Perpetual IRC - The Multiplexer Edition

As is the case with most people involved in Open Source, I'm on IRC all day long. I can help people from around the world use some of the projects I've helped create, as well as some of the software that I use on a daily basis.

One of the major advantages that IRC has over your ‘traditional’ instant messenger clients is that, with a minimum amount of effort and hardware, you can create a setup that will remain perpetually¹ connected, even when you're not online. That means that you can keep logs of conversations, receive messages, catch up on what the current topic of discussion is when starting your day, and still be able to shut down your computer at night if you so choose.

There are a few ways of achieving the status of perpetual IRC denizen. Note, however, that almost any method requires that you have access to a remote server in addition to your local machine. It doesn't need to be anything special - a cheap VPS will do just fine, as long as you can install software packages and open the necessary ports in the firewall.

Simplest

If you want to expend the least amount of effort, at the cost of some flexibility, the easiest method of achieving IRC immortality is with the use of a terminal multiplexer, such as screen or tmux (my personal favourite), and a console-based IRC client, such as irssi.

Don't know what a terminal multiplexer is? Here's a description, right from the screen homepage:

Screen is a terminal multiplexer: it takes many different running processes and manages which of them gets displayed to the user. Think of it as a window manager for your console or terminal emulator. With screen, you can have interactive processes running on your home computer and connect to them from anywhere else to check on their progress.

Let's assume that you've installed screen and irssi on your remote server. What we want to do is start Irssi inside a screen session:

$ screen -S irc irssi # name the session `irc` and start `irssi` in it

Digression

At this point, feel free to browse the documentation on how to properly setup your preferred servers, channels and other configuration parameters for the IRC client. For a quick test, you can try the following at the Irssi prompt:

/set nick YourNickName
/connect irc.freenode.net
/join #some-interesting-channel

You can also automate the process, so that upon startup Irssi will auto-connect to the servers and channels you specify:

/server add -auto -network Freenode irc.freenode.net 6667
/network add -nick YourNickName Freenode
/channel add -auto #some-interesting-channel Freenode

If you have a registered nickname, you can have it auto-identify as well:

/network add -autosendcmd "/msg nickserv identify your_pasword_here ;wait 2000" Freenode

And you'll probably want to cut down on the noise:

/ignore #some-interesting-channel ALL -PUBLIC -ACTIONS

At this point, you should have a fully functioning IRC client inside of a screen session. You can detach from the current session by pressing control-a d, and re-attach with:

$ screen -r

See where this is going? With this setup, you can simply maintain your IRC connection within a screen session on your remote server. When you want to "log on", you simply SSH into your remote server, $ screen -r, and voilà! Perpetual IRC.

This approach, while simple, has some very obvious drawbacks:

• You must be on a machine that is able to SSH into your remote server.
• You are confined to using the command-line IRC client running in the remote session.
• Any scripts that attempt to interact with your 'local' desktop (e.g. Growl notifications), are painful to setup, if not impossible.

Okay, so it's not completely ideal. But it does the job - as long as your remote screen session remains operational, you'll be logged in to IRC.

In my next post, we'll look at how you can achieve the same results, but without any of the aforementioned drawbacks, through the use of a specialized IRC proxy daemon.

---