I have had irssi installed for a month or so and idly connected to Libera and OFTC just because they're what come preconfigured in irssi, but the lack of chat logs means you more often than not connect to an empty room. I filed away the knowledge that I should connect from my devbox (a MacBook Air clamshelled on a shelf with Debian 13) in a tmux session so I can catch up. I'm warming up to speaking up in some Linux channels, but for lower-stakes activity... my friend Koinuko set up an IRC server last week! And I learned a bit about modern IRC security practices along the way.
At first, I just opened irssi and sent /connect irc.koinuko.pink:6697, /connect irc.koinuko.pink -p 6697 (SSH-style), and /connect irc.koinuko.pink port 6697 to no avail. It kept defaulting to port 6667.
Then I opened irssi with irssi -c irc.koinuko.pink -p 6697, and got this complaint:
09:09 -!- ERROR NON-TLS command received on TLS-only port. Check your connection settings.
09:09 -!- Irssi: (default) warning Connection reset by peer
irssi defaults to plain, unencrypted text on port 6667 even if you specify port 6697. In irssi, I ended up running
/server add -ssl -network koinuko irc.koinuko.pink 6697/save/connect koinuko
What /save does is add a dictionary to ~/.irssi/config (don't love that; I will try to move it to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/irrsi/config) that looks like:
{
address = "irc.koinuko.pink";
chatnet = "koinuko";
port = "6697";
use_tls = "yes";
tls_verify = "yes";
}
I now have a tmux session on my server with two irssi windows open for OFTC and Koinuko's server. Even if this doesn't lead to regular usage, it's still good to look under the hood and see that all these free software and open source software servers prefconfigured in irssi all use port 6697 and TLS per /server list. This is also clear in the config file list of dictionaries.
10:09 Server Port Network Settings
10:09 irc.dal.net 6667 DALnet
10:09 ssl.efnet.org 9999 EFNet tls, notls_verify
10:09 irc.esper.net 6697 EsperNet tls
10:09 irc.libera.chat 6697 liberachat tls
10:09 irc.gamesurge.net 6667 GameSurge
10:09 ssl.ircnet.ovh 6697 IRCnet tls
10:09 open.ircnet.net 6667 IRCnet
10:09 irc.ircsource.net 6667 IRCSource
10:09 irc.netfuze.net 6667 NetFuze
10:09 irc.oftc.net 6697 OFTC tls
10:09 irc.quakenet.org 6667 QuakeNet
10:09 irc.rizon.net 6697 Rizon tls
10:09 irc.undernet.org 6667 Undernet
10:09 irc.koinuko.pink 6697 koinuko tls