Your ident, and why it is not yours to choose
Every account on this box leaves it from the same IP address. To an IRC network that would make all of us look like one host opening a lot of connections — which is exactly what an abusive client looks like. Networks respond to that the only way they can: a low limit on connections per address, and a ban on the whole address when one person misbehaves.
Ident is the old fix and still the one networks ask for. When you connect, the network connects back to this server on port 113 and asks who owns the connection it just received. This server answers with your account name. The network can then tell our users apart: it can raise our connection limit (a trust), and when something goes wrong it can name the account rather than the address.
What it looks like
Your hostmask on IRC will be:
yournick!youraccount@shell.shadowsquad.org
The part before the @ is your ident: your ShadowShells account name, exactly as you log in with. Your dashboard shows it.
You cannot change it, and that is the point
The ident daemon here is configured so that no account can choose its own reply. Specifically:
- A
~/.oidentd.confor~/.config/oidentd.conffile does nothing. You may create one; it is ignored. - The
usernameoridentsetting in irssi, WeeChat, ZNC, psyBNC or eggdrop does not change what the network is told. Set it to whatever you like — the network asks us, not your client, and we answer with your account name. - There is no way to hide, randomise, or replace the reply.
An ident a user picks tells a network nothing it can act on, which is why networks that care about idents only count the assigned kind. The entire value of ours is that it is assigned.
What this means for you
- Your account name is public to anyone who can see you on IRC. It is not a secret and should not be treated as one. If that matters to you, choose your account name accordingly — talk to staff before you are issued one.
- What you do on IRC is attributable to you, by us and by the network. That is the deal: it is also what stops one person's behaviour costing everyone else their access.
- You still need to behave on networks that have granted us a trust. A trust is extended to this host on the understanding that we can identify and deal with an individual account, and losing one affects every user here. See the acceptable use policy.
If a network says your ident is wrong
Some networks reject connections when the ident lookup fails or times out, usually reporting something like no ident response. If that happens, it is on our side, not yours — tell staff. The service is monitored and an outage raises an alert here, but a report from someone actually connecting is faster than waiting for the next check.
Do not work around it by setting an ident in your client. It will not help, and on a network that checks, a client-supplied ident is usually prefixed with a tilde (~name) to mark it as untrusted — which is the state we are trying to get out of.