Services in regards to this post are the package that contains Nickserv, chanserv, etc. It does not come with an IRCd.
Title says it all. Been working for the last week or so deploying an IRC server with services. I cant tell you how many challenges i ran into trying to get it to run. it was such a wild ride with obsticales at every corner. I have worked in IT Administration for over 20 years and like all challenges regarding technology- i don't tire easy. I met this task head on, spent days of work with failed results but learned every step of the way.
I started with inspircd and got that running fairly smoothly. It was installed on debian vps and went through the entire config file line by line (1000+ lines) and fully configured it to my liking. I started researching the different service offerings (Atheme, Anope, etc) and thought i diddnt need much, so i settled on the ChatServices package. My research indicated it should work with inspircd but no matter what i did, i could not get either of them to communicate. I spent two days (~12+ hours) trying to get these two working together. It felt like i was repeatedly slamming my head into a wall, nothing worked.
I enabled debug logging in inspircd and anope and really dug in to try and sort out the issue but now, simple things were breaking. It wouldn't log anything, connections were being refused and then accepted and then refused. Config files had permission issues. I was going down rabbit holes and hyper focusing on issues that likely had no relation to the real problems i was having. Then i had a thought, DOCKER! There has to be a docker container with anope and IRC linked, out of the box, ready to go.
Nope! You can find containers with anope and inspircd or unrealircd but they lack config files and seem like test grounds for the users. I spent another day playing with different docker containers and never found anything that proved useful. although, i did learn a good bit about docker (something prior to this i had very little experience with).
Ive now reinstalled my server 10 or so times and have come up with a plan. Ill go with unrealIRC and anope, the two most widely implemented services. Ill install them directly to the machine and use a standard user account for both. instead of modifying config files with nano, i switched to sftp and modified them on my local machine (some formatting issue was preventing logging earlier). Finally, things were starting to work out. I ran into a silly issue while trying to get services working (anope) - but turned out to be me mismatching the ports each expected to connect too. I discovered the issue, changed the port number and tried one final time to launch both softwares - UREKA! They connected!
I spent the better part of two days working through the different config files and studying the documentation on both softwares. Ensuring best practices and considering encryption methods for security, etc. I now have a full fledged IRC network running Anope Services offering standard connections and TLS Encrypted connections.
This felt like a huge accomplishment to me, every bit of documentation i read warned me the task would not be easy. I was steadfast and headstrong and came out with a server running smoothly. I know it sounds silly, but as a young kid who used IRC alot, a small bit of me has always wanted to run my own IRC server. So screw the influence content creators, i just want some people to idle with me and pat my back on my sucess.
Feel free to ask questions. The server adheres to IRCv3 standards. all passwords are hashed with sha2. the TLS connection is signed with a lets encrypt certificate.
TLDR- I worked really hard to create an IRC server, something I have always wanted to do since i was very young. I have over 20 years IT experience. I want some people to come hang out in the IRC server.
irc.null-net.net
Ports: 6667, 6697 (SSL)
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/KqeCERw.png)
![[Linked Image from i.ibb.co]](https://i.ibb.co/ZRnZf1Dd/Screenshot-1.png)