SoylentNews

Hi,

So, my evening/night started like any other until I started having several nosebleeds which all occurred within one or two hours or so not to mention the headache, so like any responsible geek I decided to phone my Doctor, fortunately, he was still awake and told me to go to the hospital... (what I got told there isn't important to this journal entry)

Anyway, so when I came home the IRC server was *seemingly* down, in fact, my entire server was *seemingly* down. After contacting my ISP, I had to go through a few hoops - and as it turns out, it was a faulty switch (you'd think, they would at least be monitoring their own switches right?). They replaced it and it's all back up. Incidentally, I was going to configure Carbon (which was going to be another IRC server) last night but the hospital thing came up.

So all in all, my night sucked big time.

Hopefully, not to many of you were inconvenienced by the downtime, perhaps some of you even managed to see the sun, or at the very least, felt the wind.

Update: webchat was still down, sorry about that.

Hi,

As promised, here is my update about the IRC cloaks and how we're going to enhance them.

It's important to note, by default your hostname/IP's first (few) segments get masqueraded by the IRC daemon (IRCd), but you can also get an entirely different cloak by messaging HostServ and requesting one[1]. However, some people have made a good argument that the default cloaking mechanism isn't enough, and thus I began my journey finding a better way.

I went to look at the current cloak module[2] that we're using and found an easy way to improve it. However, I'm not a star in C and I've asked stderr for some advice. He then offered to write a cloaking module for us, that works independently from the original one that was linked.

He has made significant progress and we're aiming to deploy the module on our TestNet later today (you can get on the test net by connect to irc.sylnt.us on port 7779 or port 8889 [ssl]) and, naturally, test it.

Once the module gets marked as "Safe to use" we'll deploy it on irc.web-refinery.com (SN's second IRC server, that's currently linked to irc.sylnt.us, I set it up because some people were getting packet loss due to some issue along the route from them to my server in Germany). Once that's done and confirmed to be working properly - which it should, if it passes on the testnet - it'll be deployed on irc.sylnt.us.

The reason for first deploying it on irc.web-refinery.com is simple: even though irc.soylentnews.org is a round robin, it only gets low traffic, so it's safer to deploy it there first.

More information about the cloaking module will be released in time.

I hope I have provided enough information, be sure to keep an eye on my journal as more information will be released in time.

Thank you for the feedback Soylenteers and special thanks to stderr!

Another thanks to everyone on IRC who commented on my entry here to improve it, amongst others: Kobach, Konomi, Mattie_p, Soyforlent and everyone else I might have missed, English isn't my native language and that's probably a good thing.

[1] /hs request a.cloak or, if your IRC client doesn't respect the IRCd's aliases replace /hs with /msg hostserv
[2] Source here