Folks,

     We've received a couple of emails about Chatzilla not working with 'ngircd', more specifically using the Service URL provided by the BBHN node's status webpage.

     The issue is not with the proper URLs used by the node's status webpage but with Chatzilla, although Chatzilla is operating as designed.  When an irc: URL is presented to Chatzilla (e.g. irc://ae5ae-base6:6667/mesh) and the hostname portion is not a fully qualified (ae5ae-base6 vs ae5ae-base6.local.mesh) then the hostname portion of the URL is then [mis]interpreted as an IRC Network name. These Network names point to the large IRC networks around the world such as Freenode, IRCnet, GalaxyNet, GamesNET, and many others.  Since our node names probably won't match any of the network names that Chatzilla has embedded into it, the connection will fail.

The internal list of IRC networks can be modified per the instructions at http://chatzilla.hacksrus.com/faq/#networks .  I have used this info to update the internal tables of Chatzilla to allow my service URLs to point to the appropriate mesh nodes, at least for my mesh.  The problem is that I would have to modify the Mozilla file for each new IRC server I want to access via a service URL from our nodes.

Keep in mind that giving the command "/attach ae5ae-base6.local.mesh/mesh" to Chatzilla will work just fine and Chatzilla can work as nicely as an IRC client -- just not from a URL used to link to services on the mesh.

I'm sorry if you're using Chatzilla but I am no longer recommending it as an IRC client.  Please try my workarounds if you are using it.  If those don't suit you then there are PLENTY of other IRC clients available for most every computer known to man.  Yeah, IRC has been around for a bit!  :-)

-Rusty-