I thought long and hard about this, as a lot of effort went into making these building instructions, but I concluded that I feel better about sharing them with as many people as possible than sharing them with a handful and making a few bucks.
So I’m happy to announce that all the instructions I made so far will be available for free. Go check them out.
I haven’t been writing a whole lot in the past months, but I feel some things breeding and I’m also super excited about the new EV3 coming out this year.
Almost a month ago I uploaded the first version of Team Relay Chat, now I have a couple of users and some nice new features to show you.
Registration
Previously it required several not-so-trivial steps to add a user to your IRC server. Now you can just enable the registration module. Your employees will be able to just pick a user name and password and be good to go.
File Sharing
I realised file sharing was important right from the beginning.
It has been possible to share files from the web interface for quite some time now, but I added two important features.
You can now share files from your desktop client too. Just send them to Hubot via DCC, and Hubot will take care of uploading them.
The web client now displays a preview of uploaded images inline. No more no less.
Documentation
I’m working hard to make TRC as easy to use as possible. Both by just making things simpler and by writing documentation and even doing some videos.
ZNC comes with a lovely logging module that stores log files of all your chats in a folder deep inside the server.
It is now possible to browse all these files via the ZNC web interface. This interface will grow even better in the next few weeks.
Firewall friendly
Nowadays almost everyone is behind a NAT or firewall, and I’ve been working to make sure you can use Team Relay Chat even then.
Alternative IRC ports
You can now configure ZNC to listen on any port you want, even lower port numbers like 25(SMPT) or 80(HTTP) are supported. So even if port 6697 is blocked, you can still chat.
Passive DCC SEND
File sharing from the desktop uses DCC. Normally this means the sender(you) opens a port from which the receiver(hubot) downloads the file. This means you have to forward external ports to your machine.
However, Hubot also support passive DCC. In this case Hubot opens a port and you simply upload the file. No configuration needed.
It has started. A few weeks ago I was just playing around with Pallet, now I have been on Hacker News and have a couple of users.
My workflow is pretty desktop oriented, so when I was required to use a web application to keep in touch with teammates and Hacker School friends, I thought I could make a perfectly fine group communication tool based on IRC with plenty of desktop clients available.
The idea is pretty simple: Give every team a VPS with an IRC server, but the devil is in the details. A vanilla IRC server is a bit awkward as a collaboration tool. You might as well telnet to each other directly.
An important piece to the puzzle is ZNC. ZNC is a powerful bouncer with a ton of plugins. It stays connected to the server on your behalf 24/7, replaying all the messages you missed while disconnected. So that is user accounts and persistent chat right there.
Another important part is Hubot. Hubot is an IRC bot that can execute commands and notify you about things like Git commits, build failures and more.
There is also a web interface, because… you know, some people do live on the web.
Finally, I have some grand plans for file sharing, but that is for another time.
