Preparations to run an IRCd daemon

[kaniini]

Anything beyond "don' trust your host"?

A good ballpark rule here is, don't trust anything in the stack you don't control any more than you are forced to.  Using OpenVZ forces you to trust the host environment a lot more than the alternatives.

Of course, either way they could MITM you, as network traffic has to pass through the host environment, but that is presently well-mitigated by having a secure trust root (the network having it's own CA, or using an established CA).

 

[wlanboy]

OP, to answer your questions:

1. OpenVZ is absolutely fine for this.

2. NetChat's leaf nodes all run Debian, which works. You're going to be wanting to compile your IRCd from scratch anyway. Don't use them from your package manager.

3. You can run a leaf node comfortably on 128MB. Perhaps 256MB if you're hosting a bunch of things (services, main site, mailserver) off the one node. Bandwidth, I'd be surprised if you hit even 10GB.

4. InspIRCd is my personal choice. I've used Unreal before and it's not too bad, but I prefer InspIRCd's configs.

5. Atheme and Anope are pretty much at the same stage of the game, except for their data store. Atheme uses OpenSEX, and Anope (from memory) uses SQL. Both can alternatively use FlatFile, but that's kind of a bad idea.

Thank you for the input.