First off, a couple of requirements:

• low latency on the user input side
• deal with my somewhat ridiculous volume of IRC usage
• accessible from any reasonable platform (which I roughly classify as “anything with a keyboard for input, and has internet”)

So when I say “somewhat ridiculous”, that means:

• 12 IRC networks
• 65 channels (of varying volume)
• varying numbers of query windows, usually about 30+ open

I flatten my jabber/gtalk to IRC as well, by using bitlbee. It counts among the 12.

Historically, I had this set up as irssi with irssi-proxy in the USA, then another irssi+irssi-proxy at my home (to join a network only accessible via the WUG at that point), and then I would connect my machine-local client to that server (which was on dyndns). A couple of pain points with this included the fact that dyndns sucks donkey balls, and syncing of logs (which I did with rsync at the time) was crappy. At the time I also had less IRC volume than I do now.

Aside from those pain points, and the occasional power outage at home (which just made me link up to my parent client), this worked well. Quassel’s backlog fetching is shiny, though. Very shiny. I wanted it. So I redid my IRC setup. Now there’s only one master server (currently in Germany), with a quassel core connecting to it. The irssi proxy config looks like so:

20:08:39 -!- Irssi: Module proxy/proxy already loaded
20:08:44 [irssiproxy]
20:08:44 irssiproxy_bind = 127.0.0.1
20:08:44 irssiproxy_password = passwordhere
20:08:44 irssiproxy_ports = freenode=6001 shadowfire=6002 oftc=6003 bitlbee=6004 ...

So basically:

• /load proxy
• /set irssiproxy_bind ip
• /set irssiproxy_password ircpassword
• /set irssiproxy_ports network=port network2=port2

Connect the quassel core up to the proxy, and that’s it. Infinite scrollback for any of my devices with quassel, and I can just ssh from some random server and connect up to screen as well (which has saved my bacon in DCs a few times).

And yes, I know this is (a bit) crazy.