Forums General Discussion Preventing DCC Chat

In a locked-down environment, can a System Administrator install mIRC on a client such that DCC Chat is disabled (can't send or receive) and the user can't re-enable it?

While this is not directly possible in mIRC, as an administrator in a 'lock down' situation, you can deal with this.

mIRC has defined ports it uses for DCC (setup in options) you could block these ports in your routers to accomplish what you want.

Hope this helps.

And what if a user changes these ports in the options?

You could scan traffic for the string DCC (SEND|CHAT) but that is a (very) dubious method.

if this person is a system admin, and they are in lock down, one would assume (I am) that they block ALL outside access to the internet, which means they would be blocking ANY port in the range that mIRC could use.

If you *are* a sysadmin you should already be aware that users can send data over any port without administrative privileges, and can listen on any port >=1024 without administrative privileges. This isn't an mIRC thing, this applies to just about any application. If you want to lock down your system properly, you should take into account this fact.