If you ever find yourself behind a corporate firewall, as I have found myself at the PIKtipi sprint in Potsdam, and need to access a remote IRC server, here is a command to tunnel the traffic over SSH:

ssh -L 6667:irc.freenode.net:6667 yourserver.com

yourserver.com is a remote server (not firewalled) that you have access to. Of course, this assumes that the local firewall is not blocking SSH on port 22, otherwise you won’t be able to access the remote server.

Then you can connect to the remote IRC server by using localhost:6667.

Or if you don’t have time to type these commands in on the terminal, you can just use IRCatwork.com.

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