• Services
• IRC

This article is out of date and needs updating once irc has been sorted out

Server

We use UnrealIRCd.

There are two main servers that accept connections from clients, Molotov and Twilight. There is a DNS Round-Robin between the two at irc.uwcs.co.uk.

IRCServices

We run ircservices (connected to Twilight). It provides loads of supposedly useful things like:

• OperServ

• NickServ

• ChanServ

• MemoServ

• StatServ

http://wiki.blitzed.org/Category:IRC_Services_documentation Might be useful in figuring out how to configure most of the useful bits

NeoStats

We run NeoStats (connected to Molotov). It provides loads of supposedly (hahahah) useful things like:

• StatServ

• LoveServ

• HostServ

• MoraleServ

• etc.

Bot

The primary IRC bot is BadgerBOT. benji, bucko, [Faux] and Silver all have a rough ideas what is going on. Problems:

• Choob depends on MySQL 5, which is not installed on 'tov, so it runs horribly slowly.
• Choob depends on Java 5.0, which is not installed (as the default) on 'tov. This means it has a modified (from svn) startup script to reference the alternate java install.
• Choob requires a decent networking stack and regex library which are broken. This is probably the only thing that isn't (directly) Debian's fault.

There are other bots running (mainly JinglyBOT, which Choob depends on for most of her functionality).

Backups

ircservices is the only thing in the society that is actually backed up. This is done by dumping the databases to xml, gzipping them, scping them to 'tov and then spamming the root users. Please don't delete the ssh keys (again).

Security

As this is CompSoc (and we have a sane password policy), the password is the same for everything to do with IRC. This means that if you can access the irc account, you can break (and recover plaintext passwords from) chanserv/hostserv/etc. Have fun.

[sadiq] has root access to the bot. Therefore he can be blamed for any problems that occur, legitimately.

Disaster Recovery

We theoretically have ircservices and neostats installed on both 'tov and twi, but they're out of date and unmaintained, so if one node goes down, we lose the functionality.

• IRCd
  • By coincidence, the IRC network is quite good at recovering from netsplits. Just let it do it's thing.
• Bot
  • The bot is started every 10 minutes by a cronjob running as it's user on 'tov, meaning that if it crashes out it'll restart itself soon enough.
  • It's also resilient to mysql disappearing (it should recover (eventually)), and losing network connection to localhost (internally).

Footnote

Everything to do with IRC is installed via. a massive hack.