Achieving maximum bliss on IRC: Bouncers explained

Many of you have probably experienced this problem before: You're using an IRC client (in my case Konversation), but then your desktop crashes, or you have a power failure, and then of course the IRC client crashes too. Some time later you log into your desktop again, fire up the IRC program, but damn, you've lost a part of an important conversation. Worry about this no more!

Fortunately, there exists software that's generally called "Bouncer" (or BNC). A Bouncer is basically a proxy server that handles the IRC connection for you. Instead of talking directly to the IRC server, you talk to the Bouncer instead, which relays everything in realtime to the IRC server. Modern Bouncers even support SSL encryption for added safety (I would recommend to use this). The advantages of a Bouncer summed up:

You can be connected 24/7 to the Internet, without actually having your computer running.

When you lose your connection to the Bouncer, you can simply log in again, and the Bouncer will even replay a log of all lost information to you, fully automatically. Basically it appears as if you had never been offline, things are all back to normal again.

On networks that don't offer an IRC Cloak service which hides your real IP address, the Bouncer can use a virtual host that hides your address. This increases security.

The Bouncer will automatically log you into all channels that you frequent, without having to join them explicitly again. This is handy if you sometimes use different IRC clients.

Some Bouncers (most modern ones) even allow logging in with multiple clients simultaneously. That's a killer feature. E.g. you could be logged in with your computer at home, and when you have to leave in a hurry, you can simply log in with any other computer (e.g. a Nokia N900) in the same session again, from anywhere in the world. Awesome, no?

How to set up a Bouncer:

Get access to a server somewhere that's always online. If you don't have your own, you could ask a friend. There you install the Bouncer software, e.g. shroudBNC or psyBNC (thanks to Kevin for doing this for me!), preferably with SSL support enabled. Then you configure your IRC client to connect to the Bouncer, exactly like you would connect to a normal IRC server. And voilà, you will now be able to enjoy IRC a lot more than before.

Here's a tutorial that explains the concept in more detail: psyBNC Tutorial


Enjoy


PS: There exist IRC clients (Quassel is a prominent example) that have similar functionality built-in. However, Bouncers will work with any IRC clients, e.g. Konversation, Irssi, X-Chat, and others.