After so much fighting, the upgrades are finally done!
As everyone saw, the network netsplit around midnight today.
The upgrade has finally brought in some much wanted upgrades!
Text Banning:
Users can now filter text being said in their channel (very good for spam control) by simply doing:
/mode #mychannel +b ~T:*@*:block:*text*
Please note that * is a wildcard, meaning it matches all around. You can control what people/ISP's can say it by adjusting the *@* spot :)
With that being said, a user with HOP (+h / %) or above will be able to say text that's banned.
Channels can have 15 of these types of bans for the time being. If there is a large demand for a higher limit, i'll increase it.
Adjustments to channel modes +c +S:
Before, these modules just removed/blocked colour from being said. We've now expanded the module so it strips bold, underline, and whatever reverse is.
Better PM controlling:
A feature enjoyed on efnet and rizon was the ability to set who can pm you when you're in a no pms mode. We've now introduced this, known as callerid. With this new addon, users that aren't on your accept list will be told that you're in such a mode. On top of this, users will be informed by server-notice (check your status window) informing them of the user/hostmask that pm'd them.
To use it, simply do.
/umode +I
/accept Nick
The 'accept' list is a per connect time basis kind of deal, meaning you can't set your list and it's saved (at this time anyways). If a user wishes to remove someone from their PM allowed list, simply do:
/accept -Nick
Bigger ban list for massive damage:
With our central hub now upgraded, starting tomorrow, users will be able to enjoy having a 200+ (either 200 or 250) entry ban list to manage their channels.
Upgrades will be coming to services introducing timed bans and some others :)
~Francisco
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
webchatters
One of the many issues we see with people using the webchat is that they insist on setting their channels to +R (registered only can join). This is an issue as our webchat doesn't inform the user of the following:
- That the channel is actually +R (it goes to the status window which is confusing).
- how does one register?
How would people feel if we made it so webchatters got marked +r, even if they aren't registered?
It would allow for them to at least get past +R and the likes.
Some people are afraid of things like spambots and the likes. We've been considering using a image verification deal on the webchat to help with this.
Another option to this is to add a bar to the top of the current webchat (that or even changing the 'HELP' menu) where it would be a drop down where the user can select a help topic. On select it would pop up a quick help documents.
Input?
- That the channel is actually +R (it goes to the status window which is confusing).
- how does one register?
How would people feel if we made it so webchatters got marked +r, even if they aren't registered?
It would allow for them to at least get past +R and the likes.
Some people are afraid of things like spambots and the likes. We've been considering using a image verification deal on the webchat to help with this.
Another option to this is to add a bar to the top of the current webchat (that or even changing the 'HELP' menu) where it would be a drop down where the user can select a help topic. On select it would pop up a quick help documents.
Input?
Saturday, August 05, 2006
yay! DNS upgrades!
Hurray!
Finally, our DNS upgrades are done.
after some quick tests, we found out that the geo has a 'otherwise goto' type part, where if a region isn't declared, it's sent to our 'world' view (our US based servers).
Once I found htis out, I simply made our DNS load the 'world' and 'europe'. By doing this, we cut the ram usage from a nasty 46MB to 13MB, only a couple megs above stock :)
We've also added a Germany DNS server to help with dns pickup times - hurray!
Users should notice a speed up (we hope).
We're currently considering another 1 more DNS server over in Texas, but haven't decided yet.
Finally, our DNS upgrades are done.
after some quick tests, we found out that the geo has a 'otherwise goto' type part, where if a region isn't declared, it's sent to our 'world' view (our US based servers).
Once I found htis out, I simply made our DNS load the 'world' and 'europe'. By doing this, we cut the ram usage from a nasty 46MB to 13MB, only a couple megs above stock :)
We've also added a Germany DNS server to help with dns pickup times - hurray!
Users should notice a speed up (we hope).
We're currently considering another 1 more DNS server over in Texas, but haven't decided yet.
Friday, August 04, 2006
webchatters & floods
Webchatters
Many people have found, and seem to enjoy, the webchat we provide at http://chat.deltaanime.net
I must admit, it's quite useful and works quite well (when it wants to). Alas, those "when it wants to" are becoming a rather large annoyance to many of the people in #deltaanime
To help with this, we'll be doing the following:
- Trying to make it pass the channel name in the users real name field (hopefully).
- introducing #webchat to help as a guidence center to help users get in the right direction.
Users that wish to help in #webchat will be welcome to talk to either Dilt or I to trial to help on it. We don't need many people, but a people that can speak other languages will be very useful.
