EFnet Hits Turbulence

Lots of submissions regarding a bumpy week for EFnet, mostly short on fact and long on rumor. Several high-capacity servers have either dropped off entirely or limited their connections to local clients due to DOS attacks. We got one good link about the situation; anyone else have more info? Is this a real problem or just normal roughness? I'm not an IRC regular these days but I've never seen a stable IRC network.

Comments

Blackened

[toofast]

I remember when blackened.org went offline because of DoS attacks. They had the ability to serve up to 7000 IRC clients. One of the main reasons for killing the server, IIRC, was because of an evening where a bunch of idiots threw tons of garbage down blackened's pipes, causing the entire state of (arizona?) to be deprived of internet access. Although I cannot find Matt's original letter, I did find the config of irc2.blackened.com:

oldcharred.blackened.com: AMD K6-2 @ 333mhz, 128M of ram, 18G-10k rpm scsi primary, 9G secondary. This server houses the origional irc2.blackened.com EFnet server, the largest EFnet server in the world before it de-linked. Still running with the origional IRCD, I, O, C/N lines and TCM.

It's a pity that, in blackened's case, volunteer workers such as mjr are forced to abandon what they love to do, because of immature kiddies flooding the network with useless garbage.

Nothing to see here, move along.

[pim]

Disclaimer: I'm fairly new to the efnet experience. I've been running Undernet servers[1] for the past two years and only recently linked a server to efnet[2].

I haven't yet found someone who has been able to figure out where these rumours have been coming from. We got a couple enquiries about "is efnet going to shut down" in our efnet mailbox, but that's nothing out of the ordinary (Imminent Death of Efnet Predicted - Film at 11). Haven't seen any mail claiming that anything really special is going on. A couple of servers changed their policy. As far as I understand, from my limited experience, there's nothing strange or extraordinary about that. IRC networks are dynamic in nature.

The amount of DoS-flooding that goes on directed at a typical server for a major IRC network is completely out of bounds. Scriptkiddies see themselves as Freedom Fighters and Mighty Warriors, but are slowly pushing IRC networks to the point where they either become unusable or virtual Police States. On some networks, ideas have already been coined to start using a mandatory user registration system. No admin likes the privacy implications of such a move, but it may turn out to be the only way to keep the idiots out.

Once in a while, we get lucky and one of these kids touches a site that a federal agency cares enough about to start a case and the world has to deal with one scriptkiddie less. Most of them never get caught, though.

HTH.
Pi

[1] saltlake.ut.us.undernet.org and haarlem.nl.eu.undernet.org
[2] efnet.vuurwerk.nl

It's a size problem

[Masem]

I've got no proof, but based on what I know on IRC networks and the types of host-leaf connections you need to set up, I'd say that maintaining the stability of a IRC network increases with O(n^2), n being the number of servers. I've found EFNet always relatively unstable, Dal somewhat so, and smaller networks rather stable. I think some of this has to do with the ability of smaller networks to stategically plan where to plug in new servers carefully, while larger networks have to haphazardly place new servers based on the best info available to them. There's also something about "too many cooks" .. Dal has fallen apart due to so many internet IRCOP conflicts, it's not funny.

The only disadvantage is that you can't have as many clients -- but save for help channels, how the heck are you supposed to have meaning conversations in an IRC channel with over 50 or 100 people in it???? I think smaller networks will make IRC a bit more 'worthwhile' in terms of it's original concept.