Tonight I setup psyBNC so that I could connect to IRC without having to worry about some of the issues that come with being on IRC. I haven’t been active on IRC in about two years and the last time that I was on it was only for a month or so. At every 2600 meeting, I see my friend txs and he always asks me when we are going to start having a work night at the lab to work on projects that we have going on? My response is always I’ve got too much other stuff going. Most recently, the excuse is that there is standing room only in the lab. The reason I have a sudden increased interest in IRC is because he is always in #nc2600 and hopefully I can get some dialog going with him on projects that I’m planing on work on this summer.

I should probably begin by explaining what psyBNC is before I go into my rant about why Windows IRC clients suck. PsyBNC is an IRC bouncer. It’s a program that runs on a computer that is connected to the Internet via a very high speed line normally on a shell account. Once you have it setup, you can then connect to it and then tell it to join any IRC server you want. It acts as a proxy server, but has specific IRC commands that a SOCKS proxy doesn’t. You can instruct it to Op/Kick/Ban certain people when the join the channel (if you have ops), it will change your nick to away in all of the channels it is connected to when you disconnect from it and log all messages that are sent to you while you are gone, it will also allow you to talk to people in two different channels on two different networks, and all of this can be done over an SSL connection between your IRC client and psyBNC. It also supports vhosts if your shell provider has them setup.

Once I got it setup, the issues of the Windows clients began. First there is mIRC, which is extremely bloated. I could use it if I had to, but I’m looking for something else. My first choice was X-Chat because that’s what I use on my Mac. It comes with it’s own ident server. PsyBNC requires you to be running an ident server because it uses it to figure out what your username is. The problem with the one included with X-Chat is that you can’t control any of the information that is sent to the service requesting information about yourself. I also couldn’t find a place to turn off in the GUI. It’s kinda dumb if you ask me. X-Chat does however support SSL, which is one of my main requirements. Speaking of which, requirements are as follows:

Requirements

• Decent usable Interface
• Non-Bloated Client
• SSL Support
• Configurable Ident

So, X-Chat is out. Next I tried HydraIRC. It really looked promising. I got logged in, no problem. Started adjusting the colors the way I liked them, then went to enable SSL and I quickly learned that it isn’t supported. Another strike for Windows IRC clients. Next I looked for a Windows binary for Irssi. Found one and it also supports SSL. I haven’t looked to see if it has a configurable ident server, but if not, I can run a standalone one if it will let me disable it. I’m not sure if I want to go back to a console client, but I’ll let you know what I decide to do. I also found a client called .IRC. It does support SSL and has a built-in ident server, but it has icons and buttons that looks like it was written for windows 3.11. My point is Windows IRC clients suck. I’m not sure what I’m going to eventually decide to use, but I’ll let you know. I need to go study for the 70-291 test.