We’ve been busy improving IRCCloud - here are some recent changes
we want to highlight.
As always, you can talk to us in #feedback if you have any questions or suggestions.
Alert sound
An alert sound now plays when you receive new highlights and PMs in the background.
The sound effect is on by default, and you can disable it in settings.
Here’s the MP3 file for our sound.
Webkit desktop notifications
In Safari and Chrome, we’ve had desktop notifications for a while. We’ve switched to having
them dismiss automatically after a few seconds. Clicking the popup will focus the
message. There is a setting to disable autohide if you wish.
User mode indicators
See inline if someone is an Op, has voice, etc. Defaults to coloured dots:
You can change it to traditional symbols (@, +, etc) in your settings:
Commands to run on connect
Auto-send commands when you connect to the IRC server. For example, you can AUTH
with the Q bot on QuakeNet this way:
Improved nick tab-complete
Type the first few letters of a nickname and hit tab, to see our
improved tab-complete menu.
Press tab some more to cycle through the options.
Password security
We now store all user login passwords using bcrypt hashing. The previous
salted MD5 hashes are removed and replaced with bcrypt the first time
you login after your account was migrated.
HTTPS / SSL Security
IRCCloud continues to only be accessible via SSL (ie, https://). Also:
- We have reviewed and updated our SSL cipher suite;
- We are using HTTPS secure cookies;
- We send strict transport security (HSTS) headers;
- As of Chrome 22, the irccloud domain is on the force-https list.
Ignoring troublesome users
Often requested - now you can ignore people, and anything they say won’t display in the chat.
Basic usage:
/ignore bozo/unignore bozo
Advanced usage (masks):/ignore <nick>!<user>@<host> (wildcard \* is supported)
There is also an ignore option in the nick context menu, which defaults to
using \*!<user>@<host> for a more reliable ignore.
Check your current Ignore list from the Options menu. You can also use a blank /ignore command with no target to show the list of masks.
Channel management improvements
Conversations now automatically rename when the person you are talking
to changes their nick.
Fixed a long-standing bug where channels failed to rejoin after a
disconnect.
We also improved initial chanel joining to more reliably wait for confirmation of NickServ identification.
New shortcuts
/archive - leaves a channel if necessary, and archives it (or /close or /a or /wc “window close”)/delete - leaves a channel if necessary, and deletes it (or /rm or /wd “window delete”)
Connectivity, IPv6, Hardware
We recently deployed 3 brand new connection pool machines, which we
lovingly name after places in London that have outdoor pools. The new machines are called tooting, richmond and hillingdon.
Here is our current list of IP ranges, useful if you run an IRC network and want
to whitelist IRCCloud.
We now favour IPv6 IRC connections if your network supports it. Lots of the
major networks already do—Freenode for instance. This means we can assign each IRCCloud user
a personal IP address and hostname on each of our connection pool machines. This makes it a lot
easier to uniquely identify users on other networks.
General tweaks
- Modal dialogs replaced with in-page overlays
- Various bugs fixed when using irccloud with ZNC
- Fixes for connecting to LDAP secured IRCDs that check usernames
- Lots of little bug fixes
Last week, on Thursday September 13, we attempted a planned upgrade of IRCCloud
with an expected down time of up to 2 hours. It ended up taking all day, with
partial-to-no availability for most users throughout.
Sorry for the poor service - we realise how much of a pain it is to be without
your normal IRC client, and we’re busy working to make sure it doesn’t happen
again.
Background
IRCCloud started out hosted on one server, where we changed settings and tuned
the system as we went along. As part of growing the service, we recently
invested time in moving all our configuration management to Chef, with
automated deployments and upgrades provided by Jenkins (the subject of another
post in future).
These changes allow us to easily deploy additional servers, safely upgrade the
systems holding open your IRC connections, and run the site in a more robust
and manageable way.
We tried to move the core service to our new infrastructure last week, but
ultimately rolled back to the old system to properly address issues uncovered
by the migration.
Alpha site
For the last 4 months we’ve been running an updated alpha version of the site
with a small group of testers, in parallel with the beta.
The Alpha site lives on the new servers and infrastructure. Our plan was to
migrate all users to the new site last week. This was going to involve some
down time while we shut down user accounts and IRC connections, migrated them
to a new database structure, and started them up again on the new system. Logs
also needed migrating, but this was being done ahead of the downtime.
What happened
On Thursday morning we shut down the beta site, disconnecting everyone as
planned, and began to migrate user accounts in the order they signed up. At the
same time we redirected the irccloud.com domain to the new server, so people
could immediately log in once migrated.
After resolving some initial problems with the upgrade procedure, we noticed
the migration queue was being processed far slower than expected, owing to
heavy load on the alpha server.
Throughout the day, we patched the system to address problems that were
cropping up. With hindsight, we should definitely have aborted early on in the
process and switched back to the old system.
We also had a couple of crashes caused by incorrectly set configuration
parameters. Settings we had previously changed on the old system, but missed
when building a new server. All our configuration is managed by Chef now, so
mistakes like this will be much less likely when we deploy new servers in
future.
At the end of the day, we had almost all users migrated to the new server. We
left the remaining few migrations running over night. Things were working, but
sluggish.
The following morning, rather than frantically patch the system in place, we
decided to move everyone back to the old server. Although painful, this was
better than inflicting slow and laggy performance on everyone for any longer.
We should have done this much sooner.
Artificial load testing: too artificial
As part of testing performance on the new server, we generate artificial load
with a test suite. It turns out our artificial tests were too artificial. The
distribution of messages/joins/quits/parts/renames/etc we use for testing no
longer resembles the traffic we see in the live environment.
We’ve fixed many of the issues that led to the server overloading and we’re
improving our load-testing to better model the specifics of a full restart and
ongoing operations. We’re also working to simulate other transient events
better in our test environment (eg, netsplits, mass disconnect/reconnects, etc)
before we migrate any more accounts to the new system.
Ongoing issues
We have a list of IRC networks where our session limit needs updating for the
new servers. We’ve been contacting the relevant network admins this week to
improve matters. Please email team@irccloud.com if you’re an IRC network
admin and have any questions.
Some users are reporting a varying backlog gap in some channels between the end
of August and near the time of the failed migration. This is a temporary
display problem that should resolve itself as more activity in those channels
pushes the gap out of cache. This might take a bit longer for quieter channels
though.
Separately, we have a known issue on beta where backlog is inaccessible from
before August 12th. This backlog is safe: it’s been moved to the new system,
because we ran out of space on the current server. This is obviously an ugly
solution and would have been fixed by the database migration. Since the
rollback, this data is again unavailable. It will be accessible again once we
migrate over to the new server.
If you’re having any other issues in the mean time, you can contact us via email, twitter, or in our #feedback channel on
irc.irccloud.com.
IRC