Episode: 1869
Title: HPR1869: Irssi Connectbot
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1869/hpr1869.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:29:24

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This is HPR episode 1,869 entitled UrseConnect. It is hosted by Enable and is about 14 minutes long.
The summary is Enable talks about setting up UrseConnect.on Android phone to access IRC.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
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Hello, this is Enwai Bill and today I thought I'd talk to you guys about a nice app I found
for my phone called Ursee. I don't know if any of us have decided how to say this yet,
IRSSI maybe. I should talk a bit about how I interact with IRC. So I have a VPS and I usually set my
VPS as up to, so I can SSH in, I'll generate an RSA public key pair, put my public key up there,
then turn off password login, turn off root login, and change the port to something privileged under
1000. I'm not going to tell you what that is. So why I do that is I, in the morning or sometimes
like my desktop it just runs 24-7. It's connected to my VPS via SSH and I use T-mux to have virtual
screens. So one of those screens will always be IRSSI or IRC or however we're going to say that.
So that I can sit in three or four, well let me see how many I'm in, one, two, three, four,
I'm in five channels and then sometimes another T-mux window will be a channel into our 2600
group. So kind of my flow in the morning is whenever I sit at desktop it's usually a blank screen
but it's SSH in because somewhere else in the house, usually my laptop, I have SSH connected
and then done a T-mux attached minus D. What that does is let's me get back into the T-mux session.
So I have all my screens and everything where everything's running and the slash D disconnects
the other screen that happens to be accessing T-mux. Why I do that is because you can run into problems
with the screen size. If I'm on my, let's say I'm on my E which is a 11 inch, 10 inch, small screen
and I SSH in and T-mux attached, I will attach and it will shrink the size of the window down to
that 10 inch, 11 inch screen size. Then if I come upstairs to my 26 inch desktop and I T-mux
attached, it will keep the screen size the size of the E and then just have a whole bunch of
dotted lines going filling up the rest of the 26 inch. So the minus D just drops whoever was
using whatever computer was using the T-mux session before then. So as I was saying,
whatever in the morning, whatever computer I sit at, I SSH into my VPS, T-mux attached minus D
and the first screen that's there is IRSSI. So that keeps me persistent in IRC and when I come back,
you know, I might be away from computers for two or three hours working but when I come back,
I have the backlog there and I can see what the conversation was and if I want to jump in or
see if someone mentioned my name, it'll be highlighted. So I like to have like a persistence in IRC
or you feel a little lost if you just jump right in and nobody's talking and the room just seems
dead, you know, I like the backlog. So there are often times when I'm out at work or something,
you know, I might be an hour away and I've got a three hour job or something but I'd like to
interact with IRC but what I would usually do is just wait until I got home and then, you know,
see if I can jump in or mention what I wanted to mention and I got to thinking there must be a way
that I can do my regular desktop or laptop setup with my phone. So I started poking around and I
found IRSSI Connectbot. So this is maybe everyone, maybe people are familiar with Connectbot which is
an SSH client. This one kind of, it is the SSH client Connectbot but then it has some IRSSI
interaction with it so we'll get into that in a minute. Okay, so this is what I found out, I found
to connect to IRC via my Android phone. IRSSI Connectbot is in Android. I don't use the
Goog so I get everything out of Android or if I have to purchase something, I do once in a while
use the Amazon app store but the only time I've ever done that is to get beyond pod. So I basically
find everything I need in Android so it's good if you don't have that installed, install it and
have a poke around, it used to be fairly sparse a few years ago but now there's tons of things in
there. Let me, I'm looking at my phone now, let me get back to where I was. So IRSSI Connectbot shows up,
you tap the screen, oh no, you don't have to tap the screen, there it is down at the bottom,
it'll say SSH, then you can just type in the SSH and the host name and the port you want to connect to
but what I wanted to do was see if I could find a way to generate key pairs like I do with my big
new desktops and laptops and then push the key up and it turns out that IRSSI Connectbot can do that
so let me see where I was here. You hit menu and then manage public keys and then menu again and
generate and here you can generate a public key pair, this this this was really great. You can name
your public key, choose RSA or DSA, bits 1024, 1024 is kind of considered week these days I think,
you can change that to 2048 or I want to 4096, why not just make the best key I can, it doesn't take
that much time. Load key on start, I did click that so that every time IRSSI Connectbot starts,
the key is in the background waiting to be, it's there to be accessed, confirmed before you said
didn't do that and then you hit generate and what it will do is put up like a little blue screen
and ask you just to keep swiping your finger around and random, you know, circles, lines, whatever
and that is generating the entropy. So this takes, it was actually quicker than on my desktop, maybe
the entropy was better with the touchscreen, I used to just hammer away at the keyboard a little bit
for entropy. After that's done, it generates your key, then you'll see you know you can have
different keys for different servers so I just I named my phone underscore bill and what you can do
