Small team private IRC server with history. My first IRC server ever. Is this possible? reddit / irc ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaveSha · 2013-02-18 20:41 To date, I have only ever used IRC occasionally as a user. Well, my team of 7 people needs a simple, secure way to chat and IRC seems like the best option. What IRC serving software do think that I should use for my first time setting up IRC and what would you do to get something like a /history command working to output the last ~100 messages in any given room? Thanks for any point in the right direction or advice at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kzrl · 2013-02-18 21:03 To achieve the /history you'd want to setup a bot in the channel you'll be chatting in. Then users could do something like: /msg YourBot history #channelname (for example. I'm not sure exactly which bot you'd use) Ubuntu/debian will have an IRCd that supports SSL in their repos I'm sure. Here's a [blog post describing such a setup](https://marvelserv.com/setting-up-ircd-hybrid-and-hybserv- services-with-ssl-on-ubuntu/). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- aperson · 2013-02-18 21:06 You probably don't want IRC. XMPP/jabber sounds more like it. Openfire is easy to setup and run. It does exactly what you want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaveSha · 2013-02-18 21:25 That's a great start - thanks a lot. Have you used ircd-hybrid? Is it a good server? Is there a bot that you recommend to facilitate the "/msg YourBot history $channelname" thing? What about security? Is it possible to password protect an IRC server? Thanks a lot for the reply. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaveSha · 2013-02-18 21:27 I checked out Openfire before thinking that IRC might be the way to go. A couple of guys on my team have used IRC in the past, so they have requested it. I sort of like the "oldschool / little training" part of the whole thing... and I like how easy it seems to be to plug other stuff in to IRC down the road. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- aperson · 2013-02-18 21:36 Down to specifics, there's absolutely nothing that IRC can do that xmpp doesn't already. It's also just as easy to 'plug in stuff' (and you can do a lot more). One of the organizations I'm a part of used irc for quite some time for collaboration and we moved to XMPP just because it made a lot more sense (better permissions, better room control, easier to maintain, better ways to plug things in, etc). Beyond setting up the actual server, it took us at most a day to port our bots over to XMPP. I'm not trying to evangelize this too you too much, but it just sounds like you're asking for a nail when you need a screw. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaveSha · 2013-02-18 21:42 You might be right. I might be looking at Openfire the wrong way. One of the big things that I didn't like about openfire was the way that group chats worked. There wasn't an easy way for the entire team to collaborate and chat in public. Did I miss this piece of it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Franciscouzo · 2013-02-18 21:55 Password protect? That's easy, it's just a variable in the config file. If you're a little paranoid you could set your channel's mode +s. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- flotwig · 2013-02-18 22:23 You might want to check out [Grove](https://grove.io/), it's a hosted IRC service with basically everything you're asking for. Think HipChat or Campfire, but accessible from any IRC client. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DaveSha · 2013-02-18 22:31 I really liked the look of Grove. It's reasonably priced and has everything that I would like to do. Two things are keeping me from using it: It's hosted outside of my control and I'm not sure about how long it will be available for. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jbroome · 2013-02-18 22:34 You could also use the bot to log the channel to a pw protected website. Look at irclogs.ubuntu.com as an example. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- flotwig · 2013-02-18 22:56 According to [their blog](https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay), they're "here to stay". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- aperson · 2013-02-19 21:11 By public, do you mean *open to everyone*, or as *open to everyone in our group/organization*? If the latter, it's just a matter of creating a channel with the correct permissions (I believe you can have users join that channel by default as well). If the previous, I do believe it's possible with openfire's fastpath plugin. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chopin2712 · 2022-09-25 17:00 I know this is a very old chat but I wanted to comment anyway because I was asking myself the same question and found some interesting things. Basically, it would be possible to simply set a server (like [ngircd](https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd)) with a bouncer (like [soju](https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju)) connected to it. You just have to make sure the IRC port "6667" is blocked by your firewall so your server only is accessible through that bouncer. That way people can only connect to the bouncer, the bouncer will provide history and since the bouncer require authentication, it will be private. Another option would be to add an archive system such as [litterbox](https://git.causal.agency/litterbox/) with [scooper](https://git.causal.agency/scooper) (you can then use HTTP basic auth so that only people with accounts can access the archive) Finally a third option would be to create an IRC bot as someone else pointed out. But anyone reading this, remember that IRC isn't encrypted, so it shouldn't be considered private. Though I prefer IRC to XMPP for some reason, I have to admit XMPP is MUCH better at encryption and privacy than IRC.