Hello everyone,
This is to inform you that on Monday Feb 22nd 2018 ~10:00 UTC, the infrastructure powering irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted for security upgrades. This is expected to only impact bots that are using irc.wikimedia.org AND are not able to automatically reconnect on connection failure. From recent experience (the equipment was rebooted 210 ago last time, with no fallout) those are very limited in number these days.
Regards,
Alexandros Kosiaris wrote:
This is to inform you that on Monday Feb 22nd 2018 ~10:00 UTC, the infrastructure powering irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted for security upgrades. This is expected to only impact bots that are using irc.wikimedia.org AND are not able to automatically reconnect on connection failure. From recent experience (the equipment was rebooted 210 ago last time, with no fallout) those are very limited in number these days.
Thank you for this notice.
Do you know if it's still the case that per-wiki channels on irc.wikimedia.org are not available/able to be joined until there's activity on that wiki? My memory is that reconnecting to irc.wikimedia.org has not usually been the issue (as you note), but instead it's been that there's a speaking bot account on the network that would only create a channel after there's some activity to report about that wiki. For larger wikis with lots of activity, this means the channels get created nearly instantly after a server restart. For smaller wikis with little activity, this means that the channels may not get re-created for days or even weeks.
I just tested irc.wikimedia.org again and it appears that joining/creating arbitrary channels is not allowed. This makes me think that bot accounts and others would be disallowed from joining small/quiet wiki channels until those channels are re-created by by the server/rc-pmtpa, unless some kind of whitelist or workaround has been implemented.
MZMcBride
Hi,
On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 9:32 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Alexandros Kosiaris wrote:
This is to inform you that on Monday Feb 22nd 2018 ~10:00 UTC, the infrastructure powering irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted for security upgrades. This is expected to only impact bots that are using irc.wikimedia.org AND are not able to automatically reconnect on connection failure. From recent experience (the equipment was rebooted 210 ago last time, with no fallout) those are very limited in number these days.
Thank you for this notice.
Sorry for not answering sooner, I 've just seen this.
Do you know if it's still the case that per-wiki channels on irc.wikimedia.org are not available/able to be joined until there's activity on that wiki?
I did not know that, but I just researched it and that is still the case. For future reference the code in question is in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/operations-puppet/browse/production...
My memory is that reconnecting to irc.wikimedia.org has not usually been the issue (as you note), but instead it's been that there's a speaking bot account on the network that would only create a channel after there's some activity to report about that wiki. For larger wikis with lots of activity, this means the channels get created nearly instantly after a server restart. For smaller wikis with little activity, this means that the channels may not get re-created for days or even weeks.
I have no such recollection but it does make sense.
I just tested irc.wikimedia.org again and it appears that joining/creating arbitrary channels is not allowed. This makes me think that bot accounts and others would be disallowed from joining small/quiet wiki channels until those channels are re-created by by the server/rc-pmtpa, unless some kind of whitelist or workaround has been implemented.
That's true. But I don't expect this to cause any kind of major problems and experience up to now supports that. But thanks for bringing it up. I learned something today.
Hello everyone
This has just happened. Most bots seem to have already reconnected successfully and so has the rc-pmtpa bot. Everything seems to be in order.
Regards,
On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 9:18 PM, Alexandros Kosiaris akosiaris@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 9:32 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Alexandros Kosiaris wrote:
This is to inform you that on Monday Feb 22nd 2018 ~10:00 UTC, the infrastructure powering irc.wikimedia.org will be rebooted for security upgrades. This is expected to only impact bots that are using irc.wikimedia.org AND are not able to automatically reconnect on connection failure. From recent experience (the equipment was rebooted 210 ago last time, with no fallout) those are very limited in number these days.
Thank you for this notice.
Sorry for not answering sooner, I 've just seen this.
Do you know if it's still the case that per-wiki channels on irc.wikimedia.org are not available/able to be joined until there's activity on that wiki?
I did not know that, but I just researched it and that is still the case. For future reference the code in question is in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/operations-puppet/browse/production...
My memory is that reconnecting to irc.wikimedia.org has not usually been the issue (as you note), but instead it's been that there's a speaking bot account on the network that would only create a channel after there's some activity to report about that wiki. For larger wikis with lots of activity, this means the channels get created nearly instantly after a server restart. For smaller wikis with little activity, this means that the channels may not get re-created for days or even weeks.
I have no such recollection but it does make sense.
I just tested irc.wikimedia.org again and it appears that joining/creating arbitrary channels is not allowed. This makes me think that bot accounts and others would be disallowed from joining small/quiet wiki channels until those channels are re-created by by the server/rc-pmtpa, unless some kind of whitelist or workaround has been implemented.
That's true. But I don't expect this to cause any kind of major problems and experience up to now supports that. But thanks for bringing it up. I learned something today.
-- Alexandros Kosiaris akosiaris@wikimedia.org
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