Re: the right ircd for Blitzed

On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 10:52:43PM +0200, Philipp Kern wrote:
> On Sa, 2004-07-17 at 22:39, Andy Smith wrote:
> > However, no one is putting in that effort, including me.  Even if
> > you/we started now, it could be significant time until we did have a
> > production-quality ircd.  At the same time we do want a better ircd.
> 
> [IPv6 and SSL are supported by a patch]
> Yes and you said that the patch isn't in production quality.

Yes, I've shown it can work, but it would need considerable effort
to make it work *properly*, it's time that would be better spent on
another ircd I think.

> > We now have the ability to have twp IPv6 public irc servers but we
> > can't because our current ircd doesn't support it.
> 
> Ok, but still there's no need for many IPv6 servers. I use it by myself,
> but there are rarely more than eight people online on soylent-green.

That's true although regardless of how many users there is, you do
need multiple servers for redundancy.  If IPv6 were something we
wanted to promote then we should probably have one server at each
place we can have one.

I know that you want to run an IPv6 server, and I'm sympathetic to
this desire, but not when the code is so bad that it could risk
significant problems for the rest of the network.

> > We could be offering SSL client connections but we can't because our
> > current ircd doesn't support it.
> 
> SSL support is something to consider. But does Unreal also provide
> strong encryption between servers? RC4 is the weak point at the moment.

I'm told that RC4 is no weaker than the protocols SSL uses[1].  I've
not enough knowledge of cryptology to tell, and to be honest for the
sake of IRC I think even compressed links are too much trouble for
the average attacker.  The issue over SSL vs RC4 is for me one of
standardisation.  SSL is more standard than ad hoc RC4, so the could
would be cleaner.

> > We could be masking hosts, we could be offering vhosts.  Those
> > services are controversial and should be voted on, but at the moment
> > we can't even begin tot hink of offering them because our current
> > ircd does not support them.
> 
> Vhosts count as DNS-Spam, and are IMO just another toy which isn't
> needed.

By vhosts I mean something like freenode does, i.e.:

[email protected]

I don't really see why that is "DNS SPAM", DNS SPAM (to me) is when
shell compaies dedicate whole /24 to stupid hostnames for their
irc-using shell customers.

> Masking hosts is a valid point for protecting our users from
> attacks, but it wasn't necessary in the past.

Whether to do it or not is of course a separate question but it
would be nice to have the option.

> Bahamut isn't bloated at all and had hardly any memory leaks I noticed.
> It still runs on milk with 190 days uptime at 10M.
> ircd      1108  0.4  1.7 10116 4420 ?        S    Jan09 1097:44 ./ircd

23:02:39 <Solaris> PID   USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE  RES   STATE  TIME  WCPU  CPU   COMMAND
23:02:40 <Solaris> 27978 ircd     28  0    1924K 1244K RUN    0:00  0.51% 0.29% top
23:02:40 <Solaris> 185   ircd     2   0    6940K 6440K select 14:06 0.00% 0.00% ircd
23:02:41 <Solaris> 186   duden    2   0    3628K 3340K select 1:56 0.00% 0.00% eggdrop-1.6.16
23:03:16 <Solaris> on this Server are now 509 Users
23:03:55 <grifferz> and on the network as a whole?
23:04:54 <Solaris> Now 1600 User online including the +i Users
23:12:42 <grifferz> how long has that ircd been up?
23:14:14 <Solaris> we update for tow Weeks to 3.2.1
23:14:25 <Solaris> but with 3.2 it was up 6 Months
23:14:29 <Solaris> without any Crash

(this discussion wasn't prompted by Solaris asking me why we don't
use Unreal.  I told him I'd been thinking about Unreal and he said
he runs it on eu-irc, which is bigger than blitzed)

> Restarts all the time because of Unreal upgrades would neither be
> helpful for our userbase.

Unreal does seem to have a lot of releases.  I agree that because it
has so many features, bugs in those features require regular
updates.  A lot of them must be adding more features though, so we
wouldn't have to restart purely for that.  Also, modules would help.

[1] http://s.dgl.cx/6bc

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