Many of us still use IRC for communicating with others online. So why not try to set up your own server. I’m now working on setting up my own IRC server on the Raspberry Pi for some server admin training. You can try my server by using your favorite IRC client and connecting to: raspirc.no-ip.org:6667 or by using a webclient. If you have any issues connecting please leave a comment. Looks like there is some issues with the web client you can try this instead chat.mibbit.com (you will have to supply server info in this one)

I am describing the server setup in this post. The point of this blog is to find the pitfalls, optimize the server and write about it.

So how did i set it up:

sudo aptitude install ircd-hybrid

Next you need to make a admin password using this command /usr/bin/mkpasswd “password” This will give you an MD5 string to be used later

Now run sudo nano /etc/ircd-hybrid/ircd.conf

You are now in the main config file. The first thing you need to do is find the listen { part. Then change host = “127.0.0.1”; to host = “0.0.0.0”; That’s it you can now connect to the server

Then go to the “operator {” section and change the password. This should be the MD5 string we created earlier also change user to user = “*@*”;

The last command you need to issue is sudo /etc/init.d/ircd-hybrid restart

And that’s it you have a running IRC server. Now you can play around with the rest of the configurations, like change server name and so on.