best practise in Efnet (and other irc networks)

[bitkocher]

Hello,

I would like to set up a small irc network, but it should match Efnets practises for server operation. My first question: Is there something like "best practise guide" how to set up a server to match Efnets requirements ?

The Efnet application form gives some hints regarding what to care about when running an irc server. The hybrid-irc give some basics to get an ircd running, but what is about attacks, spam etc. ? I think there is much experiences regarding these nasty problems and how to deal with them.

My second question is more technical: The network consists on several servers at different ISPs. Each server has two IP addresses, one provider specific IP, which is unique in Internet, the other provider independent IP address is identical to all these servers. The /24 is distributed by BGP by different AS. It works for Akamai (http, ftp etc.), but I am not sure if this works with IRC protocol. Do you know if there are issues regarding irc and anycast ?

Even some types of http applications may fail in such an environment. I am operating a small irc network for several years, experiments with that environment did not show any failures, with exception if a routing change takes place. Users lost connection to servers, which are hit by routing change, but they were able to reconnect. On the other hand Anycast seems to be unusable for irc server peerings, I got some very strange effects.

My intention is to create such an irc network is to set up load balancing by bgp routing and a possibly better way to handle DDoS attacks, because attacks will also handled by distributed server. If a server fails, users can reconnect using same IP address. This irc network is for experimental purposes only.

regards
Bitkocher
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