Connect to an IRC bouncer with Thunderbird?

Question

I would like to set up a bouncer on my rootserver and connect there from my PC, so I will see all messages during the last 30 minutes that I missed when I reconnect to a channel.

Is this possible in Thunderbird Chat? And how?

Answer 1

You can install bip, an IRC proxy, that keeps connected to your preferred IRC servers.

It is easy to install and configure on arch or debian with this HowTo. That HowTo works already quite well. I only had a bit of hazzle to find out, how to connect via ssl to irc.hackint.org, solution:

network {
    name = "hackint";
    server { host = "irc.eu.hackint.org"; port = 6697; };
    ssl = true; 
};

There seems to be a problem with Thunderbird still, so I use it with Pidgin now instead to connect to bip on my server an always stay logged in at my preferred channels and get messages that were sent when I was offline, I otherwise would have missed.

---

Since the Howto is down, here are the main steps:

Installing BIP

Installing BIP is simple for both Arch Linux and Debian.

Debian

I run BIP on Debian Wheezy with the backport repository enabled.

sudo apt-get -t wheezy-backports install bip
sudo sed -i 's/ENABLED=0/ENABLED=1/' /etc/default/bip

Arch Linux

pacman -S bip
systemctl enable bip

Create a user

The next thing to do is create a username and password and BIP provides it's own utility for doing this called bipmkpw. Replace 'username' with whatever you want your BIP 'username' to be. This name has no relation to any IRC usernames so it can be anything.

bipmkpw username

Enter a password when prompted. The password will then be output as a hash. Make a note of both the hashed and un-hashed values somewhere, you will need them later. Create a certificate

We don't want the username and password being sent as clear-text, so we will create an SSL certificate for BIP to use.

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:4096 -nodes -x509 -keyout bip.pem -out bip.pem

Move the certificate to /var/lib/bip

sudo mv bip.pem /var/lib/bip

Change ownership and permissions of the certificate to the user bip which was created automatically when the package was installed.

sudo chown bip:bip /var/lib/bip/bip.pem
sudo chmod 600 /var/lib/bip/bip.pem

Configure BIP

Here is example configuration for BIP. Copy it to /etc/bip.conf, modify it accordingly and then change the ownership and permissions.

sudo chown bip:bip /etc/bip.conf
sudo chmod 640 /etc/bip.conf

• Example configuration

If you require any clarification about what the configuration options do then man bip.conf is your friend. Start BIP

Now that BIP is configured, it can be started.

Debian

sudo /etc/init.d/bip start

Arch Linux

sudo systemctl start bip

Client configuration

I use HexChat, but other IRC clients are available. I add a new Network to HexChat for each of the IRC networks I defined in /etc/bip.conf. The screen shot below shows how I configure a BIP network in HexChat.

HexChat BIP Configuration

Password format

The Password is the most important and confusing item. This is for BIP, not for any IRC network. Remember the unhashed password? That goes here but with a twist. The format for the password is:

bipusername:unhashedbippassword:bipnetwork

Bipnetwork? What is that? It is from the following section of /etc/bip.conf on the server?

network {
    name = "freenode";
    server { host = "chat.freenode.net"; port = 6667; };
};

A more practical example:

myuser:S3cr3tP@$$w0rd:freenode

Conclusion

And that's it! We are now perpetually connected to IRC, can connect to BIP proxy from multiple devices in a completely transparent and seamless manner. Moreover, the logs for all channels are saved and automatically rotated on the server.

If you looking for an alternative to BIP, then try ZNC.

References

• https://wiki.linaro.org/Resources/HowTo/BIP
• http://nerderati.com/2010/11/perpetual-irc-the-proxy-edition/
• http://stevengorrell.com/bip-irc-proxy/