11

The situation:

I want to play around with IRC bots as general communications interfaces to other code I am investigating. The server hardware would be old and low-memory, but running on a relatively up-to-date Debian GNU/Linux install. I don't expect more than a hundred users at a time, tops, and probably in the single-digits most of the time. The interfaces are more of interest here than the server itself, so I'd prefer something relatively simple to maintain over something with a huge number of configuration and tuning options more useful to a larger site.

Referencing the Wikipedia comparison and the Google PageRank list against the available package list for Debian comes up with the following top contenders: Undernet (ircd-ircu), Ratbox (ircd-ratbox), and Inspire (inspircd). Unfortunately, I can't find any serious comparisons of them, so I'm hoping that asking here will provide a faster solution than just trying them one at a time until something frustrates me enough to move.

Vertexwahn
  • 7,709
  • 6
  • 64
  • 90
Zed
  • 3,457
  • 3
  • 20
  • 21

4 Answers4

9

Unreal IRCd is full featured if a little complex on the setup.

Tanj
  • 1,354
  • 1
  • 15
  • 25
  • The groups I've chatted with always seemed to use Unreal. – Ross Sep 27 '08 at 17:29
  • I second Unreal as it's very feature-rich. I don't know how it scales or how secure it is, but it sounds like he won't have any of those issues anyway. My second vote [or true first] would go to ratbox. – Till Sep 27 '08 at 17:46
  • Thanks, Till. Can you say more about why you would go with ratbox? There's no package for Unreal on Debian, so I'd have to roll my own for that (which I can do, but it's extra work), and I'm not enthusiastic about the 'complex on the setup' part, either. – Zed Sep 28 '08 at 16:26
6

During the past couple days I have been coding a bot with Python and IRCLib. Since I am coding the communication interface I needed to see the raw data transfered between the server and the client. So, I needed an IRC server which would support that. At first I was using IRCD, and it was totally fine. But after a while I realized that I was missing some features that IRCD did not have since it's outdated. So, after further research I found ngIRCd.

I compiled it from source with those options "--enable-sniffer --enable-debug". Now when I want to see the information sent between my bot and my client I only need to start the server with the -n and -s option. Like that : ngircd -n -s

Here is the website of the server : http://ngircd.barton.de/

jdcaron
  • 111
  • 2
  • 8
2

Unreal IRCd is what I finally picked for hosting an IRCD. Why? Halfop, admin/protect, founder/owner, advanced operator acl, vHost via i:line and etc...

Also see

1

Use XMPP instead. IRC is not very well designed for your situation; it can be made to work, but it is a big pain.

Jacob Krall
  • 28,341
  • 6
  • 66
  • 76