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Setting up ircd

From paul maney on Thu, 17 Dec 1998

hi there i cant set up ircd on redhat Linux i haveing big pog what can i do to get it to work a.s.p pls from paul marney

you can get me on [phone omitted] or [email omitted]

I'm afraid this question is below the literacy threshold.

I think this translates to:

I can't set up 'ircd' on my Red Hat Linux system. I'm having "big problems" (with it). What can I do to get it to work? Please reply ASAP.

First, I've never set up an IRC server. I've only used IRC as a client on a few occasions (less than ten in the last ten years). I presume that I could set on up if I tried (and I know some of the people who created Undernet -- one of the larger IRC networks, so I'm sure I could get help if I needed it).

However, your question shows a remarkable lack of motivation. You don't provide any information about what version of Red Hat you are using, where you got the your IRC (Internet Relay Chat) daemon package (I've never seen one included with Red Hat Linux CD's --- though admittedly I wasn't looking for it). More importantly you don't give any indication of what you've tried or what sort of problems you've encountered.

Based on your message it doesn't appear that you've even read whatever man pages, README files, and other documentation came with your ircd package.

Glancing around I found an ircd21002.tgz in the Slackware contrib directory on ftp.cdrom.com (Walnut Creek, manufacturers of many fine collections of free software --- including the Slackware Linux distribution and FreeBSD).

Grabbing that I find a set of documents and an example ircd.conf file that give some hints as to how you'd use this particular version of IRC. It turns out that this one is the "UnderNet" version of ircd (I'd heard that they'd written their own, but coming across here it was just by chance).

You could look at the UnderNet web site (http://www.undernet.org) but that doesn't seem to lead to any technical documentation of the sort that you'd need to set up your own server or join one of the relay networks. You'd have to know to look at http://www.undernet.org/documents (since there don't seem to be any links from the index page down to this page). However that doesn't include anything that you need either.

My next stop would be Yahoo!:

Computers and Internet:Internet:Chat:IRC:Networks

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Chat/IRC/

... and I'll leave it to you to search through those links.

Naturally you could also hunt through the IRC channels and ask the regulars in those that are appropriate. I suspect that some of the people who install, configure and maintain these servers are also IRC users. I think there's also a couple of news groups that are appropriate (search your local lists of newsgroups for the string "irc").

If you ask for help from any other parties, I'd suggest putting some careful thought into crafting your questions --- most people won't spend nearly the time that I just have on answer a question that's presented as badly as this.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 36 January 1999

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