Given my renewed focus on security I’ve been looking to lock down much of my communications so that I feel more secure online. One of the things that I use quite a lot to connect with people who know WTF they’re talking about is IRC. #freenode is my network of choice as it has a bunch of interesting places with fairly active communities. irssi is my current client of choice for a few reasons.
SASL, among other things, is one thing that can be enabled to secure your communication on IRC. There’s quite a bit of information out there already about how to enable SASL for irssi on Freenode. These instructions worked out of the box for me on Linux, but not on Mac OSX. After downloading cap_sasl.pl and putting it in ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun and installing the required Perl modules I went through the steps to get SASL configured. When I attempted to enable it as per the instructions using the command /sasl set network TheColonial <password> DH-BLOWFISH I had the following error:
Can’t locate object method “send_raw_now” via package “Irssi::Irc::Server”
This took a bit of Googling to nail. It turns out that, for some reason, on Mac OSX irssi actually requires an extra package to be included in the script. So open cap_sasl.pl and look for this (it’s right at the top):
use strict;
use Irssi;
Immediately below this, add the following:
use Irssi::Irc;
The script should now run fine and irssi should stop complaining.
This might seem obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me! From what I can tell other people around the traps have had the same problem so I thought I’d post this in the hope that it helps others.