Floods
We now are in possession of the addon to provide the network with some well needed protection from these kiddies. Testing will begin tonight on our testnet (IP will come later) while we try to trigger it.
Any user that will be able to help stress this is welcome to talk to me on IRC to help testing how well it works!
Many people have found, and seem to enjoy, the webchat we provide at http://chat.deltaanime.net
I must admit, it's quite useful and works quite well (when it wants to). Alas, those "when it wants to" are becoming a rather large annoyance to many of the people in #deltaanime
To help with this, we'll be doing the following:
- Trying to make it pass the channel name in the users real name field (hopefully).
- introducing #webchat to help as a guidence center to help users get in the right direction.
Users that wish to help in #webchat will be welcome to talk to either Dilt or I to trial to help on it. We don't need many people, but a people that can speak other languages will be very useful.
Floods
We now are in possession of the addon to provide the network with some well needed protection from these kiddies. Testing will begin tonight on our testnet (IP will come later) while we try to trigger it.
Any user that will be able to help stress this is welcome to talk to me on IRC to help testing how well it works!
Thursday, August 03, 2006
DNS & Botnet floods
Just to annoy indigo/dilt, i'll start off by stating it's been a wacky week!
The new DNS testing has completed and now pending final installation :)
It uses a tad (*cough* a lot more *cough*) RAM that we originally planned for:
So ya, around 46MB of ram used - yikes!
With such a huge footprint on RAM, I'm now wondering if it's truely worth it to run our DNS like we plan. Granted, the other DNS server we have has 512 ram, 46MB of ram just for that still sounds steep - compared to the current 9MB footprint we're using.
Advantages: Resolve times will be much quicker as it doesn't need to contact the GeoDNS server to find out IRC IP's.
Downside: The increase in resouces could prove to be an issue, depending on how quickly we grow.
As for the botnet flood, we're needing hte module quickly and waiting on donations just wouldn't
work out. We've now purchased the module off my credit card where i'll probably end up having to ride it there for a bit.
With that being said, though, donations do help and it would be wonderful to be able to pay for that module full out!
Users wishing to donate even $1 to help with it, may do so by sending paypal funds to delta@deltaanime.net
The new DNS testing has completed and now pending final installation :)
It uses a tad (*cough* a lot more *cough*) RAM that we originally planned for:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5426 named 20 0 80120 45m 1852 S 1.0 18.4% 0:08.94 named
So ya, around 46MB of ram used - yikes!
With such a huge footprint on RAM, I'm now wondering if it's truely worth it to run our DNS like we plan. Granted, the other DNS server we have has 512 ram, 46MB of ram just for that still sounds steep - compared to the current 9MB footprint we're using.
Advantages: Resolve times will be much quicker as it doesn't need to contact the GeoDNS server to find out IRC IP's.
Downside: The increase in resouces could prove to be an issue, depending on how quickly we grow.
As for the botnet flood, we're needing hte module quickly and waiting on donations just wouldn't
work out. We've now purchased the module off my credit card where i'll probably end up having to ride it there for a bit.
With that being said, though, donations do help and it would be wonderful to be able to pay for that module full out!
Users wishing to donate even $1 to help with it, may do so by sending paypal funds to delta@deltaanime.net
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Botnet's suck :(
Well.
Today, around 6PM PST everyone saw as kasumi split from the network, and sorata dumped the majority of her users. At this same time, #l2-paradise took a large (1000+) botnet causing the boxes to max outta RAM.
We've had this problem in the past and so we increased all the ram allotments on the servers to help with this. Since DA is still a small community, though, we don't have enough servers to absorb that kinda of sudden increase without causing some issues :(
We've found a solution at - http://www.vulnscan.org/customcoding#ConnThrottle
Alas, DA is short the cash to afford this.
Anyone wanna donate? :P
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
DNS emo fest part 2
After much fighting we've finally built a fully custom build of BIND in a nice little RPM that we can easily patch on top of cpanel w/o issues.
The way it works, though, is confusing in parts.
The way the GeoDNS works is that we split each continental region into what's known as a 'view'. Each view is then told what countries to actually manage for (this views don't know them selves, hense why we need to define them).
Now, views are odd in that if you are defining a zone (a domain), the zone must be mentioned in each view - very annoying :(
Since our hosting is always expanding so much these days (at times we get 5+ accounts a day, a shame none of them pay :P), we can't just do a full switch over - cPanel just doesn't allow for this. The way cpanel works is that it allows no wiggle room for these things so all the customizing we've been doing, we'll have todo again - boo!
To accomidate this, what we've done is have a 'included' file that cpanel updates, which is then included into the real named.conf - hurray!
We've done a test of this and it worked fairly well so far.
