Recently I worked from home, to communicate with my mates, my company use IRC and there is an IRC server set up on office server. I use irssi as my IRC client. All work well until I change my work place from my home in BeiJing to my wife’s hometown(FuJian). It seems irssi can not establish a stable connection to the IRC server in office.
At first, I tried ssh to my computer in office and run irssi there. It works but there is some problems: I tweak a script that use Growl to notify me whenever there is a IRC message for me, and with Sound notification. It work very well locally, but not work well remotely, there is a delay for the sound playing(I use esound to play sound effect file).
Later, I got another solution from greg(thanks!), building an ssh tunnel for IRC server, then I can run irssi locally. After I gave it a try, it worked very well!
To make the ssh tunnel, run command:
$ ssh -Nf -L 6667:IRC_SERVER:6667 GATEWAY_IN_OFFICE
Then in irssi, connect to “localhost” as the IRC server.
It seems ssh does a really good work on network connection. Thank you, SSH!
