By the way, this happened to an admin friend of mine. They decided to add a firewall rule to let the connection starve … everything else seemed just wrong, he said.

First, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) ist one of the oldest chat/instant messaging system, originally based on command-line client which still work perfectly well. One of the more advanced clients ist “irssi”. It still runs in a simply terminal (window). “screen” is a great tool which enables you to leave open a remote terminal session and restore it later by reconnecting to this existing session. And it allows one to have multiple virtual screens residing on my remote server. Normal connections time out when the user goes away, but screen sessions not.

This user, like me, is running a screen session on some kind of server which never terminates. And in one of the virtual screens is running irssi, connected to IRC: As a result, I never leave IRC and so I’m always “online”, even when I’m away or sleeping. When I open my laptop, I connect to the remote screen session and I can see what others have discussed while I was away. Technically, my fellows never know if I’m there or not.

In the strips whe see how an admin displays the list of logged in users (”sam”) and in the last one he examines the process list where he sees the screen session and irssi still running.

Even when sam dies, his screen session is still there and he is kind of “alive”. Well, at least until someone terminates the process or reboots the server which would kill the last presence of sam. Or the admin could connect to sams screen session and say something on IRC which others would treat as a message from sam.

Pretty scary.

Herwig