My IRC setup shenanigans

So I’ve spent about a week banging my head and pacing around the room to get this setup. At last, I have an IRC server, IRC services (services just handles nick and channel registrations in case you don’t know), a web client for easy connecting, and a bouncer for log retention. What an absolute chore!

Originally I was trying to setup a Matrix server, but after testing around with one, I didn’t really like it. There’s surprisingly a lot that goes into setting one up, especially if you want to handle registrations. I didn’t really like the registration requirements and really didn’t want to setup a sendmail server for handling my own registrations either, so I dropped it and went for IRC instead.

I would really prefer to avoid any kind of registration requirements, and just make it optional. It’s very annoying how you have to give out your phone number, email address, SSN, birth record, and tax history just to sign up for some bullshit site these days just to have a chat.

I was thinking of setting up a channel on Freenode, but Freenode is dead so then I looked at Libera IRC and those assholes require registration and block anon connections! There are a few other networks out there too, like QuakeNet, but they don’t seem to have a ChanServ and use “Q” for a NickServ. I bet it’s common to steal OP in a channel during a netsplit over there. I think Geekshed requires registration too, and Rizon IRC looked alright but by then I decided to just host one myself.

At first I was thinking that simply running the IRC server would be good nuff, but didn’t realize all of the additional nuff that goes into it.

My first IRC daemon of choice was InspIRCd since there were so many recommendations and guides written about it, but I got filtered by the install process… So I did some searching and found an easier one that's already in the Debian package archive, ngIRCd. For services I setup Atheme, which wasn’t as simple to setup like some of the guides out there make it out to be. Also most of the guides are out of date or have typos in them that kept throwing me off. Some of them had relevant information and some of them didn’t, so I had to piece them together. Just another day in Linux land!

After getting those two setup and working with each other, I started thinking just how tf are people going to connect!? I’m pretty familiar with IRC from old gaming clan days and know how to setup a client, but most people these days probably won’t know how and would get filtered before they could even think of connecting. So I looked around for a frontend web client and found KiwiIRC. It was surprisingly easy to setup and works great.

Then at last when I thought it was over, again I realized that I needed a way to log chats when offline. I’d forgotten about that little bit of IRC history. So I setup a ZNC bouncer and while it was easy to install and configure, it was a complete bitch to setup the connection for my IRC account to auto auth with NickServ. There’s something fuky going on with that auto auth module because I had to set it up from within the client instead of from the webmin page. I really don’t remember it being this complicated, but I finally got it all working.

I’m really exhausted now from going thru all of that and don’t feel like touching a computer for a month now.

Anyhow, come on down to CozyNet IRC if you want to have yourself a time!

Thanks for reading my blog!