So make sure and stop by the IT dungeon sometime today and show your appreciation to your sysadmins. If you aren’t sure how to show your appreciation, a friendly greeting, a thank you, a cup of coffee, donuts, coupons for a free lunch, taking us out to lunch, or even just cold hard cash are some of the ways that you can tell your sysadmin how much you appreciate them.

However, one feature that neither client offered is, of course, staying connected to the IRC server when the computer is asleep. It is quite useful for me to be able to log into the IRC channels that my colleagues are on and be able to scroll back a ways to see what the current conversation is about, or to see if I missed anything that is important to me. The obvious solution here is to use an IRC client running on a remote machine that is always running. Most people I’ve talked to use the Irssi running in a screen session on a shell server somewhere. This is a perfect solution to the stated problem.

Using this method to connect to the IRC does bring up one whole new problem. Since I am in anywhere from 7 to 10 different IRC channels at a time and have work to do that doesn’t involve watching all channels all the time, I’ve relied on Growl notifications to alert me whenever someone mentions my nick. This is one feature that most people have to give up on in order to stay connected using Irssi in a Screen session. Well, I did some research and found a couple of pages on the internet that provided very useful information to make possible using Irssi in a screen session on a remote server and still get Growl notifications anytime your nick is mentioned! Here is how to do it:

First of all, I won’t go into setting up Irssi or Screen. There is more than enough documentation on the web to help with doing that. Also, I don’t want to take credit for figuring out how to do this. Most of the information came from this page.

First step:
Download this script, unzip it and place it in your ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/ folder (create this directory if it doesn’t exist yet).

Second step:
Make sure your SSH public key is on the remote server where you will be running your irssi instance.

Third step:
Create a script on your local computer. I named it “growl_irc.sh” and placed it in my ~/bin/ directory, which I have added to my PATH variable.

#!/bin/bash

# Kill all current fnotify sessions
ps | awk '{if($0 ~ /fnotify/ && $1 ~ /[0-9]+/ && $4 !~ /awk/) print $1}' |
while read id; do
kill $id
done

# SSH to host, clear file and listen for notifications
(ssh username@hostname -o PermitLocalCommand=no \
"> .irssi/fnotify; tail -f .irssi/fnotify" |
while read heading message; do
growlnotify -t "${heading}" -m "${message}";
done)&

Fourth Step:
Download and install growlnotify. It is in the DMG in a directory called Extras that you can download from http://growl.info/

Fifth Step:
Write a simple script, which opens an SSH session to the remote host and also starts the growl_irc.sh script. I call it “irc” and put it in my ~/bin/ directory:

#!/bin/bash
~/bin/growl_irc.sh
ssh user@hostname

Sixth Step:
On the remote server, I wrote another little wrapper script to resume the screen session. It just has one line:

screen -raAd

This can also be called “irc” or this line could be added to the .bash_profile file, if that is all the remote server will be used for.

So now my workflow is as follows: Open a terminal, type irc, once logged into the remote server, type irc again and I have my Irssi up and running with working growl notifications. Enjoy!

Extra tips:
Since I don’t want my irssi window to get lost among all the other terminal windows I have open, I use Terminal.app for regular terminal work and iTerm for Irssi. This way I can have default window sizes and colors for Irssi be different than for other terminal stuff.

You can configure the growlnotify Application in the Growl Preference Pane to make changes to how long the notification stays on screen, etc.

If you read the manpage for growlnotify, you can find ways to tweak the notification’s icon, etc.

Look at the scripts available on http://www.irssi.org/scripts to find how to change the appearance of Irssi, i.e. to get colored nicks and a list of active nicks in a channel on the sidebar, reminiscent of X-Chat or other GUI clients.

Ok, so to shorten this long rant I will get to my point. Late last year my wife and I decided that we would start considering the possibility of moving back to the US. I casually applied for some jobs here and there with no real hopes. Then I found my holy grail. I noticed that Mozilla was looking for a Systems Administrator. This had kind of been my dream job ever since I was in college. Back then, we’ll say 2005 or 2006, I was just starting to get into open source software and linux and servers and really becoming a computer geek. Anyway a good friend of mine got an internship at Mozilla in Mountain View and after he moved there from Oregon, I decided to go visit him. While I was there, Mozilla was hosting an open house of some sort and I got invited to go check out the company behind everyone’s favorite browser. I was truly amazed when I got there. The people were all really friendly, knowledgeable and passionate about open source and making the web a better place. I had no idea that anything like this existed. Everyone I met seemed extremely happy, everyone loved their job. I thought I had a good job at the time, but never had I seen everyone at my place of employment be genuinely happy to be at work every day. I got the feeling that there was no such thing as a disgruntled Mozillian. I was impressed. Unfortunately I didn’t see myself ever getting to work there, because they already had desktop support people, and that was pretty much the extent of my experience at the time. They were still a pretty small company and were mainly focused on hiring developers and such. I wrote it off as a dream that would never come true and always hoped that someday I would find a place to work with such energetic colleagues. Well to date this hadn’t happened. I graduated college, entered the real world, got a job at a small tech firm which seemed like a good place to work, but once I got there I realized that there is no such thing as a “fun” place to work. Yeah, you have good days and bad days and you have fun with what you are working on, but I haven’t encountered anything like what I saw at Mozilla. So once I saw that they were looking for a Sysadmin and the job description pretty much matched my experience exactly, I applied for it. I couldn’t reasonably think that I would be so lucky to get an interview, but I could dream. Things that good just don’t happen to me. Plus it all seemed to perfect to really work out. The timing was right. They were looking for someone, just as I was getting disgruntled with my current job. My wife and I decided we would love to move to Northern California if the opportunity ever presented itself. But again, we didn’t really think I would get this job, it was just simply too good to be true.

Well, after two months of phone interviews, a trip to California and back, pleasant experiences all the way around, I was offered the job and of course I accepted it. It took some negotiating with my old company to let me leave in a reasonable amount of time (normally you have to give 3 months notice to quit a job in Germany), and I have to stick around long enough to train my replacement, but in less than a month I’ll be starting my dream job in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Now the stress of moving is starting to hit me. Gotta pack everything, plan everything, cancel cell phone contracts, utilities, apartment, find a new apartment, figure out how to move cats internationally, figure out how to get my car from Oregon (it has been sitting for two years), etc., etc.