miniircd is a small and limited IRC server written in Python. Despite its size, it is a functional alternative to a full-blown ircd for private or internal use. Installation is simple; no configuration is required.
- Knows about the basic IRC protocol and commands.
- Easy installation.
- Basic SSL support.
- No configuration.
- No ident lookup (so that people behind firewalls that filter the ident port without sending NACK can connect without long timeouts).
- Reasonably secure when used with --chroot and --setuid.
- Can't connect to other IRC servers.
- Only knows the most basic IRC commands.
- No IRC operators.
- No channel operators.
- No user or channel modes except channel key.
- No reverse DNS lookup.
- No other mechanism to reject clients than requiring a password.
Python 2.6 or newer. Get it at http://www.python.org. Python 3 is currently not supported.
None. Just run "./miniircd --help" (or "python miniircd --help") to get some help.
In order to use the --chroot or --setuid options, you must be using an OS that supports these functions (most *nixes), and you must start the server as root. These options limit the daemon process to a small subset of the filesystem, running with the privileges of the specified user (ideally unprivileged) instead of the user who launched miniircd.
To create a new chroot jail for miniircd, edit the Makefile and change JAILDIR
and JAILUSER to suit your needs, then run make jail
as root. If you have a
motd file or an SSL pem file, you'll need to put them in the jail as well:
# cp miniircd.pem motd.txt /var/jail/miniircd
Remember to specify the paths for --state-dir, --log-dir, --motd and --ssl-pem-file from within the jail, e.g.:
# miniircd --state-dir=/ --log-dir=/ --motd=/motd.txt --setuid=nobody \
--ssl-pem-file=/miniircd.pem --chroot=/var/jail/miniircd
Make sure your jail is writable by whatever user/group you are running the server as. Also, keep your jail clean. Ideally it should only contain the files mentioned above and the state/log files from miniircd. You should not place the miniircd script itself, or any executables, in the jail. In the end it should look something like this:
# ls -alR /var/jail/miniircd
.:
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 3 nobody root 4096 Jun 10 16:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Jun 10 18:40 ..
-rw------- 1 nobody nobody 26 Jun 10 16:20 #channel
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 1414 Jun 10 16:51 #channel.log
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 10 16:19 dev
-rw-r----- 1 rezrov nobody 5187 Jun 9 22:25 ircd.pem
-rw-r--r-- 1 rezrov nobody 17 Jun 9 22:26 motd.txt
./dev:
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 10 16:19 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 nobody root 4096 Jun 10 16:20 ..
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 Jun 10 16:16 null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9 Jun 10 16:19 urandom
GNU General Public License version 2 or later.
- Joel Rosdahl joel@rosdahl.net
- Alex Wright
- Jan Fuchs
- Leandro Lucarella
- Martin Maney
- Matt Behrens
- Ron Fritz