pratul dot in /home/lut4rp

[18:59]         sid0 : lut4rp: well everyone knows that drupal sucks, so...
[18:59]          jai : yes
[18:59]          jai : but their community is awesome
[19:00]          jai : contributors are insanely motivated
[19:00]          jai : to the point of nausea

jai (GSoC 2009 student and FFmpeg developer) and sid0 (GSoC 2008 student, Mozilla developer and intern) during a random rant on Drupal caching and the bot module.

I’ve been using ZNC for the past two weeks now, and its awesome. In fact, I like it far more that a screen + irssi combination, and the recently-getting-popular Quassel core + client combination. So what’s so nice about ZNC? Its an IRC bouncer.

The advantage, you ask? I can use any client to connect to my ZNC `instance`. Yes! So I can use Colloquy (if I’m on my dad’s MacBook) or irssi if I’m on my own notebook. Lets go slightly technical now... ZNC runs as a daemon on a remote machine (say, your VPS?) on a port you specify (say 8888). It has these super easy settings where you specify what IRC network(s) you want to connect to. Then you press the Big Red Button. Now, the next time you want to connect to IRC, you don’t connect to the IRC network, you connect to your.server.address:8888. Push in your server password and vala! Your client will automatically join the servers and channels you had set up! Talk about smartness, eh?

And no, the phun doesn’t stop there. There are tons of modules available (and Mr. h4x0r can write his own in C++ or Perl or Tcl) which allow even smarter stuff. You can setup multiple users (each with their own modules and configuration) within the same ZNC instance. Users can have encrypted buffers and logs. No need to SSH to the server to change configurations every time (gasp!), you can control everything via a /query! Its everything you need, and more. Get it from http://znc.in.