Welcome to ircu2.10.11, the Undernet IRC daemon

Version u2.10.11 of the Undernet ircd incorporates many new features
over its predecessor, and we feel that using it will make you very
happy indeed.

New features include:
  - A completely rewritten network event engine, which make full use
    of the asynchronous event engines available in FreeBSD (kqueue)
    and Solaris (/dev/poll), resulting in dramaticaly improved
    performance.
  - New F: (feature) lines in ircd.conf, and the GET/SET commands allow
    many settings to be changed dynamically, rather than by with compile-
    time configuration.
  - The new "account" feature added to the P10 protocol, allows people to
    remain logged in to service bots (i.e., gnuworld) during a netsplit.
    This means people will not have to login again once the network rejoins.

INSTALLATION

Please see the INSTALL file for installation instructions, for hints on how
to best configure your OS for running ircu under high load, see the various
README.<platform> files.

COMPATIBILITY

This version of ircu will only work with servers that use the P10 protocol,
some of the new features will only work between ircu2.10.11 servers.

GENERAL PERFORMANCE HINTS

For platform-specific notes and hints, see the various README.<platform>
files included in this distribution. The notes below apply to servers that
will serve large numbers (thousands) of clients simultaneously. If your
server serves a small amount of users, you will not really have to do much
of anything about performance tuning.

 - Run an OS that supports an asynchronous network event engine; currently
   these are FreeBSD (kqueue), and Solaris (/dev/poll); possibly other BSDs
   will also support kqueue. This will have a dramatic effect on performance.
 - Make things as lean as possible: Make your server dedicated to ircu,
   disable anything that is not neccesary, and build a custom kernel (where
   possible). 
 - Tune kernel parameters; see the various README.<platform> files as well
   as your OS documentation for more information.
 - With many clients connecting each second, ircu will be doing lots of DNS
   lookups. Make sure that the DNS server(s) in your /etc/resolv.conf are as
   close as possible, or run a local caching DNS server on your IRC server.

TIME SYNCHRONIZATION

Many things can and will go horribly wrong when the clocks on the servers
on your network become (too far) out of sync. It is therefore highly
recommended that all servers run a version of ntpd that will keep their
clocks from going astray.

INFORMATION HIDING

As per undernet-admins CFV-165, this server contains code that will,
by default, hide certain information from ordinary users. If you do
not want this, please make sure you add -DINCLUDED_ircd_policy_h to
CFLAGS prior to running ./configure, like in:

> CFLAGS=-DINCLUDED_ircd_policy_h ./configure

MORE INFORMATION

For more information on this software, see the included documentation
in the doc/ directory, as well as http://coder-com.undernet.org.

For general information on the Undernet, vist http://www.undernet.org

Happy IRCing!