Lucas Nussbaum has posed an eerily familiar question: what is the best way to maintain a single and constant IRC presence, accessible from multiple locations? After some experimentation with different solutions (including Irssi + Irssi-Proxy), I finally settled upon a combination of Bip IRC Proxy, an SSH tunnel and my favourite GUI IRC client. I was planning to write a guide, but I came across an excellent one which explains the whole process. Managing the SSH tunnel is easy with gSTM.

Now I can use the same nick from multiple sites at once. It is completely transparent to other people, so it doesn’t matter where in the world I am provided that I have an Internet connection with an SSH and IRC client. I am not forced to use a particular IRC client, and I don’t have to give up a GUI. I can even stay logged in at both home and work at the same time.

My primary feature request would be for Bip to have the capability to set myself as Away when I have no IRC clients connected. At present, it only provides the option to change my nick in this circumstance, which is too heavy-handed and pollutes the channel with announcements.

The following is an e-mail that I posted to the SLUG mailing list:

Subject: [SLUG] Maintaining a constant IRC presence
Date: Sunday 03 September 2006 13:07
From: Sridhar Dhanapalan
To: SLUG list

I am in a situation that I’m sure a lot of SLUG members are in. I am a
prolific user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depending on where
I am. I have three main problems:

  (1) maintaining a single and constant online presence
  (2) maintaining easily accessible chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being notified of messages that suit specific criteria

I currently use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat client, it can beep when I have a message. If I leave it
connected, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my laptop, though (I need to disconnect when travelling). Also, it
forces me to have a separate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
session) connected.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by something like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local clients with a single login. I could ssh into a
single system running irssi, which would alleviate both (1) and (2).

I understand that there are plug-ins for irssi that perform a notification
service or run commands on certain cues. If irssi was running locally, I
could do all kinds of things with such a feature. If running remotely,
however, I believe that I am limited to notifications inside the irssi window
itself. This would force me to manually check the window on a frequent basis,
which will either become annoying or be forgotten. I would like to have
audio/visual cues to let me know that my attention is required.

[1] http://www.garion.org/irssi/irssi-proxy.php