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DALnet is an Internet relay chat (IRC) network founded in July 1994 by members of the EFNet #startrek channel, and named for the dragon "Dalvenjah Foxfire", in a fantasy novel by Thorarinn Gunnarsson.
At one point DALnet was one of the five biggest IRC networks. It is accessible by connecting with an IRC client to an active DALnet server on port 6667 or 7000.
From 25 users in July 1994, the number of users grew to 1,000 by November 1995, 5000 by June 1996, 10,000 by December 1996, 50,000 by October 1999, 100,000 in November 2001, and peaked around 137,000 in April 2002. The number of servers grew from 2–4 when started, peaking at 44 in April 2002. The network is currently populated by a stable population of around 40,000 users (neither growing or shrinking appreciably) in about 18,000 channels, with 25 servers making up the network.
The network operation was severely disrupted in late 2002 and early 2003 due to distributed denial of service attacks. Added to the DDoS issues was the fact that the owner of tsunami.dal.net (the world's largest single IRC server, hosting more than 30,000 clients most of the time) delinked his servers (for personal reasons). The other servers on the network could not absorb the extra client load, leading to users' complete inability to connect to DALnet. The network was first crushed by attacks, and then by its own userbase. About 60% of DALnet's population moved to other IRC networks due to these extended connectivity issues.
In 2003, DALnet put up their first anycast servers under the name "The IX Concept," and made irc.dal.net resolve to the anycast IP. Since then, most new client servers linked are anycast.
DALnet has since recovered and remained functional, though no longer topping the list of the most populated IRC networks. As of 2004, DALnet is the seventh largest publicly monitored IRC network by averaged monthly user count.
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