Get your instant IRC Bouncer (psybnc) at jtan.com

JTAN Instant psyBNC Bouncers

A JTAN Instabouncer is a psyBNC IRC proxy. Your IRC client connects to the Instabouncer, and the bouncer connects to the network. This is useful for people for two main reasons: privacy and convenience. The bouncer protects your privacy by allowing you to connect to IRC using a custom, private vhost that is different than the IP address associated with your PC. A bouncer is also useful for people who cannot be on IRC all the time. It maintains a connection to the IRC network independent of your IRC client connection. It stays connected when you disconnect (N.B.the DYNAMIC flag disables this). Should your Instabouncer crash for some reason, JTAN runs a cron script that will automatically restart it after a brief delay.

A JTAN Instabouncer is set up on its own custom vhost and port. These are picked through the members area when the BNC is set up. The vhost is fully configurable and can be anything you want. Typically people create a vhost name in their own domain, hosted by their JTAN ProShell/DNS account.

My Instant Bouncer has been set up, how do I get to it?

To connect to your psyBNC bouncer, direct your IRC client to the bouncer with a command like

  /SERVER {vhost} {port}

where {vhost} and {port} are replaced by the custom vhost and port for your BNC. Suppose your vhost is bnc.mydomain.com and the port you chose was 1234, then you would connect using

  /SERVER bnc.mydomain.com 1234

The username and password is also set during setup. Make sure your ident username matches the username you selected. Your password can be changed directly on the psyBNC with a command like

  /QUOTE PASSWORD newpassword

Remember, the only vhost you can use is the custom vhost that you have configured through the members page. If you need to change your vhost, it must be changed through the JTAN members page. You cannot use the /BVHOST command to pick anything other than your own vhost.

Once you have connected to the BNC, you can connect to an IRC server with the command

  /QUOTE ADDSERVER irc.someircserver.net :6667

This is just the basics. The full set of psyBNC commands can be listed by typing

  /QUOTE BHELP

There may also be a help page here.

Setting your vHost

IRC people call it a vHost. Ordinary internet people call it a dedicated IP address. Whatever you call it, JTAN instabouncer's come with a free, configurable dedicated IP/vHost that you can set to whatever hostname you want.

Any hostname? Well, there's a small catch. The members page will allow you to set your instabnc vHost to have any hostname provided the forward DNS for that name matches the IP your vHost has been assigned. That means you must configure the forward DNS first before you reconfigure your vHost.

For example, let's say you have a JTAN ProShell/DNS account with which you host the domain mydomain.com. As part of hosting, JTAN serves the forward DNS for that domain. Now, suppose you want to set your Instabouncer to have the vHost bnc.mydomain.com. First you need to find the IP address of your Instabouncer. You can see it on the config page for the instabouncer in the members area. Suppose the address is 192.168.4.5. Now you can go to your DNS config page and set up an "A" record binding bnc.mydomain.com to the IP address 192.168.4.5.

After you do that, go read a book. DNS changes take a while. Typically 4 hours, but sometimes several days. You can use sites like this to test. If you don't wait, the forward and reverse DNS won't match and the members page won't let you set the vhost. Once you feel that the forward DNS for bnc.mydomain.com resolves to 192.168.4.5, you can go to the Instabouncer config page and set the vhost there. This sets the bouncer to use the new vHost as well as setting the reverse DNS for that IP address to match. Again there will be some waiting for the new reverse DNS to spread around the world, but once it has, your vHost is set.

Learning More

A good starting page to use for learning how to use your bouncer would be

the psyBNC FAQ.

And the JTAN IRC FAQ page is also a useful reference

JTAN IRC FAQs