Early alpha release of IRC Idler

[Ian Denhardt]

Hey everyone,

I've been working on an IRC bouncer than runs on sandstorm; those of you
who hang out on #sandstorm probably have seen some discussion. It's now
officially at the point where I want Alpha testers so... Hi! If you want
to be a g

A bit more about the app. From the README:

> Why
>
> Lots of folks prefer to be persistently online on IRC. A common solution
> to this is to be logged in via a console IRC client on a server
> somewhere, running in tmux or GNU screen. This works, but is less than
> ideal.
>
> What
>
> IRC Idler connects to the IRC server for you, and then acts as an IRC
> server itself -- you connect to IRC Idler, and it proxies the
> connection. When you disconnect, it stays connected, and flags you as
> away until you reconnect, at which point it replays any messages you
> missed while you were gone.

(Note that the bit about auto-away isn't implemented yet).

This is a *very* early alpha; it's buggy, in some ways I know about and
probably many others that I don't. It probably won't eat your children,
but it might lose track of some messages or do some other weird things.
But, it's at the point where I'm dogfooding it and not having to
work around obnoxious bugs in my day-to-day use. What I'm hoping for
with releasing the alpha is to shed light on bugs that I don't hit
because of my specific workflow, and get a sense of what should be a
priority, now that it's usable enough for myself.

There's a bit of weirdness in connecting to it; it uses websockets for
client connections in order to take advantage of sandstorm for auth,
which has the unfortunate effect of preventing most clients from
connecting to it directly. There's a companion tool called
websocket-proxy to help with this, see
https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler#using-sandstorm for details.

Also note that because this requires raw network access, you'll need to
be an administrator for your sandstorm instance to use it -- so it won't
run on Oasis.

If you're feeling brave enough, try it out, report bugs, give
suggestions, and help out. Bug reports should go to the bug tracker
(linked below) if possible, and I hang out in #sandstorm on Freenode.

Links:

* Source: https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler
* Bug tracker: https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler/issues
* Source for websocket-proxy: https://github.com/zenhack/websocket-proxy
* Spk and binaries for websocket-proxy:

https://isd.sandcats.io/shared/E9ecGJte7sESRb0TqQqHmfN4HJYS_VPkoEKMzvNMKz-

There are some known issues particularly worth being aware of:

* https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler/issues/15
* https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler/issues/13 and the related
sandstorm issue https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/issues/2551

If the second of those bites you, the thing to do is just restart the
grain, and then reconnect.

Cheers,

-Ian

[Jake Weisz]

I am so ridiculously excited to see progress in this space. Even if as
an Oasis user primarily at the moment, I can't immediately benefit.
-Jacob Weisz

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[Kevin Reid]

On Sep 17, 2016, at 16:11, Ian Denhardt <i...@zenhack.net> wrote:
>> IRC Idler connects to the IRC server for you, and then acts as an IRC
>> server itself -- you connect to IRC Idler, and it proxies the
>> connection. When you disconnect, it stays connected, and flags you as
>> away until you reconnect, at which point it replays any messages you
>> missed while you were gone.

Does it support simultaneous client connections (e.g. one 'home, usually permanent' and one 'roaming, intermittent')?

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Kevin Reid (2016-09-17 23:02:07)

Not currently; if you connect from a second location, it boots the first
client.

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Ian Denhardt (2016-09-17 19:11:00)

> * Spk and binaries for websocket-proxy:
>
> https://isd.sandcats.io/shared/E9ecGJte7sESRb0TqQqHmfN4HJYS_VPkoEKMzvNMKz-

So this is down, due (probably) to some badly timed weather. If it's
still down tonight I will try to upload the files to a mirror somewhere.

-Ian

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Ian Denhardt (2016-09-19 17:26:47)

Still down, so mirror:

https://mirror.zenhack.net/pub/irc-idler-alpha1-downloads/

[Jared Bidlow]

Is there an updated spk?

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Jared Bidlow (2016-12-17 19:55:11)
> Is there an updated spk?

Not yet. There are a few blockers, and I've been distracted by
other things lately. In particular,
https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler/issues/20 is making things
difficult for me to use. It's happening to me if I log out for more than
about a day. Which means I have to restart my grains essentially
every time I reconnect. I have it on my calendar to debug
https://github.com/zenhack/irc-idler/issues/8, which I suspect has a
related cause.

I have been meaning to investigate what happens over non-TLS
connections, since it breaks during the handshake, but I *suspect* it
will just hang the next time it tries to talk to the server.

[Ian Denhardt]

Quoting Ian Denhardt (2016-12-18 16:28:23)

So I've got a new release up:

https://mirror.zenhack.net/pub/irc-idler/irc-idler-alpha2.spk

It is still very much an alpha. One pitfall to be particularly aware of:
If you rejoin a channel with a large backlog, you'll get the whole thing
very quickly, and some clients will react less-than well to this. Pidgin
tends to lock up for a short while. Furthermore, the main server loop
currently won't responded to server PINGs until it's finished replaying
the log, which can theoretically cause some complications. This needs to
get fixed at some point, but in the meantime there are a couple ways to
mitigate it:

1. Log in every now and then.
2. Don't set channels to auto-join, if possible. This way you get one
channel log at a time, which can be much more manageable.

I ended up doing #2 myself because of an unrelated bug in pidgin, and
since then it's been reasonably usable for me (though still not super
presentable). In light of this I'm releasing it, even though the issues
I spoke of are still not fixed.

Generally curious: has anyone been actively using this? I've heard a bit
of enthusiasm, but no actual feedback.

Anyway, the spk is linked above. I'm going to try to keep the available
binaries pretty close to master going forward. I'd do nightlies if the
project is active enough, but as it is it's just going to be whenever I
get some work done on it.

Cheers,

-Ian