It took me a while to figure out how connect to freenode’s IRC servers via SSL today. Here’s a reference for my future self and anyone else who might find this helpful.

N.B. I use weechat as my IRC client.

1. Pick a nick that’s not already taken. Weechat kept retrying unsuccessfully when I used one that was already taken.
2. freenode has instructions here on how to connect via SSL
3. I run weechat on Ubuntu 12.04 and had to install the intermediate and root certificates mentioned in the link above. Otherwise, weechat complains that it doesn’t recognize the certificate.
4. sudo mkdir /usr/share/ca-certificates/extra
5. Copy the Gandi and InstantSSL certificates to that directory.
6. Let Ubuntu add the new certificates’ path relative to /usr/share/ca-certificates to /etc/ca-certificates.conf by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates.

This should be all. Here’s the weechat IRC configuration for freenode which should be written to ~/.weechat/irc.conf.

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freenode.addresses = "dickson.freenode.net/7000"
freenode.proxy
freenode.ipv6
freenode.ssl = on
freenode.ssl_cert
freenode.ssl_priorities
freenode.ssl_dhkey_size = 1024
freenode.ssl_verify
freenode.password
freenode.capabilities
freenode.sasl_mechanism
freenode.sasl_username
freenode.sasl_password
freenode.sasl_timeout
freenode.autoconnect = on
freenode.autoreconnect
freenode.autoreconnect_delay
freenode.nicks = "davidxia"
freenode.username
freenode.realname = "David Xia"
freenode.local_hostname
freenode.command
freenode.command_delay
freenode.autojoin
freenode.autorejoin
freenode.autorejoin_delay
freenode.connection_timeout
freenode.anti_flood_prio_high
freenode.anti_flood_prio_low
freenode.away_check
freenode.away_check_max_nicks
freenode.default_msg_part
freenode.default_msg_quit
freenode.notify