4 ms·

Grove is fantastic. I've been using IRC to communicate with my team forever and we were just using freenode. I finally got around to setting up an IRC server on

by dools 15y ago

Grove is fantastic. I've been using IRC to communicate with my team forever and we were just using freenode. I finally got around to setting up an IRC server on one of our machines but when it came time to configuring and securing it properly it was going to take days to read through all that documentation, so I just locked it down at the firewall level and we all connect using a forwarded SSH port, or from the local host (we all use irssi as our chat client anyway). A (rather large) ad agency that a friend of mine works for has a small group of people that wanted a collaboration solution and they all liked IRC so I sold them a monthly VPS with an IRC server configured but guess what - they have to forward a port to connect. That was cool, they said, they're on OSX and I provided them with scripts that just setup the port and opened Adium for them in a single click ... then along came a contractor that wanted to use windows :S So I said look: you can pay me to figure out all this shit for you, it'll take me days and cost you thousands of dollars, but for that same money you could buy a few years of a grove.io subscription and I can still connect all the same bots that I've got running for you. Seriously the price point they've got there is great. Properly configuring and securing a high availability IRC server isn't as simple as "set and forget" you have to do quite a bit of reading and configuring in order to get it running properly. Plus Grove has a bunch of web configuration options that are really handy for less technical folks. IRC is the chat technology of the past, present, and future, keep it up guys.

moe 15y ago
I agree with the praise for IRC, but I don't see what you need grove for. There's mibbit, irccloud and a few other web IRC clients, all of which seem quite a bit more advanced than grove. And for the server-part; why not hop onto freenode, make a private channel - and off you go? If you insist on private server then that shouldn't take someone linux-savvy more than 15 minutes either. You literally type 'apt-get install inspircd', tweak two and a half values in the config file (to enable SSL and set a server-password) - and that's it. An irc-daemon is not exactly maintenance-heavy, mine has been running for over a year without a blip.
- dools 15y ago
  Firstly, you're not actually allowed to use freenode like that, technically it's supposed to be for open source projects right? Secondly, I wouldn't run a server application like that on a publicly accessible server without learning pretty thoroughly about how to configure it securely, ymmv obviously but I just wouldn't do it. Thirdly, there are a bunch of web configuration options that allow non-technical folks to login and do a bunch of stuff. If my client were paying me to do that for them they'd blow their Grove.io budget by an order of magnitude or two each month.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    So don't use Freenode. EFNet has had invisible, keyed channels since forever.

by dools 15y ago

moe 15y ago

I agree with the praise for IRC, but I don't see what you need grove for. There's mibbit, irccloud and a few other web IRC clients, all of which seem quite a bit more advanced than grove. And for the server-part; why not hop onto freenode, make a private channel - and off you go? If you insist on private server then that shouldn't take someone linux-savvy more than 15 minutes either. You literally type 'apt-get install inspircd', tweak two and a half values in the config file (to enable SSL and set a server-password) - and that's it. An irc-daemon is not exactly maintenance-heavy, mine has been running for over a year without a blip.

dools 15y ago
Firstly, you're not actually allowed to use freenode like that, technically it's supposed to be for open source projects right? Secondly, I wouldn't run a server application like that on a publicly accessible server without learning pretty thoroughly about how to configure it securely, ymmv obviously but I just wouldn't do it. Thirdly, there are a bunch of web configuration options that allow non-technical folks to login and do a bunch of stuff. If my client were paying me to do that for them they'd blow their Grove.io budget by an order of magnitude or two each month.
- rhizome 15y ago
  So don't use Freenode. EFNet has had invisible, keyed channels since forever.