This post is out of date, and does not allow for newer versions of ZNC supporting mutliple networks per user.
ZNC is an IRC bouncer with some pretty nice features. For a number of reasons I wanted to move my ircing from home to a shell, so I decided to give ZNC a try. ZNC isn’t in ports, but compiles fine using gmake.
The only problem I encountered was getting it set up to work with multiple networks in irssi. Configuring ZNC itself to put me on many networks was easy enough, and when I connected irssi to it for each network using /connect it worked fine. Using /server add to set up irssi’s server list didn’t work out so well.
Every time I tried to add another server (for connecting to another network), irssi would remove the first one. This is because irssi only considers a server’s hostname and port when trying to work out if it’s unique. When I added another server which differed from the first only by password and associated network, irssi assumed I was updating the existing one and changed it. Putting the required entries in irssi’s config by hand also didn’t work.
The solution was easy enough; one ZNC instance can listen on multiple ports, so I got it to listen on a selection of ports using multiple Listen directives in its config file, and then added each network’s server to irssi using a different port number.
Now I can take advantage of cool things like buffer replay and detaching from channels. Sorry, irssi-proxy - you don’t quite cut it now :)