UnrealIRCd Forums

Hello, I am new the IRC world and I have a question. I setup Unreal IRCD on a FC14 box and got it running. When I compiled I compiled with SSL available. Now I am wondering if there is a way to require all connections to use SSL. Does anyone know if this is possible? I saw the post on requiring opers to use SSL and if that is the best I can do then I'll at least do that.

FYI: This is not for a production environment. I am doing this for a security class and the instructor is using the IRC channel to communicate information about our team. I don't want the other teams to get this information so you can see my want for the SSL requirement. Thanks in advance.

Also, I am a frequent user of Linux but this is my first time with IRC anything so I appreciate the help and understanding from everyone.

Yes, you can require SSL. It's as simple as only having "Option SSL" on all of your ports. The only problem with this is, if they connect with a non ssl client, they will see this: " * [10053] Software caused connection abort". There will be no error message saying that the server is SSL only, so you would have to notify people of the SSL issue via a website, and give them a list of SSL clients to use.

Thank you for the reply. Does having a client that supports SSL just mean that the client must also have OpenSSL install or are there particular clients that will support SSL without having OpenSSL installed?

breimer273 wrote:Thank you for the reply. Does having a client that supports SSL just mean that the client must also have OpenSSL install or are there particular clients that will support SSL without having OpenSSL installed?

You need to have OpenSSL installed for SSL to be supported.

Mirc has SSL support built in now, you just have to download the openssl libraries they provide. (http://www.mirc.com/ssl.html)
XChat has built in support without additional downloads (http://xchat.org)

There are several other clients out there, but most don't formally support SSL "Out of the Box"

The other option for using SSL is stunnel (http://www.stunnel.org). Any client can connect through it, even if it does not support SSL.