Night Light IRC Proxy 1.2.42d.pre4 review

Night Light IRC Proxy or ircproxy in short, is a multi-user IRC (Internet Relay Chat) proxy written in C for UNIX compatible systems.

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 337K Developer: Jonas Kvinge

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Night Light IRC Proxy or ircproxy in short, is a multi-user IRC (Internet Relay Chat) proxy written in C for UNIX compatible systems.

If you do not know what IRC is, then IRC proxy probably isn't for you. A IRC proxy is a program which works like a client and server, you connect to it with your IRC client and it connects you to the chosen server.

This way you are protected behind the machine running the IRC proxy, connecting through a proxy will hide your machine's IP-address from other users on IRC.

More simply explained, the IRC proxy will forward data sent by the IRC server to one or more IRC clients connected to the ircproxy, and forward data sent by the IRC clients to the IRC server.

The IRC proxy can also keep your connection to IRC alive even when you disconnect from the IRC proxy.

This IRC proxy is very flexible, it allows to configure multiple ports for listening, access by hostname or IP-address, multiple users and multiple connections and a optional ident server.
This is all done through the following configuration files:

A listen configuration file (listen.conf) where you specify what hosts and ports users can connect to.
A access configuration file (access.conf), where you specify which IP-addresses or hostnames users can connect to the ircproxy from.
A optional user configuration file (user.conf) (with optional encrypted passwords), where you specify usernames/password allowed that IRC clients must send to get access.
A connection configuration file (conn.conf) where the actual IRC connections to IRC servers is specified, each connection is owned by a specific user defined in user.conf.

The ircproxy can compile and run successfully on most UNIX systems. It has been successfully compiled and installed on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, OSF1, HP-UX, AIX and Windows (Cygwin).

What exactly can ircproxy do?

Share your internet connection.

If you dont have direct access to the internet but another machine (router or server) on the network has internet access. You can share the internet connection using a this ircproxy for IRC access. Even your already using NAT, SOCKS or a forwarding proxy, ircproxy is probably preffered because it will allow you to have ident on IRC, and different ident can be replied for different users.

Get your own hostname from a shell ISP or hide your host behind a server.

If your internet service provider does not allow you to have a static IP with your own hostname, or you simply want to hide your real host. You can buy shell access from a ISP and eventually buy your own IP-address from the ISP to use with ircproxy.

Keep your IRC connection alive even when you disconnect with your IRC client.

If you have a dial up connection but want your client connected to IRC 24/7, you can install ircproxy on a server. This ircproxy will keep the IRC connection alive after you disconnect from the ircproxy with your IRC client.

Restrict data sent to the IRC server to prevent flooding the IRC server.

Solve problems getting disconnected with "Excess Flood", possible cause for this is that someone is flooding you with CTCP's or similar. This ircproxy will restrict you from sending data faster to the IRC server then the IRC server will allow. It will simply queue the data you send and keep it until the IRC server is ready to take more data without disconnecting you. However the queue is also restricted, there is a max sendQ, if it is reached your IRC client will be disconnected but the connection to the IRC server still stay alive.

One connection to IRC from more then one machine at the same time.

With ircproxy you can be connected to IRC from two or more machines at the same time without more then one connection to the IRC server. This ircproxy will allow you to resume a IRC server connection from more then one machine at the same time.