As part of my new role as a team manager I want to make sure I’m readily available for both my direct reports, and the internal customers my team services.

This means getting clever with my IRC setup.

Since I first got an iPhone I’ve used Colloquy for IRC, which has “bouncing” (sharing a single connection between multiple clients) and push notifications, however these require using Colloquy, which in turn requires OS X. I wanted something less restrictive.

I discovered ZNC - a bouncer application - that does lots of nice connection sharing things and - with plugins - supports push notifications. Great! Except that the version packaged for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (which all of my servers run) is way out-of-date.

Packaging is one of the areas of Ubuntu I’ve never really got involved in, but I took the opportunity to a) backport the current version for Precise Pangolin to 10.04 LTS b) setup a Personal Package Archive. After a bit of hair pulling, I succeeded in both.

Now I had my connection sharing up and running (along with nice features like automatically changing my nick when I disconnect and auto-replying to people while I’m disconnected), I needed push notifications. Fortunately Colloquy provide a ZNC plugin that does exactly that.

Except it doesn’t work with my iPhone 4S. The plugin compiles, loads etc. and works fine with my iPad (running iOS 5), but it refuses to register my iPhone as a push device. :(

I then discovered another ZNC module for interfacing with Prowl, an app I’d installed, but never really played with. Fortunately this does work. The notifications are a little slower than Colloquy, but the app is very flexible and now I’m wondering where else I can make use of it.