Enterprise communication with IRC

Classic Chat

Article from ADMIN 10/2012

By Martin Loschwitz

Running an IRC server might seem almost anachronistic, but the classic service from the early 1990s offers a huge amount of functionality with very little in the line of resources. In the daily grind at the office, IRC supports simple communications at a distance.

Never count the old dogs out: The IRC protocol, which was very popular in the bubble at the beginning of this millennium, is slightly less fashionable today, but undeservedly so because it offers a resource-friendly way of supporting text-based communication among staff in a corporate environment. Thus far, none of IRC's various protocol successors has even come close to finding as convenient an approach for allowing large groups of people to visit a single chatroom. At the same time, IRC impresses with absolutely minimal hardware requirements: You can easily set up an IRC server for several hundred users on legacy hardware, and IRC clients are plentiful, no matter what operating system you need to accommodate. In many cases, an IRC client is even part of the standard scope of a large IM solution (such as Gaim or Adium).

If sys admins are looking for an option to offer company employees a communication path via chat, IRC is a sensible solution. Because IRC is a few years old, you will find countless IRC server variants. Almost all originate from the original code, which is still in use today on IRCNet [1] and comes closest to the original IRC RFC [2]. Additionally, you will find a plethora of successors and forks: Each of the large public IRC networks has its own fork, and various forks exist in the form of private projects. The rising star among IRC servers in recent years has been Ratbox IRCd. The original Ratbox IRCd version is used on EFnet and the well-known OSS IRC network Freenode. (Freenode uses ircd-seven, a descendant of Charybdis and a Ratbox fork).

Installing Ratbox

If you want to run an IRC server with Ratbox, you need to do some work first: The distributions years ago abandoned the attempt to offer finished packets for the existing IRC server – only

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