Sysadmin/BNC

From KDE Community Wiki

Sysadmin maintains an IRC Bouncer (BNC) for all registered KDE developers. The software used for this bouncer is ZNC. The advantage of using a bouncer is that you can see what happened on a channel when you are not connected to it.

You can request an account via a sysadmin ticket; mention your identity.kde.org username.

BNC Configurations

You will receive a password from sysadmin. Then you can login into https://bnc.kde.org:7778/ and configure the bouncer. Most of the settings are straightforward or explained in the user interface. Some nice settings are:

  • add the libera.chat network, and configure the channels that you want to join (use the form irc.libera.chat port #. All libera.chat servers listen on ports 6665, 6666, 6667, 6697 (SSL only), 7000 (SSL only), 7070 (SSL only), 8000, 8001 and 8002).
  • for each channel set the buffercount, this is the amount of lines you would like to see replayed when you connect.

Connect your client to the BNC

It's time to connect to your IRC client to the bouncer.

Settings for Konversation

You would need the following settings in Konversation:

  • add a new network, called KDE, connect at the start
  • add a new server to the network, use bnc.kde.org as server, fill in 7778 as port.
  • fill in "yourusername:yourpassword" (without quotes) in the password field and check the SSL option (this is the username:password to BNC, not your libera.chat nickserv password)
  • you should not set any channels in konversation, it will join the channels you have setup in the web interface earlier.
  • if you auto-identify to nickserv, add your libera.chat password in your Konversation identity on libera.chat, not in the connection setup

Settings for IRSSI

For the following, let $USERNAME be your bnc.kde.org username and $PASSWORD your password for bnc.kde.org. Let "BNClibera" be the network name as set at bnc.kde.org (see previous step).

At first, check that your settings at bnc.kde.org are correct. For this, start irssi and execute the command:

/server -ssl bnc.kde.org 7778 $USERNAME/BNClibera:$PASSWORD

If irssi correctly connects to the BNC server and to all configured channels, we can proceed to configure irssi such that it autoconnects to the BNC server at program start. For this, open the irssi configuration file at "~/.irssi/config" and edit the following sections:

Servers

Add the following snippet to the "servers" section:

{
  address = "bnc.kde.org";
  chatnet = "KDE";
  port = "7778";
  autoconnect = true;
  use_ssl = "yes";
  password = "$USERNAME/BNClibera:$PASSWORD"; 
}
Chatnets

Add the following snippet to the "chatnets section:

KDE = { type = "IRC"; };

Note that if you set up several networks at bnc.kde.org, you must create entries for each of the networks in "servers" and "chatnets".

Now, when starting irssi the client should autoconnect to the BNC server and also to all channels that are set up at the BNC web frontend.

Configure Identify

Now you need to configure to identify to the libera.chat network properly.

  • don't use znc's 'nickserv' module. This only identifies after the connection, which means you will join the channels uncloaked first and only later get your cloak. Another reason is that some channels might be shielded based on your cloak, autojoining channels won't work. Better is to use the sasl module. This identifies you directly at the moment of the connection.
  • after you are connected issue '/msg *status loadmod sasl'
  • after that issue '/msg *sasl set primarynick liberapassword'. Replace primarynick with the primary nick you once registered at nickserv and replace 'liberapassword' is the password you set to protect your nick. This is not (and should not) be the same as the username and password you use for the znc web interface.