794322 - Duplicate IRC accounts confuse Thunderbird

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Instant Messaging, defect)

Description

[Steve Wills]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/21.0.1180.89 Safari/537.1

Steps to reproduce:

Created two IRC accounts, both pointing to my irc proxy. I use this:

http://bip.milkypond.org/

to proxy IRC. It connects to multiple irc servers and differentiates between them based on the password used.


Actual results:

Because the same host and username are used for multiple accounts, Thunderbird didn't work properly. It disconnected the first one when connecting to the second one, but then failed to connect.


Expected results:

The IRC accounts should have "Account Name" settings, just like regular mail accounts and they should be used to name the chat accounts, rather than the user@host.

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

It shouldn't be possible to create duplicate accounts in the first place, and we have a patch in progress to fix this in https://bugzilla.instantbird.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1511.

We aren't going to complicate the UI for account configuration to accommodate strange bouncers.

That said, "It disconnected the first one when connecting to the second one, but then failed to connect." seems strange, and could be worth looking at what's going on.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

(In reply to Steve Wills from comment #0)

> It disconnected the first one when
> connecting to the second one, but then failed to connect.

Can you be a bit more specific about this?
Did it mark the account as disconnected in the account status window, or was the connection closed by your proxy when you connected the second account?

I suspect the culprit is the password, as they are stored in the password manager, so all duplicated accounts will use the latest password you entered for that username/hostname.

Comment 4

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

(In reply to Florian Quèze [:florian] [:flo] from comment #1)
> It shouldn't be possible to create duplicate accounts in the first place,
> and we have a patch in progress to fix this in
> https://bugzilla.instantbird.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1511.
For the record, this is now bug 954943.

Comment 5

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

This is quite common for bouncers actually. If you want multiple networks you need multiple accounts (znc) or some strange way to switch between networks (psybnc). Supporting the same username with different passwords sounds quite exotic, but I think it should at least be possible to support the same host with different usernames. I believe this is already the case though.

A workaround would be to use DNS to link multiple hostnames to the same IP, then use one per account.

Comment 6

[Andrew DeMarsh [WizardGed]]

(In reply to Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] from comment #5)
> This is quite common for bouncers actually. If you want multiple networks
> you need multiple accounts (znc) or some strange way to switch between
> networks (psybnc). Supporting the same username with different passwords
> sounds quite exotic, but I think it should at least be possible to support
> the same host with different usernames. I believe this is already the case
> though.
> 
> A workaround would be to use DNS to link multiple hostnames to the same IP,
> then use one per account.

I suppose i only ran into this due to ZNC suggesting this as a more convenient method to deal with handling multiple networks without having to set up the same rules again and again for every new account you make per irc network. I never thought about changing this via dns. this is obviously the more clever work around to this problem. 

Note: for those who may look back on this, this can be solved by adding the hosts ip and a fake domain name to either "Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" in Windows, "/private/etc/hosts" in OSX, "\etc\hosts" in Linux and "\etc\hosts.conf" in FreeBSD. Ex) 123.456.789.10    mozilla.irc