Clemson DCIT Blocks IRC Ports

As many of you have noticed, Clemson DCIT has blocked ports 6667 and 7000 (at least, possibly more). The result is that students on Clemson's network will no longer be able to connect to IRC and chat.

One of our new members, SquishyWaffle, has set up a workaround for this. As he described in this forum post and at the last meeting, he set up TCP redirection using TCP Simple Gateway on his domain ccaverna.ath.cx port 7500, which students on campus are still able to access. When used as connection information in your favorite IRC client, it redirects you to irc.gimp.org port 6667 and you can connect to that IRC network, so that you can, of course, chat on #clug.

We also came up with the idea of running our own IRC server (you may have gotten something about that on the mailing list) but decided against it, since that would probably cause us to lose some people from the channel. So if you're still wondering, no, we're not moving to a new IRC server. We have decided, however, to run a few more TCP redirectors on different off-campus networks to get around this. Connection information for these networks will be posted once they're up.