Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

A bit of history

I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve always enjoyed IRC bots. Perhaps it’s the fact that it emulates a person in an easy-to-program way, or maybe it’s about having a flexible and shared “command line” tool, or maybe it’s just the fact that it helps people perceive things in an asynchronous way without much effort. Probably a bit of everything, actually.

My bot programming started with pybot many years ago, when I was still working at Conectiva. Besides having many interesting features, this bot eventually got in an abandonware state, since Canonical already had pretty much equivalent features available when I joined, and I had other interests which got in the way. The code was a bit messy as well.. it was a time when I wasn’t very used to testing software properly (a friend has a great excuse for that kind of messy software: “I was young, and needed the money!”).

Then, a couple of years ago, while working in the Landscape project, there was an opportunity of getting some information more visible to the team. Coincidently, it was also a time when I wanted to get some practice with the concepts of Erlang, so I decided to write a bot from scratch with some nice support for plugins, just to get a feeling of how the promised stability of Erlang actually took place for real. This bot is called mup (Mup Pet, more formally), and its code is available publicly through Launchpad.

This was a nice experiment indeed, and I did learn quite a bit about the ins and outs of Erlang with it. Somewhat unexpected, though, was the fact that the bot grew up a few extra features which multiple teams in Canonical started to appreciate. This was of course very nice, but it also made it more obvious that the egocentric reason for having a bot written in Erlang would now hurt, because most of Canonical’s own coding is done in Python, and that’s what internal tools should generally be written in for everyone to contribute and help maintaining the code.

That’s where the desire of migrating mup into a Python-based brain again came from, and having a new feature to write was the perfect motivator for this.

LDAP and two-way SMSing over IRC

Canonical is a very distributed company. Employees are distributed over dozens of countries, literally. Not only that, but most people also work from their homes, rather than in an office. Many different countries also means many different timezones, and working from home with people from different timezones means flexible timing. All of that means communication gets… well.. interesting.

How do we reach someone that should be in an online meeting and is not? Or someone that is traveling to get to a sprint? Or how can someone that has no network connectivity reach an IRC channel to talk to the team? There are probably several answers to this question, but one of them is of course SMS. It’s not exactly cheap if we consider the cost of the data being transfered, but pretty much everyone has a mobile phone which can do SMS, and the model is not that far away from IRC, which is the main communication system used by the company.

So, the itch was itching. Let’s scratch it!

Getting the mobile phone of employees was already a solved problem for mup, because it had a plugin which could interact with the LDAP directory, allowing people to do something like this:

<joe> mup: poke gustavo
<mup> joe: niemeyer is Gustavo Niemeyer <…@canonical.com> <time:…> <mobile:…>

This just had to be migrated from Erlang into a Python-based brain for the reasons stated above. This time, though, there was no reason to write something from scratch. I could even have used pybot itself, but there was also supybot, an IRC bot which started around the same time I wrote the first version of pybot, and unlike the latter, supybot’s author was much more diligent in evolving it. There is quite a comprehensive list of plugins for supybot nowadays, and it includes means for testing plugins and so on. The choice of using it was straighforward, and getting “poke” support ported into a plugin wasn’t hard at all.

So, on to SMSing. Canonical already had a contract with an SMS gateway company which we established to test-drive some ideas on Landscape. With the mobile phone numbers coming out of the LDAP directory in hands and an SMS contract established, all that was needed was a plugin for the bot to talk to the SMS gateway. That “conversation” with the SMS gateway allows not only sending messages, but also receiving SMS messages which were sent to a specific number.

In practice, this means that people which are connected to IRC can very easily deliver an SMS to someone using their nicks. Something like this:

<joe> @sms niemeyer Where are you? We’re waiting!

And this would show up in the mobile screen as:

joe> Where are you? We’re waiting!

In addition to this, people which have no connectivity can also contact individuals and channels on IRC, with mup working as a middle man. The message would show up on IRC in a similar way to:

<mup> [SMS] <niemeyer> Sorry, the flight was delayed. Will be there in 5.

The communication from the bot to the gateway happens via plain HTTPS. The communication back is a bit more complex, though. There is a small proxy service deployed in Google App Engine to receive messages from the SMS gateway. This was done to avoid losing messages when the bot itself is taken down for maintenance. The SMS gateway doesn’t handle this case very well, so it’s better to have something which will be up most of the time buffering messages.

A picture is worth 210 words, so here is a simple diagram explaining how things got linked together:

This is now up for experimentation, and so far it’s working nicely. I’m hoping that in the next few weeks we’ll manage to port the rest of mup into the supybot-based brain.

This entry was posted in Architecture, Cloud, Erlang, Mobile, Project, Python. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

  1. milton says:

    Thought this would be another “Asterisk does this and that” post, great surprise I’s wrong.

    Another enjoyable thing about IRC bots was watching some newcomers at Conectiva/Mandriva chatting along hours without noticing the other side was a bot. :-)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *