AustNet inspired
The AustNet team have recently made the following announcement, this was also coupled by an announcement by the InspireIRCd team in regards to there migration to a new IRCd basecode. both teams openly admitting that the old codebase used on AustNEt was no longer deemed of worth and the new state of the art codebase InspireIRCd was too much to resist
Tuesday the 25th of March, 2008, saw AustNet begin a long-awaited change to new server software, based on InspIRCd. While the migration did take a little longer to
complete than expected, both servers and our custom Services software, OPAS, are now updated.
This update should not be seen as a ‘once off’, the primary reason for the change of code was to bring things up to date so new features, suggestions, and fixes can be easily implemented now and in future. We welcome suggestions from everyone on what can be done to further improve the servers and services.
A huge thankyou to the team at InspIRCd, to our staff and admins, and most of all to our users for their patience through this.
Summary of changes:
- Stronger host masking
- Improved flooding, spam and abuse control
- Enhanced user and channel controls (modes)
- IP bans and exempts can also now be in CIDR notation
- SSL client support (selected servers only - see individual server motd)
- Extended limits for nicknames and channels
InspIRCd 1.1.18
crashes under some conditions.Also include is a new module, m_ldapauth, for authing against an LDAP directory server. This module was based on the module written by Stskeeps for the (now defunct) Unreal 4, with a few changes to make it more secure.
This is a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED release. You SHOULD upgrade to it ASAP as it contains security fixes.
Major changes:
- dccallow: fix incorrect api usage
- mysql: fix race condition (crash) on unload
- core: LoopCall fix that fixes modules which call it in a command handler so that spanningtree doesnt break (useful for third party module authors only)
- snomasks: Accidentally hidden quits is fixed (it wasn't me, I swear --w00t)
- ssl: Reworded prompts in configure
- invisible: Fix multiple +Q and -Q notices (harmless)
- configreader: Better checking of newline values
- swhois: Don't desync when setting a title on an already-titled user.
- new module: m_ldapauth
I'd like to say a big thanks to the following people for their help in this release:
- Darom (working with us on the mysql patch)
- Skip (uhnames/namesx stuff)
Two followup posts will be added in this thread about hotpatching and the full changelog for anyone interested.
InspIRCd 1.2 Alpha
w00t announces that the new 1.2 breed(?) of InspIRCd is now in the ALPHA stages, the 1.2 version brings a whole mass of new stuff to the table and is as superior to 1.1.x was to 1.0.x. There are improvements to the flood control, such as fake lag - ban improvements - CPU usage is lower overall due to imrpvements and bad channels make usage of the redirection option.
Welcome to the next evolution of IRC.
InspIRCd 1.2 has (as of NOW) just hit alpha. We've been working hard for the past 14 months since 1.1's release, and we think we now have something ready to be released: 1.2 Alpha 1.
Announcement:
First I'd like to point out that this is not (yet) ready for use by the faint of heart: 1.2 does introduce some 6,000 new lines of code along with significant changes to existing code.
InspIRCd 1.2.0a2 TexasLonghorn Released
w00t has announced, already the next alpha release of the 1.2 series, this version brings into the fold a whole mass of fixes and improvements which only brings to myself one question "when does the inspire team sleep ?" - they seem somewhat unstoppable these days churning our quality releases in quick succession but always with a huge list of fixes, this release is no different.
w00t posted the below regarding the TexasLonghorn release:
We *did* only release a1 last week, but a lot of fixes have gone in since then, mostly trivial fixes to protocol or snotices. A few minor features have gone in also, MAP may now be requested remotely (/map server.mask), and m_shun is now in the core distribution - please use it wisely.
IRCu Serious Crash bug
Erosion writes: In this post on Milw0rm the bug and exploit is explained. IRCu (g who found the bug and described it on Milw0rm, how he found the bug. "Core dump from one of our servers," Slug starts. "send_user_mode in s_user.c does not check that the argument after a +r mode is present, if it is not than the NULL sentinel may be missed, causing the function to iterate over the boundary of the array."
