SIRC is a brand new network, aiming for security. The main thing is that no-one can sniff your SIRC session. This is accomplished by encrypting the whole communication. This is done with a constantly changing, 1024-bit key. Nice, eh ?

This is good for you, because of many reasons. First of all, it certainly makes you feel good that whoever wants to sniff your IRC session (not only what you say on channels, your private messages too!), will tear off his hair, because he won't understand anything from the whole chatting!

The second reason is the people on SIRC. We want to be an intelligent network. That is, everyone who abuses SIRC will be banned for ever. There are no lamers, no crackers here. We are like a big family.

To connect, you only have to download one little helper application, and use your favourite client. The exact steps are given below:

The easiest thing is to download stunnel for your distribution. For Debian GNU/Linux users, this is in the stunnel package. To get it, put the following into your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable non-US

Then, issue the following commands as root:

• apt-get update
• apt-get install stunnel

RedHat users will probably find this on their CD, or on rpmfind.net.

If you can't find stunnel for your distribution, you can download it from /files/. You can find the source here too!

If for some reason, the stunnel you downloaded from here doesn't work, try downloading the one in files/redhat/static/. That one will surely work.

FreeBSD users can find stunnel in the ports collection (/usr/ports/security/stunnel/ as of 4.0-RELEASE).

If you have it downloaded, run it (as a user, you don't have to be root for this). For more information on how to do this, read this.

After this, get your favourite IRC client, and connect to localhost:6642 (or whatever port you gave to stunnel instead of 6642). For example:

irc localhost:6642
bitchx localhost:6642

For 9x/ME/Y2K :
The easiest thing to do is to download S-Tunnel.Exe or zip in files/windows_gui/ into a directory.

Or download stunnel.exe and the two DLLs found in files/windows/ into a directory.

After a successful download, launch an MS-DOS Prompt, change to the directory where you downloaded the files to, and run stunnel.exe. For information on how to do this, read this.

Now you can iconize the MS-DOS Prompt window, but do not close it. Launch your favourite client (wait! I guess: mIRC!). Give localhost as server, and 6642 as port (or whatever else you specified for stunnel). Connect, and there you are !

You can run stunnel the same way on both Windows and UNIX-alike systems:

stunnel -c -d localhost:<port> -r <server>:6657

For completeness, let a few examples stand here:

stunnel -c -d localhost:6642 -r segfault.sirc.hu:6657
stunnel -c -d localhost:6642 -r elte.sirc.hu:6657
stunnel -c -d localhost:6667 -r segfault.sirc.hu:6657

If segfault.sirc.hu doesn't let you in (and it won't, because it only accepts .hu), please use elte.sirc.hu!

SIRC: Secure IRC
IRC: Internet Relay Chat