You should familiarize yourself with the NewNet Policies and be willing to work according to those policies. You should also read RFC 1459.

Servers must be approved by the machine or site administrator before being compiled, run, or linked to NewNet. It is prefered that the site administrator is the person who is responsible for the server.

Servers are required to have their clocks within +5/-5 seconds of real time.

Links for servers will be judged on the following criteria:

Server Stability:  Servers should be stable enough to run for days or weeks at a time without rebooting. It should be intended that a server will be connected 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All NewNet servers shall run some flavor of Un*x, which is what the NewNet server code is written for.

Server Speed:  Servers should be reasonably powerful machines. An old 386 running Linux/BSD would not be acceptable, although Linux/BSD running on Pentium class machines works fine.

Server Security:  Servers will have appropriate security measures in place to prevent compromise of the server. If the server security is compromised, havok can be wreaked on NewNet. At a minimum, all servers shall have shadowed passwd files, and the admin must keep up-to-date with the latest CERT advisories. If you need help or advice about security issues, you should ask another server operator.

In line with security standards, servers MUST be run on dedicated machines - no ftp daemon, no sendmail listening to connections from the outside world, no shell accounts, no web server, etc. In.telnetd, in.rlogind, in.rshd should be DISABLED on irc servers.

Link speed and reliability:  The minimum speed for a NewNet link is a T1. This is somewhat negotiable ONLY for servers physically located in countries where high bandwidth links are rarely available. Links should be as reliable as reasonably possible. If the bandwidth is saturated, this will not make a good server location.

ALL machines must be running some flavour of UNIX.

NewNet is running an IRC server specifically designed for Newnet. It is a modified undernet ircd version, which is incompatible with EFnet and stock undernet versions. This server handles channel hacking and nick collisions much better than the stock ircd, and also provides better cloning protection than the undernet server. You must run the current (unmodified) NewNet server to be able to connect to NewNet.

Server code should not be modified except by the group working on the protocol updates. If you must tweek the code, do it on an expermintal server that is not running on the standard ports. Everyone is welcome to submit bug reports and server coding changes; however, any server that is not running the official and current NewNet code will be de-linked.

When a new server version is issued, an announcement will be made indicating the date by which all servers must be upgraded. Servers that do not update their version by the deadline date, will be de-linked.

All servers need to require identd authorization from clients, even for their own hosts. Identd is widespread (it is available for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and MacOS, as well as being built into most windows/mac IRC clients.

If you are ready to apply, you may do so here.