Members Area

Introduction to IRC:

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, it’s a very basic form of messaging where you’re able to connect to a server and send/recieve messages from other people on the same server. UWT Greyhat Group has its own IRC server so that members can chat from anywhere.

There are many different ways that you can set up an IRC client, but this article will only cover three of these: setting up hexchat on your home machine, setting up IRSSI on an Amazon Web Server (free) and connecting to that, and setting up a bouncer on an Amazon Web Server (free) and connecting via HexChat.

Setting up IRSSI via AWS:

One of our members has made a very handy tutorial on how to set up both a free Amazon Web Services server as well as how to configure IRSSI on it so that you always have access to IRC. You can find instructions here.

Setting up a HexChat Client:

Hexchat is an easy-to-use IRC client that also has a nifteh little GUI. HexChat can be configured to connect to a bouncer server (detailed below) so that you can see buffered messages, or so that you can connect to an IRC server directly.

1) Download and install the appropriate version of HexChat for your machine.

2) Follow through the installation wizard, select normal settings, we don’t need to tamper with anything here.

3) When you start HexChat, you’ll be given a list of your current options for your username, choose and enter a username in these fields.

4) Below the list of usernames, there will be a list of networks, you’re gonna want to add a new network to the existing list, select “New Network” and type over it then hit enter to rename it, just remember it’s connected to UW IRC.

5) Select the “Your-Name-for-The-Network” and click edit on the right.

6) Now select “newserver/6667” and type over and hit enter it to rename it, the format is server-address/port-number. Now, if you’ve set up a Bouncer server on an AWS instance, connect to that machine (you’ll need the IP of your AWS instance and the port that ZNC is listening on). Otherwise you’ll need the information for the UW IRC server

7) If you were connecting to ZNC you’re done! Otherwise, you can go under Autojoin channels while you’re editing the UW Network you’ve made and add a new channel, then rename it #greyhat (the pound symbol IS necessary).

8) Now you can simply connect to the server and start chatting with us!

Setting up a Bouncer on AWS:

Before we do anything too interesting, we still need to have a free AWS instance set up, if you do not have a free instance please follow the instructions here up through connecting to your instance via ssh (on linux/unix) or PuTTY (on Windows).

Now what we need to do is set up a bouncer software which will store irc information on the AWS instance and relay it to your machine when you connect to the instance. The software we’ll be using is called ZNC, and setup instructions can be found here.

IMPORTANT NOTES ON THESE INSTRUCTIONS:

I) When ZNC asks you what port you want it to listen on keep in mind that this is the port on your AWS server that you will be connecting to, remember it.

II) When ZNC asks you what server to connect to, make sure you connect to the proper UW server, details can be found here.

When you’re done configuring ZNC on your AWS instance, go ahead and set up HexChat on your machine and set it to connect to the instance, then get on and start chatting!