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DEPRECATED

IRC Idler is unmaintained and deprecated in favor of sandstorm-znc:

https://github.com/zenhack/sandstorm-znc

Please use that instead; I'll leave this here for posterity.

IRC Idler is a program which idles in IRC for you. Sandstorm will be the preferred way of running it, though it will work in traditional environments as well.

This is very much a work in progress. I'm currently dogfooding the sandstorm version, but it's not exactly polished.

Why

Lots of folks prefer to be persistently online on IRC. A common solution to this is to be logged in via a console IRC client on a server somewhere, running in tmux or GNU screen. This works, but is less than ideal.

What

IRC Idler connects to the IRC server for you, and then acts as an IRC server itself -- you connect to IRC Idler, and it proxies the connection. When you disconnect, it stays connected, and flags you as away until you reconnect, at which point it replays any messages you missed while you were gone.

Sandstorm Design Notes

IRC isn't a web-app so building a sandstorm app that offers it is slightly more complicated. We still want leverage sandstorm for authentication and authorization. We do this by listening on a websocket instead of a raw TCP port, and have users use websocket-proxy to connect. This scheme also translates decently to the non-sandstorm case.

On sandstorm, each IRC connection runs in its own grain. The websocket trick means we don't need to allocate a separate port to each network.

Building

The sandstorm version is in cmd/sandstorm-irc-idler, the non-sandstorm version is in cmd/irc-idler. Either executable can be built via standard go build.

Note that we link in sqlite3 via CGO. This makes cross-compilation non-trivial, so we do our sandstorm builds in the vagrant vm like everybody else. During these builds GOPATH is set to ${srcdir}/.sandstorm/gopath -- bear this in mind, as it won't look in your host's GOPATH for packages.

Using (sandstorm)

To use the sandstorm version, you must be an administrator for your sandstorm installation. This is because IRC Idler requires raw network access, which only an administrator can grant.

Each irc network you want to connect to must run in its own grain. To set up a new network:

  • Create a new IRC Idler grain

  • Fill out the settings for the IRC server on IRC Idler's web interface. For example, to connect to freenode, you would supply:

    • Host: irc.freenode.net
    • Port: 6667 for unencrypted, 6697 for TLS
    • Check the TLS box or not, depending on whether you want to use it (recommended).

  • Click on the "Request Network Access" button, and grant network access in the dialog that sandstorm presents

  • You will be presented with a websocket URL you can use to connect. You can get a traditional IRC client to connect to this by using websocket-proxy:

    websocket-proxy -listen :6000 -url ${websocket_url}

...and then pointing your IRC client at localhost port 6000.

Using (non-sandstorm)

As an example, to connect to Freenode via TLS:

./irc-idler -tls -raddr irc.freenode.net:6697 -laddr :6667

Then, point your irc client at port 6667 on the host running irc-idler.

Note well: irc-idler does not support accepting client connections via TLS, and it preforms no authentication. As a consequence, you should run it on a trusted network. One solution is to have it only listening on localhost on the server that's running it (and have port 6667 firewalled off for good measure), and use ssh port forwarding to connect from your laptop/desktop.

This will hopefully be more streamlined in the future; one possibility is to make the websocket solution used by the sandstorm version available for the non-sandstorm version as well.

License

Copyright (C) 2016  Ian Denhardt <ian@zenhack.net>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

(See COPYING for a copy of the license).