[IRCServices] tri-ircd5 and ircservices-5.0.14

Andrew Church achurch at achurch.org
Fri Mar 28 22:45:52 PST 2003


>I tried the hostname change and it fixed it.  Considering it was giving me a
>password error, I would have never dreamed it was an IP problem.  Thanks to
>all for the help.

     This probably stems from old Unix thinking that says "never give an
attacker more information than necessary"; for example, when you log into a
Unix system, even if you give a username that doesn't exist you'll still
get a "password incorrect" error, to prevent potential attackers from
finding out valid usernames on the system.  Whether this is applicable to
IRC is a question definitely worth thinking about--server names on the
network are usually public knowledge--but that's probably where it came
from.

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