Making an irc server questions

[MagnumIP]

I want to setup my own irc server and I have no clue where to begin. I need to know where to begin. Thanks

[chuck]

I want to setup my own irc server and I have no clue where to begin. I need to know where to begin. Thanks

Software.

http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircd/

[Tsuroerusu]

I want to setup my own irc server and I have no clue where to begin. I need to know where to begin. Thanks

I personally don't trust IRC daemons to be secure against crackers, so I decided to run my IRC server on my FreeBSD box. FreeBSD has a feature called jails, which is kind of like a chroot, but more advanced and practically unescapable (Well, if you are extremely dedicated you might be able to break out), pardon the pun. Anyway, inside a jail you can run whatever process you want, and if it gets cracked into the attacker doesn't have access to your main system, so you can just do like: rm -rf /jails/irc and rebuild the jail, that way you are sure that nothing is staying around.
I run five jails on my FreeBSD box, each of which houses a daemon, or a service of some kind. Jail 0 provides shell access, jail 1 does irc, jail 2 does Jabber etc. etc.
This not only a good way to increase security (Although, as with pretty much anything, it's not a silver bullet), but also a good way to use a single box for multiple things, as it makes it easy to isolate daemons, or even users, completely from each other.

If you just want to play with IRC server stuff, you probably don't need this or anything like it, although if you actually want to run a home IRC server, I'd consider something like this. If you prefer to use GNU/Linux over FreeBSD, then you might want to look into standard chrooting because although it's easier to escape from that jails are, it's still much better than nothing.

Once you've made the OS/security-policy choice, I would recommend installing ircd-hybrid, which is an IRC server daemon. It's relatively easy to set up, the configuration file is commented fairly well throughout.

[MagnumIP]

Well I want to try it from home 1st but I might just get a VPS to run this from

[Tsuroerusu]

Well I want to try it from home 1st but I might just get a VPS to run this from

I see, but in any case, make sure you keep your eyes and ears open in case any security issue comes up.

Anyway, as I said, irc-hybrid is relatively easy to get going, so that's the IRC server I would recommend you checking out.