S-C Net IRC Channel Up

[Reikou Hitakana]

Ok, seeing as Risu didn't tear into me for going ahead and setting everything up, I'm gonna assume nobody minds that I did it ;P Now for the fun part. If this is actually going to function as bandwidth assistance for those people who have freely offered up their bandwidth to S-C.net, we need people. And not just leechers. We need people willing to Serv in the chan when they can. Plus we need a good number of Ops in the channel to maintain order. Here's the particulars:

Server: irc.mircx.com
Channel: #Sakura-Crisis

New to the whole IRC thing? www.mircx.com That's the website for the mircx irc server. There you can download IRC as well as read through a ton of tutorials on how to do things. For people who want to serv (you all should) get SysReset at http://www.sysreset.com/ This is probably the simpleest IRC Fileserver program there is.

All servers get automatic voicing to help sort who's serving and who's leeching. The current ops list is Crisis, Katze, and myself. Risu, I don't know how much you're on mircx, but I'd like your registered nickname so I can add that to the list. Prolly want a few more ops if we start to grow really fast. Anyway, I think that's it for now. Just get in there and serv [img]tongue.gif[/img]

-Reikou

[Risu-chan]

^^;;; I've got different nicks on different computers (so I just store one logon script per computer and don't have to worry where I am because it won't conflict if I left another instance running). I should probably re-register Risu-chan as a nick; I don't know if I've been on from that computer for a month or more now...

Anyway, more news.

MangaBot has been fed (I don't have the first book of Alichino here on this computer but I'll try to dig through my CDs tonight and amend that oversight). There's over a gig of S-C.net stuff waiting in MangaBot's receiving area to be transferred over to the serving area. ^__^

I'm a flaming moron who did about half of it by hand before going to get a GUI and only when it was done realizing that I could just have pointed Dreamweaver's FTP at it and been fine; Dreamweaver doesn't care if there's a web server on the other end or not, and it doesn't care if it sends .html or .zip files... @_@ oh well...

Per Crisis' FAQ instructions on handling of IRC material, I put [Sakura-Crisis.net] in the name of all the files sent to MangaBot. I also kept everything joined with underscores instead of spaces for any Unix users in the crowd. ^_^;;

MangaBot is happily living in the channel at the moment; I don't know if it's enough to keep the channel "awake" by itself, but Mahyla says she has a 24/7 connection and script which should be useful for that...

That's all I can think of...

[tenjou_sama]

I'd be in the channel right now, but I'm unable to connect at the moment (I'll keep trying), and plus I don't have all the files to serve just yet.

I did check the channel out earlier though.

I should be able to serve in the channel quite frequently. For about 1:30PM-6:00PM (Eastern Time of course ^_^ And after six it just depends if I remember to get back on) on weekdays, and late night on weekends.

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ September 04, 2003 08:10 PM: Message edited by: Carole Ann ]</font>

[dtortot]

You can always come visit the channel, be sure to check the rules and leech.

My Fserv is up if I am there, hosting a lot of S-C releases.

<font color="#660033" size="1">[ September 05, 2003 06:10 PM: Message edited by: dtortot ]</font>

[Risu-chan]

General IRC security discussion (just wrote this up for a PM and thought other people might find the principles handy to consider):

Question: "Heard that IRC is less secure than web browsing; how do you make it more secure"?

General overview:
If you're careful with your settings, it can be lots more secure than Internet Explorer because all that comes through the main chat window is text and you don't have to let anyone send anything non-text unless you accept it - but being careful with your settings also means making it a big nuisance to automate anything.

Basically, you can lock it down so that it prompts you any time someone wants to talk to you or send you a file, and you can tell it not to accept certain files that people just don't need to be sending anyway (.exe, .dll).

But if you do that, then you have to be sitting at your computer in order to click the Accept button in order to receive the file you want.

On the other hand, you can compromise some points of security in the interests of non-headache-ness -- the compromise I personally came to was:

1) banning any kind of send-to-my-computer other than the three types I know I use (manga zips, audio, and video),

2) never leaving IRC running when I wasn't there to watch it, and

3) allowing people to auto-send files (so that I wouldn't have to get there to click accept before it times out).

The reason I made that third compromise was that I'd sit in queues for hours and hours, get up to go to the bathroom or get food, and come back to discover that the send had tried to start while I was gone and timed out. As long as I'm sitting there to watch what people send to me, nobody's going to slip me a virus outside a manga zip file, and I've got VirusScan set to search everything as I access it so it ought to warn me if something shows up inside a zip file I decide to open.

But like I said, I only let people auto-send file types I know I'm expecting and I never leave it unattended.

On the other hand, I'm a former government-grade security-software employee; I'm more paranoid about security than almost anyone else I know, and most people find security a few notches down from that level OK for their personal comfort zone.

I don't know how people who run servers do their security, because I've got so many firewalls to deal with no matter where I connect from that I really can't run a server anyway... ^^;;;

Hope that helps some...

[Risu-chan]

One more idea...

Whenever the S-C.net website comes back, it's occurred to me that there is a web-based interface for IRC. So people who couldn't get and install MIRC for one reason or another could still at least get the chattable effect by using the web-based (Java-based) interface if someone put it on one of the S-C.net pages.

I don't know if the web interface lets you do things like download files; I'm pretty sure it won't do things like let you serve (at least, I can't imagine how you'd get it to run a server); but the ability to chat is still good, especially during periods when the main website has gone AWOL...

what do folks think of that idea? I'll see if I can dig up any more details...

http://chat.cjb.net/ looks like it's going to be the place to go for more info, whenever their server comes back. @_@ The sample chat on the homepage of www.mircx.com was filled with extremely foulmouthed trolls last night when I was looking for a way to connect that wasn't through MIRC which I couldn't get to make a connection for about 45 minutes -- but that probably happens to any "default" room... I'll see if I can get from that sample chat interface to the S-C.net channel...

Score! ^___^ When you're in the www.mircx.com home page's chat window, just type /join #sakura-crisis and there you are! ^___^

So now web users who have Java have a way to at least chat... ^______^