Other distractions: Internet Relay Chat

I have been futzing around with my old Raspberry Pi lately, and a lot of my energy went into that. That and talking on the usenet. My main project actually started out as making a nntp-based forum, but on the way I got distracted by all those other shiny terminal apps that I met along the way.

Well, I say shiny.

I mean, they are CLI apps.

I am just interested in some of those older kinds of applications that do not necessarily demand sending all your data to some big corporation. And there’s a bit of nostalgia in there as well. When I was a kid we did not have the internet connectivity or the spare computers to just have a server run at all times, and now with the rise of single board computers exactly that has become quite trivial. If you want a functional server for some applications you just need an RPi or any of the other equivalents, install a Linux system on it, and have it run.

Oh wait, you might want to have a public IP for your device as well. Luckily my ISP was able to provide me one for free on request.

So what did I decide to run on it? Multiple things actually. But the one that right now works without issues is a small IRC server.

What’s IRC?

It’s the Internet Relay Chat. The chat protocol that used to be the main way of chatting in chat rooms before first instant messengers and later things like discord and teams sidelined it. It originally was created in 1988, and found widespread adoption all over the world due to it’s rather open and convenient way of setup. It valiantly managed to keep chugging on even as closed instant managers and more open alternatives became available, although it is rather less popular than previously. It’s rather simple to create interfaces for it though, and there is a plethora of both server and client programs that work with it. I for example am mostly using the integrated chat in Thunderbird on my Windows machine lately, although I also have multiple other programs on other machines (mostly irssi, for my phone I use RevolutionIRC).

The server is using ngircd, which is rather lightweight and easy to configure. I also have a bouncer (znc) that keeps connected with this and other servers at all times, and The Lounge as a web interface. And an eggdrop bot which I don’t know what to do with yet. It’s not really needed so far as ngircd has the ability to make channels persistent.

Most of this stuff can be installed from the Debian package manager in the Raspberry OS, but I found the need to compile the current version of eggdrop from source (it’s easier to configure) and The Lounge can just be installed as a docker container (although that one as well is available as a .deb package).

Yep, that one has image uploads and link previews integrated as well, which is neat. It also would have an integrated bouncer (the ability to read things written while you were offline), but that would need user accounts and passwords to work.

I even connected this with Alex Schroeder’s IRC server, creating effectively the world’s smallest TTRPG chat network. (disclaimer: I don’t have a clue if that’s true)

If you want to check it out you can access it under ereborbbs.duckdns.org at port 6667, or you just go to this link to access the web interface. It’s not much to look at, but it does the job and basically doesn’t strain the server at all. Yet.