How do I set up IRC bouncer to receive messages and follow the discussion while I am offline?

Question

I am now set up on IRC and I can attend the Bitcoin Core PR review club sessions. But when I am offline I can't receive messages and I can't follow the discussion which has happened during the time I was offline. How do I set up a IRC bouncer to address these problems?

Answer 1

On some IRC channels such as #bitcoin-core-dev there are third party managed conversation logs so you can follow the conversation from when you were offline without setting up a bouncer. However, I don't think (at the time of writing, September 2020) that there are conversation logs for the #bitcoin-core-pr-reviews channel except for the weekly meeting which is logged on the Bitcoin Core PR review club site. You definitely can't receive messages whilst you are offline.

For more background information on setting up a IRC bouncer see here.

For more information on migrating to libera.chat see here and here.

There are various options to set up a bouncer but in the interests of simplicity I will just outline one assuming you followed the instructions here to install Textual on MacOS.

You will need a virtual private server (VPS) to be running 24/7 to log the discussion and receive messages on your behalf and then you can connect to that server whenever you come back online. This will require a monthly subscription.

So your first step is to choose a VPS provider. One easy to use option is Digital Ocean but there are others that perform the same function and are equivalently priced. (We generally avoid product recommendations on this site so please excuse this counterexample.) You can connect directly to your VPS/Digital Ocean Droplet with SSH using the instructions here. There is a tutorial for setting up SSH keys here.

Once you have set up your VPS you will need to install ZNC on that server. Instructions for doing that are here (deprecated but easier to follow and should still work) or here. The latest ZNC release is available here. You can ssh into your VPS using:

ssh -i /path/to/private/key root@IP_address_of_VPS

Instructions for connecting your Textual client to the ZNC bouncer are here.

The Server Address is the IP address of your VPS.

For the Username make sure you follow the below instructions.

In the field labeled Username is where you will enter your username. The format of this value is very specific: <username>/<network> — The first half of the value is your ZNC username. The second half, which is prefixed with a forward slash, is the Network Name

In this case the Network Name is libera so this should be <username>/libera.

Once you have set up your ZNC server and your ZNC configuration file you can edit znc.conf by following these instructions:

In most cases you should NOT edit znc.conf directly. Use webadmin instead.

If you really need to edit znc.conf by hand, do the following:

pkill -SIGUSR1 znc to save current runtime configuration to znc.conf

pkill znc to shutdown running ZNC instance Edit znc.conf

znc to start it again with new configuration

To set up SASL on the ZNC server follow these instructions.

For troubleshooting ZNC see this FAQ and help for ZNC commands is here.