Over at Sliceo, people like the smallest VPS available for things like DNS hosting or IRC proxying. This means that a daemon keeps the connection to the their favorite IRC servers/channels open and logged in, as if the user was online 24/7. Instead of connecting directly to said servers and channels from normal clients ( like X-Chat ), the user connects to the irc proxy instead, and continue his/her chat sessions just as he never went offline.. In the line of Sliceo duty, i helped to stabilise a setup that was going to be used for this exact purpose.

We tried several bouncers, like psybnc, ircproxy, to no avail. Most would crash after a while, and would overall be horrible in the stability-department. But then we found BIP. It had a few bugs as well, but some personal contact to its’ author quickly solved every bump in the road. Now, 0.7 is out, which incorporates all the fixes to the problems we were having.

The result: a bouncer that has been serving the needs for mutiple IRC users for many weeks now without a single crash or hickup! People looking for a solid IRC bouncer should really check out BIP!