request from a chanop for help with troublemakers who DDoS,

[darwin]

I have been on EFnet since 1995 or so, on #coders, and an op on other channels since the mid-00s, including on one of the biggest philosophical channels that has been around, AFAIK, about since EFnet started. Last night someone came to another philosophical channel I have run for years with others, broke the rules linked to when you join, got banned by me, came back with a new account, threatened to DDoS me if banned. I do not take threats, so he DDoSed and probably juped me. He said he has thousands or tens of thousands of IP addresses and could DDoS me for weeks. He either impersonated or exploited a mistake by another op on a channel secondary to the first (for complaints and op discussion,) had about 25 accounts join, and took over.

I admit one of my friends who I ran the channel with since its early days, and considers it his own channel when its creator is gone (though we agreed to run it more equally and wrote rules on a channel page) may have accidentally provoked the troublemaker/troublemakers into doing this. My friend is a great guy, but sometimes has emotional and possibly paranoia problems, and sometimes immediately bans people because of this, for no apparent reason. Once he even banned a long-time other op who had ops but had changed his nick, without checking/asking (though one who banned changes his nick often ,) because the nick was 'like my real name, and it bothered me, because I thought he was making fun of me,' so he said. He may have originally banned this troublemaker because he did not like his nick, or a channel he was on, or some off-topic discussion or link he said, though that is not strictly against the rules and everyone else, even the friend who banned, does it.

Moreover, the channel I am talking about originally started having trouble, lots of takeovers, and lots of unsavoury people attracted to it because my op friend who has these problems, once when I was off IRC a few months with a burnt-out computer (and did not feel like setting up my alternative one,) went to a large, new, so-called 'hacking' channel and invited everyone, I guess because he thought they were intellectuals who would have interest in our philosophical topic. However, the channel has many unsavoury people, unlike the oldest hacker channels that largely have a more mature generation and condone 'the hacker ethic.' I thought I had to give you the whole story, not that I just had to criticize my friends and other channels, though I am pretty frustrated with them.

I have a log of the accounts that did this, what they said, and of their impersonation of me (and could possibly get more such logs from other ops,) and I am on one of the EFnet channels where people get help. If I do not get help there soon, can anyone help here? As of this post, my regular nick (same as forum nick) is currently either juped or taken over after successfully DDoSing me, or my friend the newer darwin will have taken it over, but I do not want to state the specific channels or my other nick right now because of these troublemakers coming to several of mine, though I came back with a different nick. I hope that a threat and action of DDoS by '(tens of) thousands of IP addresses' would be enough that these hostmasks could get banned.

[Handle With Care]

I suggest a review of the following: http://irchelp.org/irchelp/changuide.html

As I told you when you asked for assistance, DDoS has nothing to do with IRC and there is nothing an oper can do about it. Your ISP provides a strong connection, coupled with a good firewall, properly configured, should provide you with protection. Opers cannot get involved with internal channel disputes.