Jan 5 2007

Lucas Nuss­baum has posed an eer­ily famil­iar ques­tion: what is the best way to main­tain a single and con­stant IRC pres­ence, access­ible from mul­tiple loc­a­tions? After some exper­i­ment­a­tion with dif­fer­ent solu­tions (includ­ing Irssi + Irssi-​​Proxy), I finally settled upon a com­bin­a­tion of Bip IRC Proxy, an SSH tun­nel and my favour­ite GUI IRC cli­ent. I was plan­ning to write a guide, but I came across an excel­lent one which explains the whole pro­cess. Man­aging the SSH tun­nel is easy with gSTM.

Now I can use the same nick from mul­tiple sites at once. It is com­pletely trans­par­ent to other people, so it doesn’t mat­ter where in the world I am provided that I have an Inter­net con­nec­tion with an SSH and IRC cli­ent. I am not forced to use a par­tic­u­lar IRC cli­ent, and I don’t have to give up a GUI. I can even stay logged in at both home and work at the same time.

My primary fea­ture request would be for Bip to have the cap­ab­il­ity to set myself as Away when I have no IRC cli­ents con­nec­ted. At present, it only provides the option to change my nick in this cir­cum­stance, which is too heavy-​​handed and pol­lutes the chan­nel with announcements.

Posted in Communications, Software, syndication-floss | 5 Comments »

5 Responses

  1. Ycros Says:
    January 5th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

    Nice, as long as it works prop­erly. I’ve tried many solu­tions in the past, and they all break on some­thing, caus­ing chaos. Cur­rently I run a screen ses­sion with irssi on my Linode, which works well. Though, it would be nice to con­nect with a local cli­ent and not feel the lag. I might give Bip a try. :)

  2. foo Says:
    January 9th, 2007 at 12:04 am

    Ice­cap http://​ice​cap​.irssi2​.org/ is going to be the best answer to the ques­tion “what is the best way to main­tain a single and con­stant IRC pres­ence, access­ible from mul­tiple loc­a­tions?” when it’s ready. The project’s some­thing to keep an eye on.

  3. Scott Says:
    January 9th, 2007 at 6:09 pm

    Why does any­one feel the need for a single and con­stant IRC pres­ence? What’s wrong with log­ging off once in a while?

  4. Andy Says:
    January 13th, 2007 at 1:51 am

    I use screen + irssi, works like a charm. Only down­side is if you crave the gui goodness.

  5. Sridhar Dhanapalan Says:
    January 13th, 2007 at 3:36 pm

    Andy,

    screen + irssi does not have adequate noti­fic­a­tion when I receive a mes­sage. With a bip + $IRC_​client setup, I can have noti­fic­a­tions auto­mat­ic­ally show up on my desktop. With irssi, I would have to keep check­ing the irssi win­dow to see if I had received anything.

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Single IRC login from multiple locations / 'Til All Are One by Sridhar Dhanapalan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Australia CC BY-SA AU licence.