How to support IRCCloud on your network
If you operate an IRC server or network, please allow an increased session limit for connections from the following IP ranges:
| IPv6 Networks | |
|---|---|
| 2a03:5180:f::/62 | |
| 2a03:5180:f:4::/63 | |
| 2a03:5180:f:6::/64 | |
| IPv4 Networks | |
| 5.254.36.56/29 | |
| 5.254.36.104/29 |
These ranges, along with more detailed information about which subnets are currently in use by each connection host, are available in machine-readable format in this JSON file.
The above ranges are always kept up to date, so any connections from outside these ranges do not originate from IRCCloud.
Mailing list
Subscribe to the connection hosts mailing list to be notified of updates to our connection host IPs.
Reverse DNS
All our IPs have forward and reverse DNS under the .irccloud.com domain.
You may wish to simply permit more connections based on reverse DNS lookups.
Identifying users
Each user can be uniquely identified for the purpose of bans, etc. by their ident-verified username,
in the form [u|s]id[UID] (eg: uid123 for a free user or sid456 for a paid subscriber). Users are unable to change their user IDs.
IPv6 support
On IPv6, each IRCCloud user connects from their own unique IPv6 address, with forward and reverse DNS entries that look like id-[UID].[POOL_HOST], eg: id-1234.highgate.irccloud.com
If your network supports IPv6 connections, we'll detect any AAAA records exposed in DNS, and favour those by default. This allows us to assign each user a unique IPv6 address, mapped from their user ID, e.g. 2001:67c:2f08:1::[UID_IN_HEX]
This is the preferred way to allow IRCCloud support, since each IRCCloud user connects from their own unique address.
In case of v6 failure, please make sure there are sensible session limits of the v4 IPs too, as IRCCloud will retry connections using IPv4 if IPv6 fails.
Some IRC servers will group a whole IPv6 subnet together for the purposes of session limits (for example, UnrealIRCD by default will consider a whole /64 as one host). If this is the case you will need to configure your server to allow a separate clone limit for each address in our IPv6 subnet.
Special arrangements
If any of these arrangements aren't possible on your network, please send a message to james on irc.irccloud.com, or contact us at team@irccloud.com and we can discuss other options. Thanks!