Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use InspIRCd on my large network?

Yes! InspIRCd is being used on some networks with more than 100,000 clients.

The number of users you can support per-server is dependent on your chosen modules, server hardware, and network connection but regardless if you have a lot of users you should probably consider spreading them out over multiple geographically distributed servers for redundancy reasons.

How do I get prefixes like %, ~, and &?

These prefixes are provided by the customprefix module. You should load this module and then define the appropriate <customprefix> tags to add those prefixes (v4 docs, v3 docs).

How do I start InspIRCd when the system boots?

To launch InspIRCd when your system starts you should place the following line into the crontab for your IRCd user (crontab -e):

# Replace [PATH] with the path to your InspIRCd bin directory.
@reboot [PATH]/inspircd

If you are using InspIRCd 3 or newer you may also use our included systemd unit files:

sudo systemctl enable inspircd.service

I have found a bug where should I report it?

Security bugs should be emailed privately to an InspIRCd core developer. All other bugs should be reported on our issue tracker.

Please do not use IRC for reporting bugs as your report may be buried and forgotten about.

I have a feature request where should I post it?

All feature requests should be posted on our issue tracker.

Please do not use IRC for requesting features as your request may be buried and forgotten about.

What services package should I use?

Common services packages used with InspIRCd are:

Why don't I have channel privileges even though I'm a server operator?

Server operators do not automatically get channel privileges by default. You can change this by:

Why does my server tell me "An unexpected TLS packet was received" or "error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number:ssl/record/ssl3_record.c" when I try to connect using SSL/TLS?

You are trying to connect using TLS (SSL) but your server is not configured to listen for TLS (SSL) connections.

Check that you have a TLS (SSL) module loaded and that your bind tag has the name of a TLS (SSL) profile in <bind:ssl>.

If you're using v3.7.0 or newer you can also use the inspircd-testssl script to help diagnose this issue.

Why does my client not show mode changes/opped users on join/etc correctly when using InspIRCd v3?

InspIRCd v3 changed the way that we emit messages in order to allow support for new IRCv3 extensions which require message tags to be implemented. The new way we emit messages is entirely valid according to the the formatting rules in part 2.3.1 of RFC 1459 (note two is of specific relevance here) but unfortunately several clients were found to be incompliant with the rules specified in this section.

This issue is fixed in many clients already. Please make sure you have updated to the latest version and if you are still having an issue then please report it to your client author. Your client author might find it useful to know that ircdocs provides test vectors for testing their message parser compliance.

This bug is known to be fixed in:

If you want to warn users to upgrade their client you can install the clientcheck contrib module via the Module Manager (v4 docs, v3 docs) and use the following config:

<module name="clientcheck">

<clientcheck engine="pcre">

<clientmatch pattern="^AdiIRC (?:[0-2]\.|3\.[0-5] )"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using a broken version of AdiIRC. This client may encounter problems on this server. Please upgrade to v3.6 or newer to fix this issue.">

<clientmatch pattern="^HexChat 2\.(?:[0-9]\.|1[0-3]\.|14\.[0-2] )"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using a broken version of HexChat. This client may encounter problems on this server. Please upgrade to v2.14.3 or newer to fix this issue.">

<clientmatch pattern="^irssi v(?:0\.|1\.0\.)"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using a broken version of Irssi. This client may encounter problems on this server. Please upgrade to v1.1.0 or newer to fix this issue.">

<clientmatch pattern="^WeeChat (?:1\.|2\.[0-4][\. ])"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using a broken version of WeeChat. This client may encounter problems on this server. Please upgrade to v2.5.0 or newer to fix this issue.">

<clientmatch pattern="^ZNC (?:0\.|1\.[0-7][\. ])"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using a broken version of ZNC. This bouncer may encounter problems on this server. Please upgrade to v1.8.0 or newer to fix this issue.">

You may also wish to automatically kill users of unmaintained and insecure clients which will never be updated:

<clientmatch pattern="^xchat 2\.\d+.\d+"
             action="kill"
             message="[WARNING] You have been detected as using X-Chat. This client is unmaintained and contains many serious compatibility and security issues. Please migrate to HexChat v2.14.3 or newer to fix this issue.">

If you want to connect to a network with Comic Chat you may wish to use this gateway to work around several bugs (including this one) in it.

My antivirus claims that InspIRCd is malware!

This is a false positive. IRC software is often mistaken for malware as it used to be common for cybercriminals to use IRC servers to control their botnets.

If your antivirus software is claiming that InspIRCd is malware you should probably report it to your antivirus vendor as a false-positive or switch to a different antivirus program.