INSPIRCD
IRC: the oldest chat system going on strong
Chatterbox Nate Drake walks you through how to set up and secure your very own IRC server, as well as master its many commands.
OUR EXPERT
Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro games. His first attempt to join an IRC ethical hacking channel landed him in a fan group for ‘furries’ instead.
W hile IRC has been dwarfed by instant messaging programs since its inception in 1988, it still remains popular with groups like tech enthusiasts, perhaps due to the protocol’s open nature and the fact there’s a number of open source, customisable clients.
The fact that said clients aren’t as easy to set up as, say, Signal messenger is kind of the point. When it comes to both exclusivity and geekiness, IRC leaves other programs and protocols in the dust. On the plus side, this usually means you’ll find channels of very well-informed people on a number of obscure topics. When researching this article, Nate went down a rabbit hole on an IRC channel devoted to llamas, for instance.
Your I config In this guide, you’ll learn how to set up and configure your very own IRC server, secure it using TLS or the dark net, then help others to connect.
Getting started
In order to operate an IRC service, you need to have access to a server. Technically you can do this using your home machine, but it would consume a large amount of system resources, not to mention require a large amount of port forwarding on your router.
VPS (virtual private servers) are ideal for running IRC. We used the free tier of an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu 24.04 (https://aws.amazon.com) – be aware that charges can apply (ensure you disable your server when not used) and we’re not responsible! We’ve also chosen InspIRCd as our server software, given that it’s relatively easy to set up.
Technically you can install the existing version (currently 3.17) in Ubuntu’s repositories but if you do this, InspIRCd won’t automatically enable third-party modules, such as those necessary for SSL support. The version in the repos is also rather dated. To install the latest version, you need to compile the code from source. First install the necessary dependencies: $ sudo apt install git perl g++ make gnutls-bin libgnutls28-dev pkg-config
Download the latest version (currently 4.2.0): $ wget https://github.com/inspircd/inspircd/archive/
QUICK TIP
An example InspIRCd configuration file is available from https://bit. ly/inspircdconf. Take some time to read through this before you begin editing your own. If you compile InspIRCdfrom source, more examples are available in /inspircd/run/conf/examples.
Your IRC server settings are managed from the inspircd.conf configuration file. Restart the service each time you make changes.