[northwestengland.pm] IRC Server Software

Smylers Smylers at stripey.com
Thu Feb 18 16:45:11 GMT 2010


Carl Johnstone writes:

> Asumming you've got a linux box handy, there's probably going to be a
> package available that you just need to install.

There seem to be several; we're currently looking at them and trying to
decide which matters.

> I'd argue it's possibly easier to setup VPNs than have to expose a
> whole bunch of different services and control access to them
> individually - but to some degreee it depends what you've already got
> setup.

We have VPN access, but people (quite reasonably) tend to use it when
they need to.  I'm hoping we can nurture an IRC culture of the team
having a window open by default; I suspect many of us don't mind joining
in an out-of-hours chat if we happen to spot it, but it's less likely we
will see it the higher the barrier to being logged in.

> However I ditched our internal server in favour of a channel on
> irc.perl.org. IRC already has enough basic ACLs in place, and what
> you're doing probably isn't that interesting for the IRC server admins
> to listen in  :-)

Hmmmm, that's an interesting idea.  (That hostname might put off the C#
half of our team though!)

> You'll probably also want to adopt IM of some sort - most people are
> more familiar with it than IRC.

Yeah, we have an internal Jabber server, which authenticates using Ldap.
But because IM is directly interrupting one individual, and demanding an
answer right now, people can be relucant to use it unless they're stuck
on something.  Or they have to try several folk in turn until they find
the 'right' one.  Or they get an answer, but somebody else who wasn't
included would've had something germane to add had they known.

So I'm seeing if IRC will work better for some kinds of in-team
communication.  Possibly we'll want separate Perl and C# channels, but
I'm thinking of starting with just one and seeing what happens.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Smylers



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