Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Marshalling your IRC connections with a
Bouncer
Now that BitlBee is running on the BeagleBone, you can enjoy OTR-protected instant mes-
saging, but we can improve the setup. Currently, we are connecting to BitlBee directly
from your IRC client. This is fine if you have one client. But, if you are chatting with your
laptop and then get up and go, you may want to continue a conversation on your phone. For
this, we will need a more persistent proxy connection. The problem can be stated in a more
general way: how can we maintain a persistent connection to all of our IRC networks, in-
cluding BitlBee. For this, we'll need an IRC bouncer.
IRC bouncers act as a proxy server and maintain your connection to an IRC server. This
may be useful on servers that don't support nick registration and you want to maintain your
nick. As mentioned in the previous use case, bouncers generally support multiple clients
which will allow you to have a near seamless IRC conversation as you switch devices.
Since we are using BitlBee as an IRC gateway to our XMPP and instant message networks,
we can combine IRC connections as well and have all of this managed by the bouncer.
