Regarding IRC

All the work I do with OpenStack is coordinated through mailing lists, IRC and design summits every six months. For quite a while I handled IRC by just keeping a screen up running Irssi on a VM on some cloud or another. That approach was quick and easy, and kept my identity online at all times. I could get connected from anywhere, and scroll-back to see what I had missed.

That left a lot to be desired though. It meant I had no easy way to get connected from my phone or basically anything other than via SSH (from a machine that had a private key I could use to connect). It also meant getting notified when someone wanted my attention on IRC was not easy. It was possible in a limited fashion anyway - I just logged everything in Irssi and then used tail, grep and notify-message like this: "tail -n 1 -q -f ~/irclog//.log|grep -i --line-buffered docaedo"|while read line;do notify-send "IRC Message" "${line}";done

I stuck with this method almost entirely because it was quick and easy and worked well enough for the last year or so. In the last few months though keeping connected with folks via IRC has become a lot more important to me, which meant I needed to step it up a little bit and find a better solution.

Most of the people I know use an IRC bouncer, and the popular choice is ZNC. That IRC proxy maintains your presence online, and makes it easy to connect from different devices, with different IRC clients. Sean Dague wrote a really good doc on his IRC proxy setup. If you are planning to take that route, you would have a hard time finding a better guide (he even includes a puppet manifest to automate the setup!)

He also mentions IRCCloud as an alternative approach. For $5/month, they provide a web interface to IRC along with an app for iOS or Android. The app is pretty decent, the web UI is easy to understand and use, and if you are lazy, it's about the quickest and easiest way to get up and running. No VM required, nothing to maintain. Just create an account, sign in and you're good to go. I gave it a try for a bit and was impressed. Someone who has been using it for a while though warned there are connectivity problems that crop up (DDoS's and such), and it's ugly when they do.

That same conversation (on IRC of course!) led me to WeeChat, which embarrassingly I had never heard of. (I feel like that happens too often even though I seriously do my best to stay on top of all things nerdlife!) This turned out to be the perfect solution for staying connected on IRC from multiple clients easily.

On my Ubuntu VM getting up and running was as easy as "apt-get install weechat". Moments later, I was back online with a very powerful shell client. One or two commands later I had enabled the relay and connected the free Android client from my phone. It was working beautifully, and alerting me for any messages mentioning me (or anything else that I specified as watch-words). Next up I tried Glowing Bear, a browser-based front-end for WeeChat and found it looked great, was easy to use, and gave me one more easy way to get connected to my IRC identity. The Glowing Bear source is open and available, and you can run it locally as a Firefox or Chrome app, hosted on github pages, or served by your own web server.

After playing around for a few minutes, I set up a cert so I could connect to my WeeChat relay over SSL following these quick and easy instructions.

So in short, if you have any reason to use IRC with any regularity I honestly think WeeChat is the best option available assuming you have access to an always-on VM and just a tiny bit of technical ability.

If you're on IRC by the way, look me up and say hi! (I'm docaedo on Freenode).