IRC

SUWS uses Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as one of its main mechanisms for communicating with each other outside of meetings and other events.

Connecting

SUWS has two IRC channels

• #g3kmi on irc.ecs.soton.ac.uk. for Amateur Radio
• #sown on irc.ecs.soton.ac.uk. for SOWN and wireless networking

There's usually somebody around at most times during the day to talk to in both of these channels.

Emergency Backup IRC Server

In the event of a serious power or network failure rendering the IRC server inaccessible SUWS have delegated #g3kmi on irc.freenode.net and #sown on irc.freenode.net as the backup channels.

Clients

There are numerous IRC clients available. Below are some of the clients used by members of SUWS. If none of these suit, irc client - Google Search may be able to find you something better.

• Windows:
  • mIRC is one of the most popular GUI clients available.
  • IceChat is also another good GUI client.

• Linux:
  • Irssi is a powerful shell text based client that can be run in Screen (so you never miss a minute of conversation!)

• Mac OS:
  • Colloquy is an open source GUI client for Mac OS X.

• Cross Platform
  • ChatZilla! is a good extension to XUL based applications, such as FireFox
  • XChat is a GUI client that can be run on Linux, Windows (for a fee) and Mac OSX as well.
  • Pidgin is a universal chat client that supports IRC on Windows and Linux platforms
  • Mibbit is a web-based client

Logs

Logs for #g3kmi are available here. Logs for #sown are available at http://www.sown.org.uk/irc/. More information about SOWN's IRC channel is available here.