No Znx!

I have been a part of a IRC network called Void Networks (VoidNet for short!). It isn’t on a par with the big four and probably never will be but that isn’t what small IRC networks are for. Ultimately smaller networks can provide things that the larger ones can. They can be responsive to their userbase due to the fact that it is smaller, requests can normally be fufilled. They can be more stable, I know that this sounds strange when you compare the networks that some of the IRCd’s that EFNet et al sit on but smaller networks hopefully aren’t the target for large scale DDOS or other such activities. A final thing that they are useful for is giving people a leg up into the world of the Oper. Few people understand what it is that Opers do, I’m sure most still think that they are just glorified channel management. 

I put together an automated relationship map not to long ago. It is pretty good if I say so myself, you can check it out for yourself. The map is generated by a simple python IRC bot, which joins and then uses graphviz to produce the images. I will need to do a short piece on how I put the bot together, its amazingly simple really. I also put together a Geomap, this is basically another method of seeing not only how the servers are linked but where in the world those servers actually are. One final thing I did was produce a bot (again in python) which collects the statistics for our stats pages.

The server I run is now aptly named irc.znx.no (used to be irc.trance.net but no longer!). You can connect via SSL because we are all using the latest ratbox IRCd (another howto I should finish up).