[9fans] miau, an IRC bouncer

["John Floren" <john@jfloren.net>]

Back when I had my FreeBSD server, I used to run a tmux session and
irssi to keep myself connected to IRC at all times.  This let me
access it from any computer with an SSH client.

Now I only run a Plan 9 server, but I missed the simplicity and
convenience of having just one nickname on IRC at all times.  I
finally got fed up and did a very crude port of Miau, an IRC bouncer.
A bouncer stays connected to your selected servers and channels while
serving the IRC protocol itself.  You then point an IRC client at your
bouncer, which instantly restores for you all the channels you had
open.

This serves essentially the same purpose as ircfs, but with the
advantage that you don't need Plan 9 or Inferno to access it--any
computer with an IRC client can connect.  In fact, you can just use
Mibbit to connect as long as you have a web browser.

Porting Miau was pretty easy; the configure script actually ran
properly and I only had to do a little bit of hacking to account for
things like the lack of crypt() (so yes, you have to type in a
plaintext password in the config file rather than giving it a hash).
There's a tar at /n/sources/contrib/john/miau9.tgz, or you can check
out the bitbucket repo from http://bitbucket.org/floren/miau9
(preferred).

Known bugs: It's really easy to type "maui" instead of "miau".


John