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michael |
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$Id: NEWS,v 1.1.1.1 2003/12/30 17:08:35 mbuna Exp $ |
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2003-12-30 Stephane Thiell pxys v2 |
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------------------------------------ |
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Woohoo! I found the time to complete the pxys v2 software suite. I now call it |
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software suite as it's no more a single program to run: tasks are separated. |
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I will try to be brief and understandable as possible. |
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Some things never change...and some things do (Ok... easy!). Well, almost |
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all the work has been to improve the internal coding design, program |
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architecture and efficiency. In the meantime, and you probably want to know |
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first what's changing in practice from an administrative point of view and not |
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too much from a developer one. So, some major things have changed: |
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- There are two main programs now. First, the IRCU service server daemon, |
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named pxyservd which links to the IRC network. It manages the remote clients, |
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provides a virtual client and an oper commands interface, send glines, |
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provides logs, etc. ok almost like in pxys v1. The difference is that pxyservd |
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doesn't perform any scans. The scanner daemon is named pxyscand, it performs |
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the scans, keeps IP caches, etc. and connects to pxyservd via a TCP socket |
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(for now only TCP is available). It has been completely rewritten in C++. To |
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communicate, they use a very cheap binary protocol I designed for the occasion, |
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it's called OPAS protocol and I wrote a library (see the libopas directory) to |
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implement it. When a client connects to the network, pxyservd sends a request |
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to pxyscand which performs the scan (in not in cache) and then reply (like a |
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DNS query). |
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- Both programs now use XML configuration files (pxyservdconf.xml and |
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pxyscandconf.xml) with the help of libxml2's standard XPath parsing (see |
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http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath). Don't worry, it's very easy to edit them using |
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a simple text editor (but if you use emacs, I recommend you the use of |
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the nXML major mode, you can find it at the following URL: |
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http://www.thaiopensource.com/download/, or another XML mode). This adds a |
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constraint to pxys2's installation: the very portable libxml2 is required |
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(you can find it at http://xmlsoft.org). It's not included to pxys v2 package |
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as it's a very common library (available in FreeBSD's ports, etc.). |
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- Another library I wrote is needed which however is not part of the pxys |
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v2 package (it's under the BSD license). I almost wrote it especially for |
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pxys. It's a original event library. You can find it at http://peak.sf.net. |
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- The use of this event-based library and the new internal design of the |
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scanner make it VERY efficient. No more 200 threads that take all the CPU time |
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for context switch! 1 thread per CPU is configured for pxyscand. pxyservd, |
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however, is limited to 1 thread as it's not useful (peak doesn't parallelize |
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events on a single socket stream). |
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- pxyservd now handles channels! For now, it's only a test and there is |
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no real usage of this feature, but some will be rapidely possible: an oper |
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will be able to ask for a rescan of a whole channel, if needed (proxies are so |
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volatile these days...), or the scanner could detect if a channel is regularly |
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joined by proxied users and report that to the console channel, for example. |
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Channels management is possible thanks to another library: dbprim written by |
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Kev. It will be a good test for his (cpu and memory) efficient library before |
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it's integrated into Undernet IRCU itself. dbprim is included in pxys v2 |
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package as a third party library for convenience. |
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- pxyservd is only P10 n2k compatible. P9 and non n2k networks can't use it. |
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- pxyscand can now use several IPs as scanning IP source (taken randomly). |
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That's almost all for the visible part; IRC commands are still oper only |
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and almost the same, mostly for stats/status purpose. If you are a pxys v1 |
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user you will barely see the difference. |
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Known limitation: libpeak only supports x86 and PowerPC processors at the |
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moment. Sparc and several other processor types will be supported soon. |
