I'm trying to join the world of IRC.

according to the manual, it's strongly suggested to setup a identd so the networks can identify me.

I installed a couple different ones. The man pages for them are all similar: the system administrator configures how identd responds to query's. I'm not having any luck finding the information I need.

I don't want my daemon to return real usernames on my computer. Rather, I just want it to return the same string of non-since. From what I'm reading, it's better to have it return garbage, than real user names.

My network topography is nothing special, a cable modem that I connect to wirelessly.

I'm using debian squeeze on an amd64

Im not a pro when it comes to IRC as I just started also but I use xchat now and when i start it it already knows to login http://xchat.org/ and this is what I followed to register my nickname http://www.technerd.net/nickserv.html hope it helps

thanks for the reply! I can already get into some irc networks, but other ones complain a lot... and still others refuse my joining.

I also like learning how things work behind all the pretty windows and widgets, so that's why I'm going through the extra steps of learning about ident