Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Configure ZNC to manage your IRC connections
Before we configure ZNC, let's step back and examine our system architecture. We have at
least three distinct pieces of hardware involved: the machine on which your IRC client is
running, the BBB, and the machines running IRC servers. One of those machines is the
BBB since it's running the BitlBee IRC server. Examine the following deployment dia-
gram:
Let's start with the BBB, depicted by the center cube. The BBB is running two modules:
ZNC and BitlBee. ZNC is the module to which multiple IRC clients can connect. ZNC is
connected to the BitlBee module, which is a process also running on the same hardware.
ZNC is also connected to one or more different IRC servers. BitlBee maintains connections
to various XMPP or chat servers but since BitlBee itself is an IRC server, you connect to it
through ZNC. Once everything is set up, you will only have to worry about connecting to
ZNC.
ZNC needs a configuration file and the easiest way to generate the configuration file is to
run the following command:
znc --makeconf
This will launch an interactive command-line interface. You'll need to create a new ZNC
username that is not associated with any BitlBee or IRC systems. You will also have to de-
cide what port to run the service. If you pick a port number in the private range,
49152
to
65535
, you'll have less of a chance of colliding with another service. For this example,
port
50000
was chosen. There are quite a few ZNC modules, but you'll want to enable the
webadmin
module to easily configure ZNC. Lastly, be sure to enable SSL. It will generate
a self-signed certificate, at which most browsers will grumble when connecting. Alternat-
ively, you can create a full
Public Key Infrastructure
(
PKI
), complete with your own cer-
tificate authority, and supply the server certificate to ZNC.
