First, some background
ubottu, our core IRC bot, is a Supybot running our custom plugins. The plugin you’ll most likely to have used is called “Encyclopedia”, that’s the one which stores and fetches factoids in our channels. We also use a plugin called “Bantracker”, which is used to keep track of things like kicks, mutes and bans. Both of these plugins store information in SQLite (version 2) databases. Up until now this has worked out fine for us, but things have changed.

Main issues
If you use the Ubuntu channels on IRC regularly, you may have noticed a while ago that ubottu was not feeling very well, lots of “Ping timeout: … seconds” quit messages. This was due to several reasons, including hardware limitations on the server we ran ubottu from, and the databases we use. Our databases have become quite large and, even removing lots of old entries, this was making ubottu “hang” and  timeout. Another issue is that the memory requirements of ubottu tend to grow the longer it’s in use, we suspect this is due to inefficient and old code.

The fix
The Ubuntu Bots team, who maintain the plugins used in ubottu, have planned to rewrite the current plugins we use, so we can move away from SQLite version 2 and keep efficiency in mind, but this will take some time and may not easily solve the database issues we were having. The good news is that we now have a shiny new server! This server was generously donated to us by The Rackspace Cloud, and it gives us some much needed breathing space. This new server copes with the insane memory usage of ubottu and makes accessing our large database much faster than it used to be. We have also decided that having ubottu in more than 40 channels is just too much for one little bot, so we’ve reorganised our existing bots and added some new ones.

New layout

From now on you’ll see ubottu in the main (core) channels, and a couple of others. The ubot2 and ubot4 bots will take over many of the channels ubottu was in, and we’ve introduced 3 new “lubotu” bots for LoCo channels. You can see a full list of IRC bots and the channels they’re in on the Ubuntu wiki.

• ubot2 will take over Team channels A-L
• ubot4 will take over Team channels M-Z
• lubotu1 will take over the Americas LoCo channels
• lubotu2 will take over Asia LoCo channels
• lubotu3 will take over EMEA LoCo channels

With this new layout we hope to firstly reduce the load on ubottu, and also make it clearer exactly which bot should be in which channels.

If you experience any problems with the bots you can contact the maintainers of most of them in the #ubuntu-bots-team IRC channel on freenode.

So, what are the council up to?
At the moment we are working on importing the access lists for the core Ubuntu IRC channels into Launchpad. Why are we doing this? Well, we plan on managing the access lists for the channels from Launchpad teams. This will mean than the access lists should always be up-to-date with active operators and allows us to create a set of “core ops”, which will have operator status in all our core channels.

We have made good progress on this and are are practically ready to automatically import the access list into Launchpad. Part of the reason behind doing this is to remove inactive operators from the access lists. The way we plan on doing this is to create a set of operator requirements which all operators will need to agree and adhere to. This will make sure all operators know what is required of them and allow us to see who are active operators and who aren’t.

The next IRCC meeting will take place on  Sunday 31 January 18:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting, the agenda is here, all are welcome to join in.

For those interested in the new layout of the IRC teams, this is a visualization created by Benjamin Rubin.