making things suck less

I’ve just committed the implementation of the new Yahoo! protocol authentication to Subversion and wanted to provide more information on what the problem was and how to get the fix.

Hey, why can’t I login in anymore?
The problem that affected Kopete is with the authentication mechanism. Yahoo Messenger 6 used a heinously complicated password obfuscation method to “encrypt” the password as it was being sent over the wire to Yahoo’s servers. Way back when, Cerulean Studios, the creators of the Trillian client, were kind enough to implement this authentication mechanism. Pidgin got it, as well as the libyahoo2 library we were using at the time. When we switched to our own Yahoo! library some time later, we carried it over. As part of this change, we began to identify to the Yahoo servers as Yahoo Messenger 6. Everything was working, and everybody was happy.

The real problem came relatively recently. As time went by, we started updating which version of Yahoo Messenger we presented ourselves as. When those changes were made, the authentication code was never updated. So, even though we said, hey we’re version 15, we were using the older scheme. I even found out in February that Yahoo! was going to be changing their authentication mechanism. I didn’t do anything because I was too busy with other stuff, and this fell by the wayside.

Yahoo began upgrading their servers at some point recently to phase out the older clients. It became a problem for us because when they upgraded, they started requiring protocol version 15 clients to speak the version 15 authentication scheme, which we never implemented. Since we still spoke version 13’s authentication, this cut us off entirely.

So where do I get the fix?
A nice person pointed the Pidgin folks at some documentation, and when this problem reared its ugly head a few days ago, they got to work on a fix. I pulled the fix from their code and now we authenticate the same way Pidgin does. That code is now in KDE’s subversion repositories in trunk, the 4.3 branch, and the 4.2 branch. I’ve sent a message to the packager mailing list with the revision number from the 4.2 branch that needs to be integrated. I’ve also asked for a retagging of KDE 4.3 RC1 so that the fix can be included there as well.

So, you’ll need to wait for your distribution to provide package upgrades or compile from Subversion yourself.

What the fix does
It does three things:

1. Implements the new authentication mechanism - which is much simpler
2. Sets the default server to scsa.msg.yahoo.com - this is what Pidgin is using now as well
3. Converts any configuration that was using a yahoo.com server to login to point at scsa.msg.yahoo.com instead, so that you have the highest possibility of logging in

Other Yahoo! login problems
If after you’ve upgraded, you still can’t login, please file a new bug so that it can be investigated and handled properly. Adding comments to the already existing bug are not as likely to net a solution that will actually work.

Credits
Thanks to the Pidgin folks for the code and the new release which is how I actually noticed the problem in the first place. I didn’t see the original bug report come in.

Thanks in particular to John Bailey, whose post on the subject from Pidgin’s point of view provided the inspiration and some small bits of content for this blog post and its format.

I turned on aliases awhile ago on bugs.kde.org. Aliases are a way for people to reference a bug number based on some nice text that is given to the bug rather than by the bug number. You don’t have to give every bug an alias, but it seemed like a useful feature to have. If nobody likes it, then we can turn it off, but hopefully people are already using it and i’m just not aware of it.

I’m fortunate enough, both at work and at home, to have multiple machines to distribute my compiles to. This means I’m generally using something like ‘make -j5′ or ‘make -j10′ to build stuff with. However, a lot of times, especially now with cmake, I’m not completely sure what exactly caused my build error when I have one. The trick that i’ve started using is running ‘make -i -j10′ first - which means make builds the whole tree and doesn’t stop on errors - and then going back and doing a single ‘make’ to figure out what didn’t compile.

Perhaps I’m late to the party with this, but since it’s been rather useful for me, so I thought I would share.

So a few other FOSS IM clients were affected by an MSN issue the last few days. Kopete in KDE 4.1 doesn’t have this issue, and if you have Kopete from a KDE 4.2 release, you just need to get a newer version of libmsn installed (which may require compiling from source). Nice to see that (for once) our lack of support for the latest protocol version actually kept us safe.

I’ve been quite productive today - committing peoples patches that needed to have the trunk freeze lifted. Already we have for KDE 4.3:

• History importer for Pidgin logs
• A new ‘View History’ button in the chat window
• A chat window that now follows the background setting from the config
• A dependency on an external libgadu rather than providing our own static copy

Thanks to everybody who contributed during the freeze. Keep ‘em coming!

So I had to move my blog back to port 8080 again. My ISP started blocking port 80 again. I thought it was just the router, and apparently it was, and then verizon probably discovered it and put a more effective block on me. *shrug* who knows. I just know i’m not paying more than $100 a month for a business account, just so i host something for my own convenience.

so i replaced my crappy actiontec router with my older, yet less crappy, linksys router, and that let me move the webservice for mattr.info back to port 80 from port 8080, so if anybody has any bookmarked links, be sure to change them from “mattr.info:8080″ to just “mattr.info”

So in my last blog about the new MSN plugin that Kopete has, I got some comments about wanting updates on the integration of Kopete and Telepathy, which from the KDE side of things, involves Decibel as well.

The update is that no work has been done to integrate Telepathy in to Kopete. Why? Because we don’t have the people to do the work. (I don’t count the Telepathy plugin that exists, since that’s just POC). For the most part, Kopete sees only some very light maintenance work (bugfixes and such) because we just don’t have the manpower we used to have.

Integrating Telepathy (through the use of Decibel) into Kopete is something that the majority of the team wants to do, but we need more people to help because it’s going to be a massive undertaking with all the various design and coding tasks that will need to be done to make that happen.

Another reason is the barrier to entry is kinda high. One would have to learn about D-Bus, Telepathy, Qt, KDE, Decibel, and Kopete to really get going. If people are interested, the folks on the kopete-devel mailing list and on the #kopete IRC channel will be glad to answer any questions anybody has.

I’ve just imported the new MSN plugin (now called WLM for Windows Live Messenger) into trunk for KDE 4.2. This new plugin provides support for MSNP15 and in general lays the groundwork for way more stuff to be added to Kopete’s MSN plugin. The new plugin uses a library called libmsn which you can get from SourceForge

Thanks go to Tiago Salem Herrmann, Gustavo Boiko, and Roman Jarosz for doing
all the heavy lifting.

Now go install libmsn, update your trunk checkouts, and start testing!

If you were having issues filing bugs for windows related things on bugs.kde.org then you will be glad to know that I just fixed those problems.