[Raion]

I'm proud to announce that within a week, we are likely to have ourselves a fully featured, convenient, IRIX-compatible and federated chat system using two protocols in tandem.

Allow me to give a brief overview:

chat.irixnet.org has been moved to a new instance I am still working on. There are a few things we need to finish, but things are pretty damn close.

The two protocols are Mattermost, which we trialed earlier this year, and XMPP (Jabber). 

Mattermost is robust, discord-like, performant and clean. It has a number of clients, including Matterhorn, which is not yet IRIX compatible but could be in the future.

XMPP is a very common protocol that already has IRIX compatibility.  We are using the Openfire implementation, which I have prior experience with from my days at InMotion Hosting in the early 2010s

Currently, I've bridged three pairs of channels with matterbridge. We can add more at any time. You can use one or the other, or both.

We've neither fully ironed out the rules nor requirements, but for those of you who have been here at least 30 days and have a history of active participation, you will be able to get an account. Note that our XMPP instance will not allow pre-existing XMPP users to connect to the multi-user group chats. That will require you to register an XMPP account on our servers. This is for security reasons, and to eliminate issues that we had with discord or IRC, where raiding was possible.

Speaking with Kaigan, he believes in the value of an eventual SSO -- the reason I've shied away from this is complexity and the fact our services can't all speak the same protocols and LDAP, Oauth etc. are all really hard to get *right*.  I'm open to it, but that'd be the first time we'd need to actually do a migration at scale.

Stay tuned.

[vishnu]

When Michael Fremont open-sourced the WBS (Webchat Broadcasting Systems) perl chatroom code I downloaded it and added a ton of features. It runs as a CGI (common gateway interface, you young whippersnappers will never have heard of it), it runs well with hundreds of users but obviously it's derived from circa 1995 technology.

[Raion]

I'm sure... but I use NGINX which doesn't get along with CGI scripts. To run a site like this effectively, ancient cruft like Apache doesn't cut it. Every time I talk tech here about this I get some older guy saying "BACK IN MY DAY PREFORK WAS FINE!!!" and I also get super young dudes singing the praises of node.js, then you get the one weird guy who says "Nah, use Hiawatha, everyone else is wrong."

NGINX used to be a reverse proxy, but it's also a great PHP-FPM component.

Really, the big issue with Apache is simple: It's a big application that requires its .htaccess files to be read in every directory in a vhost recursively for every request. This is slow as molasses and consumes enormous amounts of CPU. This means you have to turn off Allow Override, but then you're left with having to get a PERFECT httpd.conf or your entire server grenades when apachectl graceful is applied. By removing all the modules from a web server, as NGINX does (there's no CGI, FCGI, mod_php etc) it really lightens the load of the webserver to do what it does best, serving static generated content proxied in from a multiprocess background system.

XMPP is old but decent. Matermost is new and shiny. They play pretty nice together.

If we want a thread where I go into depth on the tech and bits behind the site, I can, i just don't care for the immense amount of backseat driving I got when we first opened up and I was super open about the setup we had. I had people who were telling me in 2018 to use sendmail() and php mail() calls to send email from the forums... like I'm not even trying to be mean but I guess nobody had to deliver email in 2018 to Google. It'll bounce it or silently filter it. Can't relay it either. Thats against RFCs.

[vishnu]

Since I have a static IP address from Comcast I run my website from a server inside my house. Pair does the DNS hosting for, like, five bucks a year (or something ridiculously cheap like that, I'd have to go look it up). And if Comcast ever does change my IP address there's a script on my server that will automagically update the info on Pair's network. So it's kind of like being co-loed in a Comcast data center at no extra charge.

[Raion]

I've done that for small scale sites, but after my experiences over the last near-decade in housing stability issues, I would never risk a site like this in such a situation. The cost of about, for the forum, $140/year is well worth it. The other services are subsidized by DefaultRouteUK out of the kindness of his heart. I appreciate him for that.

[vishnu]

Yeah, my website is small-scale to the point of being almost completely unused, the only traffic it gets is script kiddies trying to crack in about a thousand times a day...