begriffs/picobounce

Experiment to build an IRC bouncer out of independent programs connected by named pipes. Only half done.

picobounce

The simplest IRC bouncer I could make, one that fits my own needs. It requires SASL over TLS for the upstream server and for the connecting clients. It accepts only a single client (me!) and forwards them to a single upstream server. If you want to connect to multiple IRC networks then run multiple instances of picobounce, each on a different port.

Building

Builds on OpenBSD with no dependencies. All other platforms require POSIX and LibreSSL.

The configure script will detect whatever dependencies are necessary on your system and create config.mk with the customizations.

./configure
make

Usage

The binary is currently hard-coded to look for the certificate files my.key and my.crt in the working directory. You can make those files with the openssl command line tool:

openssl req -nodes -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout my.key -out my.crt

Create a configuration file, e.g. pico.conf:

local_port=6697
local_user=foo
local_pass=bar
host=chat.freenode.net
port=6697
nick=your_freenode_nick
pass=your_freenode_pass

Now run the bouncer:

./picobounce pico.conf

Connect to the bouncer with your IRC client, using the local_user and local_pass as SASL parameters. Some clients like weechat might not like your self-signed cert. You may need to run the bouncer on a real server with certs from a CA like letsencrypt.