1087170 - https://irc.mozilla.org/ no longer redirects to https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: Infrastructure: IRC, task)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

https://irc.mozilla.org/ used to redirect to https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC, but now the connection to irc.mozilla.org just times out.

Comment 1

[Dan Parsons [:lerxst]]

Due to security and just plain old sanity reasons, we are no longer supporting HTTP and HTTPS on our IRC servers. The authoritative link for IRC docs is https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC . If you see the old https://irc.mozilla.org/ link in use somewhere, please tell me where it is so I can correct it.

Comment 3

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

I'd like you to reconsider wontfixing this bug. When you say  "If you see the old https://irc.mozilla.org/ link in use somewhere, please tell me where it is so I can correct it", that's not something that can actually happen, because "irc.mozilla.org" gets autocompleted to "http[s]://irc.mozilla.org" by virtually all modern terminals and mail clients.

This change is barrier to contributor communication and participation, and I'm sure we can find a way to fix it that doesn't require us to run additional services on the IRC servers or expose us to additional risk.

Comment 4

[Dan Parsons [:lerxst]]

The risk of running a web server on our irc servers outweighs the convenience for the tiny amount of people who think it makes sense to go to an irc server hostname in their web browser.

Comment 5

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

Have we checked to see if it's a tiny amount of people? Was it outweighed by the risk we incur serving up a static redirect? I guess we must have, but it'd be nice to see those numbers here. 

In any case, I'm not asking for a web server, I'm asking for a redirect; I assume that we can redirect inbound traffic before it hits a specific server?

Comment 6

[Dan Parsons [:lerxst]]

No, we literally cannot redirect port 80 traffic before it hits one of our irc servers, because DNS doesn't care about, or dictate which, tcp port you're connecting to. And we don't put load balancers in front of our irc servers because of what that does to long-term tcp connections, which irc relies on. So there is no opportunity to redirect traffic before it hits an irc server's IP, so the only way we can do a static redirect is to install an http daemon of some sort, on every single irc server.

Comment 7

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

We don't have any kind of smart firewall between the world and our IRC servers?

Comment 8

[Dan Parsons [:lerxst]]

No, we are not implementing port 80 forwarding. This bug has been resolved already.

Comment 9

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

As you might imagine, this is dissatisfying for a couple of reasons. Do you mind if I get a second opinion?

Comment 10

[Justin Dow [:jabba]]

My opinion is that we should let IT handle things to their best practices. It is bad practice to have extra services running if not needed. It opens up potential attack surfaces. Adding a web server simply for a redirect adds a bit of overhead and I think the overhead involved (either extra network layers, load balancers or a local webserver) does't necessarily justify the need for a redirect.

If this one issue is enough of a barrier to entry for a potential contributor, then I don't think that particular contributor would have stuck around for any of our other much more difficult barriers to entry, so I don't see this is alienating any potential contributors. i.e. if I want to contribute and know nothing, so I try to type irc.mozilla.org into my browser and get a connection refused, and I give up right then and there and write off Mozilla... was I really a big loss to the project?

Comment 11

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

You can make the same argument about substandard documentation. My point remains that this is a barrier to participation that was put up without consideration for its impact, and which doesn't need to exist.

Comment 12

[Justin Dow [:jabba]]

But the redirect doesn't need to exist either. I don't see how this is a barrier. You asked for a second opinion and I provided one. We've provided some reasons for not adding it back, do you have data that suggests that there is a legitimate need for this redirect to exist?