then is long hold on that key and then it's down in there, it'll give you another menu system
and down there you'll see copy public key. So hit that, copy that and then you're going to need to
SSH into your server but as I said, I turn off password authentication on my server so I just
went in on my desktop here and I just went into a Etsy SSH changed SSHD config to allow passwords
and then restart at the SSH service. So I'm just going to leave that this little window of time
is just for me to push my, it's just to push my public key up to the server and then I'll change
that back in SSHD, turn password authentication off. So you have your public key in the phone's
clipboard. Now you hit the back button, hit the back button, connect to your server, just press the
button. It might try and connect using the public key and say that fails, that's what happened
on mine, it'll, but it will give you the password prompt. So put in your password and then you're
going to type echo, quote, then long hold your screen and hit paste and that will put your public
key in there, then close the quotes and then greater than, greater than sign. So we're going to push
this file into space dot SSH backslash authorized underscore keys and that will put your, uh,
your key up there. Now you can go back into your server, you could probably do it right here from
the phone, but if I have a keyboard in front of me, I'm going to use the keyboard. I went back
to Etsy SSHD and turned off password authentication again and then restarted the SSH server
and then to test things, I disconnected on irsci connect bot, connected to that server again
and bang, it just lets me right in. The only problem I ran into is I didn't have access to
arrow keys on the Android keyboard, the default keyboard. Like I was saying with the, uh,
I SSH into my server and the first thing I do is hit the up arrow which goes to the last command
which is always tmux attach minus d. On the phone I have no up arrows to go up. So I just typed it in
but I don't want to have to type that in every time. So I started looking around at different
alternative keyboards for the Android phones, uh, I tried hacker keyboard. That was pretty good.
But I was, I forget what issue I was having with it. I don't think it was suggesting, uh,
it wasn't suggesting spell corrections as you type and then I had to get a, you have to get a
dictionary so I would have to get the English dictionary but I couldn't get the English dictionary
from eftroid. I would have had go under the Google market and the big Google again, you know,
so I kept looking around and it turns out that this phone, this is a Samsung Galaxy S4,
has two keyboards in it. The second keyboard is called swipe and in the bottom corner,
well it allows you to like spell by just dragging your finger around but you can also just, uh,
use your thumbs and I continue to use my thumbs. I don't use the swipe feature. Yeah, maybe I'll get
used to it. Right next to, on the lower left hand corner on the swipe keyboard there is a little
finger with a yellow swipe. Right next to that is question mark 123 and if you long hold that
you'll get the choice of 12345678 different keyboards. You can get the number pad,
you can get different layouts, you can put the keyboard up in different sections of the screen,
you can get like an emoticon keyboard and then that keyboard right there that I want I'm going to
press it right now is the arrow keys. So that gives you, you know, up down left right,
it also gives you like cut and paste and back arrows. So this was quite handy. This is exactly
what I was looking for and now I can reproduce the flow I do using large computers with my phone
and I never have to be away from IRC again. So that was basically connecting to your server via SSH
with connect bot. That's what connect bot does, but this is irssei connect bot. So irssei connect bot
or irssei connect bot as a few features that specifically interact with irssei. If you
first of all I use four panes. I split my window four panes and then so I'm in
the top. The next one down are sitting in two channels. They stay there all the time.
The bottom one is my lug. It stays there all the time and then the third one down I can go
between two different channels that I switch back and forth and when irssei connect bot connects
to that irssei session it just shows one room per screen because you don't have a lot of screen
real estate on a phone. So what that does is all my channels I'm in I can swipe left and right
to get to different channels and then if I want to go back into the backlog which would be difficult
with a phone you drag the screen on the left hand side just drag up and down. So this is a nice
setup and it's doing everything I wanted it to do and I found this handy and hopefully some of
you might as well. Now I know I kind of was just talking along and assuming everybody in the
world runs Linux but I'm sure you can do this on a windows box too you know how to set up your ssh
servers and the process shouldn't be too different. Another thing you can do I'm not sure if this is
a connect bot feature it probably is or if it's an irssei I would imagine it's connect bot but
you're going to want to know about this. When I first used this and I connected to my server the
font was so tiny it was unusable. I had to get a magnifying glass just to see what I was saying which
was past or certificate authentication only. So to change the size of the font you use the volume
up down button and then you can get a nice comfortable font that is quite usable. So this is just
a quick episode because I found this helpful and hopefully someone else will. If anybody has any
comments you can use the comment section or I am N.Y. Bill at gunmonkeynet.net and GNU Social
is sm.commonkeynet. Yeah. GNU Social is sm.commonkeynet.net. Okay I'll talk to you guys later.
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