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Looking at IRC Servers on Linux

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Because the chat infrastructure team seems to be unable to get their issues resolved about the MindAlign bots, and because I can't really honestly say that the bots I need are business critical, I've started looking for IRC servers that I can start up on my own, point all my servers at, and then simply have my own IRC system. The load is trivial, and with this, I'd be able to get things done, but there's always the risk of being tagged as a rogue chatter.

Given that it's been two weeks, and there's no accommodations being made for important but not critical bots, I'm thinking that even if I get nailed (and that's not a guarantee by any means) that my excuse is exactly that - two weeks, no communication, and no alternatives. Sounds good to me, anyway.

So I've been looking at the IRC servers, and it seems like IRCD-Hybrid is a decent tool, and the history of it leads me to believe that it's really different only in the very 'far out' IRC issues - things I'm not liable to hit ever. I just need a basic communication hub, and for that, this should do just fine.

I'll get it, build it and see if I can get it going on a box of mine. If I can, then good enough and I'll try running it there for a while. I'll convert a few processes over and then see how that flies for a few days. If all looks OK, I'll convert over simply to await the day that the MindAlign guys get things worked out.

UPDATE: so I got the code and configured it by reading every single line. And boy, oh boy... you have to read every single line as there's a line in the config file that will crash the server intentionally if left in the config file. So, read and configure.

The big change was that the default IRCD-hybrid 7.2.3 does not allow for NICK names to start with an underscore (_). Since all the bots for MindAlign have to start with that, I needed to get into the code and fix it. The relavent code snippit was originally:

  1.   int
  2.   valid_username(const char *username)
  3.   {
  4.     int dots      = 0;
  5.     const char *p = username;
  6.  
  7.     assert(p != NULL);
  8.  
  9.     if ('~' == *p)
  10.       ++p;
  11.  
  12.     /* reject usernames that don't start with an alphanum
  13.      * i.e. reject jokers who have '-@somehost' or '.@somehost'
  14.      * or "-hi-@somehost", "h-----@somehost" would still be accepted.
  15.      */
  16.     if (!IsAlNum(*p))
  17.       return 0;
  18.  
  19.     while (*++p)
  20.     {

and needed to be changed to:

  1.   int
  2.   valid_username(const char *username)
  3.   {
  4.     int dots      = 0;
  5.     const char *p = username;
  6.  
  7.     assert(p != NULL);
  8.  
  9.     if ('~' == *p)
  10.       ++p;
  11.  
  12.     /* reject usernames that don't start with an alphanum
  13.      * i.e. reject jokers who have '-@somehost' or '.@somehost'
  14.      * or "-hi-@somehost", "h-----@somehost" would still be accepted.
  15.      */
  16.     if (!(IsAlNum(*p) || ('_' == *p)))
  17.       return 0;
  18.  
  19.     while (*++p)
  20.     {

After this change, a simple recompile, and the bots were working great. This would be a nice change to the codebase to put this in the config file, but I can see that this is probably pretty stable, and so they might not want to mess with it.

In any case, I'm set now with my own IRC server for my apps. If they come after me, I have a solid defense - it's for the best for the business.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 6:21 am and is filed under Coding, Cube Life, Open Source Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.