The only down side is that with low-end hardware (the new germany server is only a 733 Mhz P3 w/ 256MB ram), booting up of the nameserver isn't a snap like it was originally. With the way 'views' work, is that the zone is loaded once for every zone - we have 1600+ zones & 8 regions = 12800 zones to load - D'oh!
Initial startup of this was a little shy of 1 minute on the old hardware, with loads of 1. Once it was loaded, though, we had 195MB of RAM free and loads at 0.00 :)
Depending on how work goes, i'll be implimenting this sometime tomorrow.
The way it works, though, is confusing in parts.
The way the GeoDNS works is that we split each continental region into what's known as a 'view'. Each view is then told what countries to actually manage for (this views don't know them selves, hense why we need to define them).
Now, views are odd in that if you are defining a zone (a domain), the zone must be mentioned in each view - very annoying :(
Since our hosting is always expanding so much these days (at times we get 5+ accounts a day, a shame none of them pay :P), we can't just do a full switch over - cPanel just doesn't allow for this. The way cpanel works is that it allows no wiggle room for these things so all the customizing we've been doing, we'll have todo again - boo!
To accomidate this, what we've done is have a 'included' file that cpanel updates, which is then included into the real named.conf - hurray!
We've done a test of this and it worked fairly well so far.
The only down side is that with low-end hardware (the new germany server is only a 733 Mhz P3 w/ 256MB ram), booting up of the nameserver isn't a snap like it was originally. With the way 'views' work, is that the zone is loaded once for every zone - we have 1600+ zones & 8 regions = 12800 zones to load - D'oh!
Initial startup of this was a little shy of 1 minute on the old hardware, with loads of 1. Once it was loaded, though, we had 195MB of RAM free and loads at 0.00 :)
Depending on how work goes, i'll be implimenting this sometime tomorrow.
DNS makes me wanna /wrist my self.
Well after a lot of checks over the past month have proved my question that our dns is wacky at best.
Our host, staminus has some of the best filtering for ddos and the likes. But, due to these filters it slows our DNS resolving time down.
People in the USA aren't having it too bad, but anyone that has weaker connections to the USA (south america, asia region and hunks of europe) are just not getting our IP's.
Our solution? Install another DNS server. Since a month ago when we noticed lower user numbers we purchased a server in Germany to provide another resolving point.
To try to speed it up even more, we've been trying to merge all of our different servers together to make it as fast as possible. Issue? bind is really really lame.
So lame, in fact, i've spent the past 2 weeks at work during breaks and at night trying to get it working. When we finally get it working, other domains will stop working.
Ugh!
If there is anyone good with BIND, lemme know on IRC? :P
Edit
Well, after some more testing it seems this can be handled by doing the following:
- For each view present (currently 1 view per region), do an include for a list of all the domains we currently are authoritative to.
The only issue with this is that since we host so many domains (1600+), on a slower server (like the new germany DNS server), it will take upwards of a minute to get it to be fully loaded.
It's either this or simply just put the DNS server in the pool and just hope it picks up in time.
Then again, a 1 minute startup time on the DNS isn't bad, since we'll almost never have to reboot the DNS unless there's either a powe-outage or we're upgrading it.
~Francisco
Our host, staminus has some of the best filtering for ddos and the likes. But, due to these filters it slows our DNS resolving time down.
People in the USA aren't having it too bad, but anyone that has weaker connections to the USA (south america, asia region and hunks of europe) are just not getting our IP's.
Our solution? Install another DNS server. Since a month ago when we noticed lower user numbers we purchased a server in Germany to provide another resolving point.
To try to speed it up even more, we've been trying to merge all of our different servers together to make it as fast as possible. Issue? bind is really really lame.
So lame, in fact, i've spent the past 2 weeks at work during breaks and at night trying to get it working. When we finally get it working, other domains will stop working.
Ugh!
If there is anyone good with BIND, lemme know on IRC? :P
Edit
Well, after some more testing it seems this can be handled by doing the following:
- For each view present (currently 1 view per region), do an include for a list of all the domains we currently are authoritative to.
The only issue with this is that since we host so many domains (1600+), on a slower server (like the new germany DNS server), it will take upwards of a minute to get it to be fully loaded.
It's either this or simply just put the DNS server in the pool and just hope it picks up in time.
Then again, a 1 minute startup time on the DNS isn't bad, since we'll almost never have to reboot the DNS unless there's either a powe-outage or we're upgrading it.
~Francisco
Wee!
So the wonderful members of #deltaanime have harrased me to try to get together a blog to keep them updated with all the countless things going on with DA and the likes.
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