so.

Here is a screenshot they released of the new feature which outlines its basic:
snippet: The next version of Linkinus will allow you to set an automatic pruning time for old logs. I.e. you can have Linkinus prune logs older than days.

So what else is new? Tab completion will also receive a spec bump. You are in a very crowded channel and want to highlight a person somewhere in the middle of the nicklist? If he was talking to you a minute ago you’ll now be able to tab complete his/her nick way faster than before because Linkinus can now tab complete in “last spoke” order as well as alphabetically.

see: http://conceitedsoftware.com/blog/2009/10/31/hallo-%E2%80%A6-what-have-g... for further information as well as how to opt into the beta program.

InspIRCd 1.1.23 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:49:25 PDT

w00t appears to be not letting me get any sleep as another release of InspIRCd has quickly followed yesterdays release and no its not for the 1.2.x branch. w00t has released a new version for the seemingly long forgotten 1.1.x branch which looks to fix

ZEnet new site | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:19:03 PDT

ZEnet has re-launched their site with a whole new design and some code modifications to bring it up to scratch. A brief snippet from the release information about the site reads like so: It has finally been done - a new design and new codes has been

Should we bring downloads back ? | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:18:49 PDT

Yes No Only if done right!

Mibbt updates preferences | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:18:35 PDT

axod has announced via the Mibbit blog the latest changes to the ever growing in popularity web client Mibbit. The client has had some rough times of late with Quakenet and Freenode opting to ban the client for bizarre reasons, but this has as yet not

InspIRCd 1.2.0rc5 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:18:11 PDT

Around 1 hour 54 minutes ago w00t announced the next release candidate for the every growing nearer to stable release of InspIRCd 1.2.x This version looks to stabilize further and the changelog is while large for the amount of time since last release (1

InspIRCd 1.1.23 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:17:51 PDT

InspIRCd 1.2.0rc5 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:50:21 PDT

Mibbt updates preferences | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:48:48 PDT

Should we bring downloads back ? | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:48:05 PDT

Yes No Only if done right!

ZEnet new site | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:47:39 PDT

ZEnet new site | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:14:10 PDT

Should we bring downloads back ? | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:13:56 PDT

Yes No Only if done right!

Mibbt updates preferences | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:13:42 PDT

InspIRCd 1.2.0rc5 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:13:40 PDT

InspIRCd 1.2.0rc5 released | IRCReport [del.icio.us]

X.Ception — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:43:23 PDT