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IRCPlus 2000 Brings IRC Functionality Into the 21st Century
Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, shares with e-mail a
long and storied history on the Internet. In its earliest incarnations,
IRC was a free-for-all discussion forum, often rather chaotic but
nonetheless alluring to the thousands who craved real-time
communication with other Internet users. Over time, IRC has become many
things: underground dens of file trading, social parlors, technical and
corporate support forums, even the technological underpinning of
Napster and its peer-to-peer "revolution."
Many IRC
clients are widely available. Among the better known are mIRC for
Windows and ChatNet and Snak for the Macintosh. With an IRC client,
users can connect to an IRC server to meet up with other chatty folks.
An IRC server hosts a number of "chat rooms," often individualized by
topic. Depending on the server, these rooms may be fixed or created ad
hoc by users. Particular users may be the "ops" (operators, akin to a
dictator) for the chat room, and each room may support "bots" --
automated scripts that offer information to other folks in the room
when they make specific requests (somewhat like a corporate fax-back
service).
While
IRC's reputation is sometimes unsavory, it is an excellent lightweight
and text-based system for real-time communications, and it provides a
strong infrastructure for legitimate uses (e.g., technical or corporate
support). The key to these "legitimate" uses is an IRC server that
offers tight control to an administrator over the content and rooms
available to visitors. IRCPlus 2000 is aimed at offering just such a
server, for either the general IRC experience, or a tightly-managed and
controlled environment.
IRCPlus
installs easily onto any Windows 95, 98, NT, or 2000 system and eats a
modest 3 MB of disk space. Its minimum memory footprint weighs in at
about 14 MB and will probably grow as the number of users connected to
the server increases. Like any server, IRCPlus 2000 benefits from a
robust machine that can handle network traffic. However, it should be
able to run a modest-sized service on even a typically configured PC.
IRC is not
a new technology by any stretch, and it's a given that a modern product
like IRCPlus 2000 should fully support the original IRC protocol, as
well as add-ons that have evolved, such as IRCX. What IRCPlus brings to
the table is a well-organized means of delivering many specific
configuration features into a navigable package. Like with other
powerful network technologies, such as e-mail servers, an administrator
could spend a month learning how to wrangle configuration files.
Products like IRCPlus 2000 greatly enhance administration productivity
by doing away with arcane configuration syntaxes.
IRCPlus is
configured and managed through a separate utility called "Remote."
Remote is the administrative GUI and, quite conveniently, can run on
any machine that can connect with the IRCPlus server -- thus allowing
for remote administration. Classes of options are clearly laid in, with
intuitive icons and feature hierarchies. A wide array of policy and
security options gives an administrator much latitude in determining
just how chaotic his or her IRC environment may or may not be. Clients
can be restricted to given addresses, and filters can be applied to
nicknames or message content. Security features offer an administrator
the opportunity to restrict the types of activities clients are allowed
to engage in on the server (e.g., spoofing their own IP addresses or
whether they may share files with other users).
IRC
servers typically provide plenty of messages to users throughout a
session of activity, from an initial greeting to information about
others' activities (e.g., who has joined a channel or who has left). In
keeping with its configurable nature, IRCPlus 2000 gives the
administrator control over all these messages, including whether and
when they appear, and what they say.
IRCPlus
2000 strikes the right balance -- you can install the software and have
a live, functional IRC server up and running within five minutes. Or,
you can spend an hour tweaking every configuration option to tune the
server, and thus the chatting environment, exactly to your liking.
Pros:
7 Good balance between ease-of-use and depth of features, 7 Sys admins
can create a tightly controlled IRC environments for providing support
or other "legitimate" services, 7 Modest system demands Cons: 7 For a tightly controlled chat systems, a sys admin still
needs to understand the how and why behind the many configuration
options, 7 Price can get steep for systems supporting more than 5,000
users (which, in the world of IRC where general chat servers typically
host many hundreds or thousands of chat room, isn't as many users as it
initially sounds)
Version Reviewed: 2.0.1
Reviewed by: Aaron Weiss
Last Updated: 9/12/01
Date of Original Review: 1/24/01
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