Nethack.alt.org

nethack.alt.org, commonly abbreviated to NAO, is one of the oldest NetHack public servers, and by far the most popular. To play, all you need is a Telnet client. On Windows, the built-in telnet.exe is adequate, though most prefer to use PuTTY. On Mac OS X and other UNIX-like systems, typing

telnet nethack.alt.org

at a command prompt will get you connected.

A wealth of information about the server, as well as detailed statistics, end-of-game dumps, tty recordings and the high score table is available on NAO's web site.

NAO is well integrated with #nethack on irc.freenode.net through the Rodney bot, which announces all deaths on the server, to the morbid delight of all.

nethack.alt.org runs vanilla NetHack with the following interface patches: menucolors, sortloot, chardump, showborn, hpmon, dgamelaunch mail.

Critics

Its a pity, that NAO doesn't support ssh. There is a good and free ssh client for SymbianOS (Nokia mobile phones) and PDAs, so ssh'ing to NAO could be very popular among mobile users.

As for now (December 2007) ssh to nwserver.ath.cx is the best way to play NetHack on Palms and Nokia phones. Especially the ones with QWERTY keyboard.