Kaoz

General purpose

Kaoz is a free notifier for IRC. It's purpose is to provide an easy to use way for System Administrators to send warnings and logs on any choosen IRC channel. It therefore uses a persistent daemon, which is called the 'server' later on, that will listen on a given port, optionnaly with ssl enabled. The server expects lines to have the format password:channel:message, like secret:#help:Hello. password is a global password required to use the service. channel is an irc channel on the configured network. (Kaoz will join the channel to do so). A 'client' is an application which connects to the server to send messages on IRC. Please note that, in case you whish to agregate many servers' notifications, you may have only one Kaoz server, but you should multiply clients.

Licence

Kaoz is provided under a MIT-like licence. See the licence file for more informations.

Dependencies

• python
• python openssl librairies (if you whish to use SSL)
• python irc library

Installation of the server

First, copy the config to the location of your choice, for example /etc/kaoz.conf. Then edit the kaoz.conf file to provide correct values for the IRC Server and the listening socket. The daemon is started with the bin/kaoz program. There is a Gentoo init.d file in initd/kaoz for your interest. It should be easy to figure out how to adapt this file to your distribution.

Known limitations

• Kaoz does not support key-protected channels
• Kaoz does not check messages for oversized lines therefore, long lines may be cut by the IRC server.

Kaoz client examples

Here are some ways to send Hello to channel #help using a Kaoz server which is listenning on host myhost port 4242, protected with password secret. For that purpose, a client needs to send secret:#help:Hello to the server (with an optional LF or CR+LF, as you want).

• In Shell, for simple servers without SSL, use one of the following lines:

  echo "secret:#help:Hello" |netcat myhost 4242
  echo "secret:#help:Hello" |socat - TCP:myhost:4242
  

• In Shell, for servers which use SSL certificates

  echo "secret:#help:Hello" |socat - OPENSSL:myhost:4242
  

• In Shell, for servers which use SSL certificates and a trusted authority certificate file (CA file)

  echo "secret:#help:Hello" |socat - OPENSSL:myhost:4242,verify,cafile=myca.crt
  

• In Python without SSL:

  import socket
  sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  sock.connect(('myhost', 4242))
  sock.sendall('%s:%s:%s' % ('secret', '#help', 'Hello'))
  sock.close()
  

• In Python with SSL:

  import socket
  import ssl
  sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
  sock.connect(('myhost', 4242))
  # use these options to check CA: cert_reqs=ssl.CERT_REQUIRED, certfile='myca.crt'
  sock = ssl.wrap_socket(self.sock)
  sock.sendall('%s:%s:%s' % ('secret', '#help', 'Hello'))
  sock.close()
  

Kaoz server support multi-lined messages, so long as each lines begins with the password and a channel.

About IRC style and colors

Some control sequences allow IRC users to write messages with style and colors (^X means Ctrl+X):

• ^B (= x02) Bold text
• ^C (= x03) Colored text
• ^O (= x0F) Back to original plain text
• ^R (= x16) Reversed text
• ^_ (= x1F) Underlined text

There are 16 colors:

1. Black
2. Navy Blue
3. Green
4. Red
5. Brown
6. Purple
7. Olive
8. Yellow
9. Lime Green
10. Teal
11. Aqua Light
12. Royal Blue
13. Hot Pink
14. Dark Gray
15. Light Gray
16. White

For example ^C2Hello writes Hello in blue.

Contact

Kaoz is provided by "Binet Réseau", a student association from France's École polytechnique. If you have inquiries, comments or suggestions, you may contact us at br@eleves.polytechnique.fr

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