[IRCServices] db lose bug

[Andrew Church]

>in addition to this db lose bug:
>i'm using services 4.5.42 and i'm experiencing the same thing
>services suddenly crash and sometimes the db files "shrink"
>this is very irretating and we had to run a process of backing up
>them every now and then (we have a large nick & chan db's)

     Do you mean you weren't backing them up before?  That's hardly
responsible administration.  As for the data loss problem, if Services is
interrupted while writing data then the old data can be recovered from the
backup file in the same directory.  Services 5.0 is more robust about
saving data and will not overwrite the old data file until the new one has
been successfully written (so you will never see any data loss because of
Services crashes--of course this doesn't rule out disk errors, system
break-ins, etc.).

>ps. i've found the "hackers" on my net loading many bots
>and sending "nickserv help" and "chanserv help" commands from them
>right before services crashed. please check it.

     This is most likely due to a write buffer overflow (what ircds call
"max SendQ exceeded").  Unfortunately this is not an easy problem to solve,
but I'll see if I can make Services 5.0 slightly more robust in this area.

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at achurch.org
    http://achurch.org/