Handling connection reset issues with bitchx

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date and not representative. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I'm testing out bitchx at work on my other latop which I ignore in the back of my monstrously large cube. The problem is that I'll ignore it for an hour and then go back to discover that I've had my connection reset like 60 times and I can't see any of the conversation at all.

I think the problem is that the router between me and the Internet drops sessions that aren't passing data. Telnet has an AYT kind of thing to deal with this. So I started looking for similar things in IRC land (to which I'm pretty new) and discover nothing. The problem is that I don't know what they would call it and when I do a Google search for the error message, I get everyone's IRC logs.

bitchx has a timer, though. So I tossed an event in the timer to whois thepresident (who doesn't exist) every 2 minutes. That seems to have solved the problem.

The better solution would be for there to be more people hanging out on #pyblosxom thus creating more data going back and forth.

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