Connecting to IRC through bouncer

What does this do?

Instead of directly connecting to an IRC server from your computer, you can have a bouncer running on your servers. This will let you stay connected to channels all the time and receive messages, which you can later read when you connect to the bouncer from home.

Another benefit is that you will appear in all chat rooms via the reverse DNS of your bouncer, and not your home IP. This can be one more indicator for your identity.

Setup

On the local machine I will be using HexChat. The bouncer on the server is using znc.

Server

This post assumes that you already have DOCKER installed.

First make a driectory to store your data. For example $HOME/znc-data.
Now pull the official docker image with docker pull znc.

Once this is done you can run a configuration tool to help you get set up with
docker run -it -v THE_DATA_DIRECTORY:/znc-data znc --makeconf.
This will ask you some questions, such as user name, and password for the bouncer and help you set up a network.

When you are done you can now run the bouncer with
docker run --name -d -p 6697:6697 -v znc-cfg:/znc-data znc. Note that 6697 should be changed to whatever you have set up during the znc configuration. Also your machine should probably listen on another port. Just choose one between 1024 and 65535.

Afterwards you can go the ip address of your machine at the port. so for example 12.34.56.78:12345. If you set up znc to use SSL add an https in front, so https://12.34.56.78:12345. Here you have the web admin part. You can manage your bouncer here if you need to.

Locally

To put the bouncer to use, you have to connect from your local machine.
This is pretty straight forward. Just connect as you would to any server, just using the IP and PORT of your bouncer. Use the /PASS authentification method and provide your username and password.

That should be all. If you have any problems, or a more complex setup, go to http://wiki.znc.in/ZNC.