#irchelp

IRCnet Server List

IRCnet wildcard DNS records for a subset of countries

Most national IRCnet servers only allow connections from the specific nation. If you are not sure which servers you can connect to at all, use !servers in #ircnet.

There are many outdated documents on IRCnet nodes all around the internet. The table below was last updated on 2018-10-31 and will probably be relatively up-to-date compared to other resources.

Country Address IPv6-only address, if any
International open.ircnet.net  
Czech Republic irc.cz.ircnet.net irc6.cz.ircnet.net
Estonia irc.ircnet.ee  
Finland irc.fi.ircnet.net  
France irc.fr.ircnet.net  
Germany irc.de.ircnet.net or random.ircd.de irc6.de.ircnet.net
Hungary irc.hu irc6.hu
Israel irc.il.ircnet.net  
Poland irc.pl.ircnet.net or polska.irc.pl polska6.irc.pl
United States irc.us.ircnet.net  

If in doubt, use the International server.

The “International” wildcard DNS record contains all IRCnet servers which are accessible independent of the country your IP address is registered in. This means that you should be able to connect to IRCnet by at least one of them. They will perhaps be less stable than a local server, and will be the target of DDoS attacks more often, which may perhaps result in them going down more frequently.

These are all known (well, to me) wildcard DNS records of IRCnet nodes by country. There are many stale DNS records and some countries might not even have wildcard DNS records at all. If in doubt, pick your servers from the tu-ilmenau list or the !servers command on #ircnet, which are always guaranteed to be kept up-to-date automatically.

Webchat

The following web-gateways are available for IRCnet:

These web frontends are suitable for finding a server you have access to using the !servers method.

Important Tips for Connecting to IRCnet servers

Other IRCnet Server Lists

The following are all external links and will take you away from our site. We keep these lists because IRCnet lacks an official web site, so these sites have different degrees of stability and accuracy. (EFnet and IRCnet are the oldest networks. They actually predate notions of network founders and ownership, and are by necessity an ad hoc collection of servers with minimal central administration, so phrases like “official” can often be more about vanity than reality.)

IRCnet Server List: another semi-official site This list is run by the admins of an IRCnet server, and is automatically refreshed by a computer script several times a day. It is thus guaranteed to be as complete as possible. It’s sorted by domain, which is the same as the country except for a few exceptions such as the US servers. Read through the “description” column and avoid those marked as “routing servers” which won’t allow you to connect. Like with the previous list, you would need to add the servers manually to your client.

Some IRCnet websites

(Last updated: January 2015)