[IRCServices] A big problem - services being flooded

[Imran Ali Rashid]

I had thought of this while starting the todo discussion, but forgot about it till now.

Is there any form of flood protection in services?
To the best of my knowledge there isn't. Hence nothing stops a person from
lagging services very easily. an example might be the following mirc command:
/timer 10 0 quote chanserv help
It sends 10 chanserv help messages immediately(0 seconds of delay between each).
The result? Services start lagging. I'm not killed since i'm not flooding, and though
services are technically flooding, they are obviously not killed. This is bad!! Creativity
can give may to more elegant ways of lagging services, but I'll stop here.

There is also no restriction on the log file size, unless you place it yourself with the
quota system.

The problem with all the above combinations is that there is nothing to stop a person
from filling the services log file with absolute rubbish and kill the the disk space on
the server if a close watch isn't kept or a quota system isn't active. Other than the
disk space issue there is also the rubbish in the log file issue.

Oh and in case you were wondering, If you keep on identifying once every second,
since a line is 110 characters long, it will take you approximately 110 days to fill up
1 GB. I know how impossible this is, hence it is not my main concern, so please don't
flame on this. My main point is the cluttering of the log file and services lag.

For Example. As a friend so happily demostrated for me, he logged on and kept on
identifying once or twice every second. Services didn't react, obviously, since there
is no flood protection in it. Guess what happened, and no the server hard disk space
didn't fill(I am a good admin despite my occasional gripes :-) ), but when I wanted to
look into a few problems, you can imagine how cluttered the log file was. Grep is nice
to use, but sometimes.....

So the issue at hand is mainly the flooding of services. Is there anything built in at the
moment, and if not, what kind of suggestions have been thought upon?

How about limiting the number of times a particular command like identify(its an example,
and not a specific case) may be used by someone, or maybe the number of commands
used by someone via services in general, even help, since it can easily be used to lag
services.

Imran Ali Rashid.