DeadTOm's Journal: Revisiting IRC

I recently discovered that we have a few LUGs here in Montana. They have an IRC channel called #ubuntu-montana on freenode. In college, getting on 11 years ago, I was an IRC nut and my nights were split pretty evenly between Quake and mIRC. I had hoped that it would be fairly simple to get back on that bicycle and jump right back into IRC but of course with my memory no such luck.
I have a lot of free time at work. A great deal of it is spent coding on my PC at home via SSH and since the firewall here pretty much doesn't let anything out but port 80, I rely on text based programs pretty heavily to make the most of SSH. So my IRC client of choice is BitchX. The first thing I noticed was that it automatically grabbed my username from the linux box I'm connecting from and tried to use that as my nick on freenode. We can't have that. So the first line in my .bitchxrc file is this:

on connect * { orignick DeadTOm }

Do a /quit and restart BitchX, problem solved. Lucky for me nickserv still operates in much the same fashion it did a decade ago so registering my nick on freenode was painless except for BitchX flood protection kicking in and ignoring nickserv. I could see this becoming an issue with memoserv as well so back to the .bitchxrc file:

on connect "*freenode*" {
msg nickserv identify <my passwd> //save me the identify command while we're at it
addnoflood memoserv
addnoflood nickserv
}

My next concern was anonymity, or as near to it as one can get these days so I started looking into how to change what shows up if someone does a /whois on my nick. I quickly discovered that BitchX has virutally NO documentation so this all took a lot of google, trial and error to figure out.
So a /whois on my nick responds with this:

| DeadTOm (n=<my linux login name>@mtlaners.org) (Organization)
: ircname : <again, the login I use via ssh>
| server : heinlein.freenode.net (Missoula, MT, US)


It's resolving the domain name (mtlaners.org) all on it's own but it's pulling most of the rest from environment variables set on the linux box I'm connnecting from, in particular my login name. Since this is my first initial and last name I'd like to change that. Some googling turned up some environment variables that it looks for and I added these lines to my .bashrc to change those.

export IRCNICK="DeadTOm"
export IRCUSER="deadtom"
export IRCNAME="DeadTOm"


Log out of my SSH session, log back in. Log back in to freenode with BitchX and do a /whois deadtom and I now get this:

| DeadTOm (n=[e-mail]) (Organization)
: ircname : DeadTOm
| server : heinlein.freenode.net (Missoula, MT, US)

At the moment that's all I needed changed and now I'm just trying to refresh my memory on IRC slash commands. It doesn't help that most of the IRC related sites that google turns up for me here are blocked by the firewall. I'm sure I'll manage though.