		          Persistent Clients
			  ==================

   (Ideas by Dianora and madmax and many others.; initial spec by Dianora)


Background: This idea has been going around for a while, I think I 
            first described it to bleep of Undernet over a year ago,
            and it made it in an edited irc log form to coder-com
            on Undernet. I'd have to look.

Basic idea: Clients really don't need to "quit" when the user using
            using that client /quit's or the client gets DDoS'ed off.
            Rather, that client can be marked as "suspended" waiting 
            for an active person to reconnect to the client making 
            it active again.

	    What this means is, a client has the option of staying alive
            even if the controlling connection has died.

To work ircd would need the following commands added:

1) /cookie

To resume a suspended client, an user must have an unique client id
and password to resume the client later. The cookie command would
return a numeric (TBD) that would give both the UID and password
for that client. This could be cut and pasted into a buffer for later
resume, or captured by a simple script.

To work effectively, EFnet must implement unique client id's. This
could be based on orabidoo's TS4 code. 

2) /suspend

An user can suspend their client for later reconnection at any
time, using the suspend command. 

3) /resume uid cookie

Any user who has become disconnected or has voluntarily suspended
from their active client can resume that client by registering to the
ircd in the normal user/nick way, then issuing a /resume uid cookie command.
Their session then becomes attached to the client sitting in all the
channels with all their modes restored.


Unfortunately occasional oper intervention will be necessary using
the following commands.

4) /destroy uid|channel

Any client uid matching that uid can be destroyed from the network. This
is a form of old style /kill but it also destroys the uid and cookie pair.
(TBD)

A channel name if given instead, will result in all members of the channel
being tossed out, and apparently kicked by themselves. (chanop hiding
in h7) The channel will then be marked as "juped" for a period of 1 
minute. First come, first serve just like old style EFnet.

5) /setpass uid

A client after successfully proven their ownership can have their
cookie password reset.

1.1

The TS NICK command as described in orabidoo's TSora paper is rather
overloaded as it is for adding an unique UID to each nick. It is proposed
to add a new UID command that would result in NICK being deprecated.
It would also add the capability "UID" to the servers capability list.

The format would take this form.

:%s UID uid_string nick UID hopcount nick_creation umodes username
    host server :gecos

The observant will note this is the old NICK command with an 
additional parameter added "uid_string."

1.2

With an UID, there is no reason to nick collide, the client is now
uniquely identified by the UID not the nick. When a nick collide happens,
the client still maintains any chanop status it had, and is marked
as suspended.

1.3

User disconnection due to DDoS or phone line hang ups results in the
client being marked as suspended.

1.4

Client expiries would take place on a 24 hour basis. If you do not
resume every 24 hours, you lose the client.

1.5

To cut down on abuse, a client may not register more than one suspended
client per user@host.

TBD. What to do if a dronebot net is programmed to /suspend as many
as possible, in order to eat up memory in a DDoS attempt. One of the
same criticisms against vchans actually.

$Id: Persistent_Clients.txt,v 1.3 2001/01/24 14:58:41 wcampbel Exp $


