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Our standard, standard, and enterprise shells, as well as shells provided as part of a medium or large web hosting package are Eggable, which is to say that you can run Eggdrop or other non-abusive bots. By non-abusive we mean bots that are not intended to intentionally flood, takeover, or otherwise disrupt IRC channels, users, or servers.

These can be run on any of our Linux based shell servers (but not our old SunOS box, it is just too resource tight to support user daemons of any sort, it’s mainly there for nostalgia reasons).

We have a number of bots and IRC bouncers pre-installed on our shell servers and available for your use. For those who prefer to roll your own, we have a very complete suite of Linux development tools available online and available for your use.

Many shell providers come and go. Eskimo North has been around under original ownership since the formation of the CIX in Stockton in 1992 and prior to that we operated a Unix Timeshare service from 1985 so we have more than 36 years of experience providing shells (prior to 1992 they were shells on an isolated SunOS network). In 2012 we upgraded our host hardware from older UltraSparc servers to i7-6700K based systems. In August of 2015, we upgraded our router to provide lower latency and improved performance. We also added an i7-6850K server.

We are not the lowest price shell provider out there, but if you want one that has a solid backbone connection, solid servers, and staying power, as opposed to someone running an old PC on a cable modem that will be gone in a couple of months, we’re the provider for you.

If you would like a custom hostname under our domain with a dedicated IP address for that hostname on a particular shell server, we would be happy to accommodate this at no additional expense. If you would like your own domain name, then you will need either a business or personal medium or large web hosting package or a virtual domain plus standard or larger shell.

Some of the IRC bots we provide pre-installed include:

Eggdrop
An Advanced IRC Robot
Fedmsg-irc
Fedora Messaging Infrastructure System – IRC Bot
Gozerbot
IRC and Jabber bot written in Python
Ibid
Easily extensible Python IM bot for IRC, Jabber, SILC, campfire, etc.
Iroffer
IRC file distribution bot
Jirc
An IRC to Jabber bridge bot
Json Bot
A framework for building bots for IRC, XMPP, and the web.
Kgb Bot
A collaborative bot for IRC
Lambdabot
A development tool and advanced IRC bot
Nadoka
IRC logger, monitor, and proxy bot in ruby.
Piespy
IRC bot to visualize social networks
Plum
IRC proxy, stationing, login, and bot program.
Rbot
IRC bot written in ruby
Rss2irc
IRC bot that watches an rss/atom feed and relays it to a channel

Most shells give you ssh access, as do we, but we also give you a full remote desktop including sound. Included are a number of text and some very nice graphical IRC clients.

While you can still use bnc, sbnc, or znc bouncers as a way to obscure your IP address from potential abuse, an alternative is to connect to our shells using x2go and then run an IRC client on our shells.

We are not at present allowing IRC servers onto our shells. This may be possible in the future if our client base becomes sufficient to cover the cost of the bandwidth demands and necessary protective measures. We are the original founders of NewNet and have run IRC servers here in the past.