Hiding network disconnections using an IRC bouncer

A bouncer can be a useful tool if you rely on IRC for team communication and instant messaging. The most common use of such a server is to be permanently connected to IRC and to buffer messages while your client is disconnected.

However, that's not what got me interested in this tool. I'm not looking for another place where messages accumulate and wait to be processed later. I'm much happier if people email me when I'm not around.

Instead, I wanted to do to irssi what mosh did to ssh clients: transparently handle and hide temporary disconnections. Here's how I set everything up.

Server setup

The first step is to install znc:

apt-get install znc

Make sure you get the 1.0 series (in jessie or trusty, not wheezy or precise) since it has much better multi-network support.

Then, generate a Let's Encrypt TLS certificate for it:

apt install certbot
certbot certonly -d irc.example.com --standalone

Then install the certificate in the right place:

mkdir ~/.znc
cat /etc/letsencrypt/live/irc.example.com/privkey.pem /etc/letsencrypt/live/irc.example.com/fullchain.pem > ~/.znc/znc.pem

Once that's done, you're ready to create a config file for znc using the znc --makeconf command, again as the same non-root user:

create separate znc users if you have separate nicks on different networks
use your nickserv password as the server password for each network
enable ssl
say no to the chansaver and nickserv plugins

Finally, open the IRC port (tcp port 6697 by default) in your firewall:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6697 -j ACCEPT

Client setup (irssi)

On the client side, the official documentation covers a number of IRC clients, but the irssi page was quite sparse.

Here's what I used for the two networks I connect to (irc.oftc.net and irc.mozilla.org):

servers = (
  {
    address = "irc.example.com";
    chatnet = "OFTC";
    password = "fmarier/oftc:Passw0rd1!";
    port = "6697";
    use_ssl = "yes";
    ssl_verify = "yes";
  },
  {
    address = "irc.example.com";
    chatnet = "Mozilla";
    password = "francois/mozilla:Passw0rd1!";
    port = "6697";
    use_ssl = "yes";
    ssl_verify = "yes";
  }
);

Make sure that you're no longer authenticating with the nickserv from within irssi. That's znc's job now.

Wrapper scripts

So far, this is a pretty standard znc+irssi setup. What makes it work with my workflow is the wrapper script I wrote to enable znc before starting irssi and then prompt to turn it off after exiting:

#!/bin/bash
ssh irc.example.com "pgrep znc || znc"
irssi
read -p "Terminate the bouncer? [y/N] " -n 1 -r
echo
if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
then
  ssh irc.example.com killall -sSIGINT znc
fi

Now, instead of typing irssi to start my IRC client, I use irc.

If I'm exiting irssi before commuting or because I need to reboot for a kernel update, I keep the bouncer running. At the end of the day, I say yes to killing the bouncer. That way, I don't have a backlog to go through when I wake up the next day.