One way to exploit the bug would be using the command with string /mode nickname i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i r r r r s. Doing so would core the server.
InspIRCd 1.1.19
w00t has announced the latest release of the Inspire stable branch 1.6.19, this version brings mostly fixes to the windows build of Inspire to address these things. The announcement reads like so:
A (very) minor update to 1.1 has been released, primarily of interest to Windows users, who will now experience faster loading (and less buggy behaviour), thanks largely to the work of new contributor GreenReaper.
Primarily:
Windows builds should also now be (significantly) smaller in file size and RAM use
Windows builds no longer (tempramentally) limit the maximum number of DLLs that may be loaded.
Windows no longer crashes with alltime and stripcolour
In terms of non-windows-specific fixes and enhancements:
There is a single crash fix in versions prior 1.1.19, in KLINE use. Opers on older versions are advised to avoid KLINE, and to use GLINE instead.
Ratbox updates
The ratbox team both IRCd and Services appear to be on the ball as they aim to get the latest versions of there respected software packages into the land of stable. Lee H was the first to announce the release of Ratbox-services with version 1.2.0 RC2 which has a minor set of fixes so i would imagine a stable release is not so far off for the services package. Later in the week we then had Aaron announce the immediate release of ircd-ratbox 3.0.0 beta 4 which sports a rather larger changelog so i would suspect another beta yet and maybe two RC's then this will be moving stable also.
The changelogs of both are printed below:
Services:
ratbox-services-1.2.0rc2
- updated bulgarian translations from ongeboren
- update example.lang translation file
- update packaged pcre to 7.7
OfficeIRC Attempts Live Chat Comeback
I happened to be just on my way to bed when i thought to myself i know il check my RSS feeds for newnews and what do you know Serverwatch a popular site has given be what i
need to post something prior to sleep. Personally i think the review was done by someone whom has used IRC for about 10-20 minutes and made there opinions based on that since they are clearly placing IRC as the same old stale thing it was prior to the likes of bahamut, inspire, unreal and even the likes of viagra... maybe a disgruntled dalnet user who knows 
Anyway here is the article from start to finish - and for all you DALnet users out there, i was only playing .. sorta.
In the early days of the Internet, Usenet was the medium for post-and-respond conversations and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) the place, and protocol, for live messaging. IRC users would connect to servers, join up themed "channels," and exchange real-time messages either in private or public with one or many participants. The whole affair (including actual affairs) was completely text-based and controlled with text commands.
1.2 a4 and 1.1.20 Released
Two new releases from the Inspire folks, one of which on there stable branch the other on there development branch, I'll save my feeble ramblings and
get on with w00t's announcement. "A double release!
1.1.20 follows up with the latest fixes of the maintenence release. It is a HIGHLY RECOMENDED upgrade for all 1.1.19 (and prior) users, as it addresses a number of client compatibility and general stability fixes.
1.2+a4 includes a number of mostly internal changes and fixes from a3, and is a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED upgrade for all current 1.2 users (things change very fast with 1.2 at the moment ;)).
As usual, changelogs follow in this post.
You can download the 1.2.0a4 release from:
- Source: http://www.inspircd.org/?p=downloads&ver=1.2.0a3
- Windows: http://www.inspircd.org/?p=downloads&ver=1.2.0a3&os=win
for the record - the correct download locations are:
ratbox updates
The guys behind ratbox-ircd and ratbox-services have been very hard at work with fixing up there products for the next round of releases which actually
includes 4 release this time. We'll start out with the services package which is highlighted as a security release as it looks to address an SQL injection issue:
- fix an unquoted sql string related to email, that could be used for sql injection
- fix the configure test for --with-pcre
Thankfully the guys didnt stop there and went on to address this issue in the older release:
ratbox-services 1.1.3- fix an unquoted sql string related to email, that could be used for a sql injection
- various improvements to the configure script
and he finished up by making the following announcement: