Notes I wrote up months ago that have since been found by others to be useful. Posting for posterity. Basically, these instructions are for how to set up an always-on logger for IRC (chat) - helpful for being able to hear the conversations others are having about the project you're working on while you're away. I am assuming a fair amount of background knowledge here, but the content is remixable, so feel free to yoink/improve/etc.

1. ssh into the box you have an account on - for instance, Sugar Labs folks can use sunjammer (aka people.sugarlabs.org) by requesting an account at http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sysadmin/Shell_account_request
.

2. Run these commands (comments in parentheses).

screen

(a dialog will pop up, hit return to kill it)

irssi

(you'll get a mostly blank screen, with a stripe across the bottom with the
time and a number [1] in brackets - that's the window list - and then a line
below that with [(status)] in it, which is the description of the window that
you're in, and the place you type the rest of the commands.)

/connect irc.freenode.net

(and then, if you want, /msg nickserv identify <password> to sign in.)

/set autolog on

(it'll start storing things in ~/irclogs in self-explanatory filenames)

/join #sugar

(and whatever other channels you may want to be in)

(You'll notice that every channel you join opens up another window - the first
channel will be in window 2, the next in window 3, and so forth. Use ctrl-p
(previous) and ctrl-n (next) to switch between windows, or alt-NUMBER to jump
to the NUMBERth window.)

(You'll also notice that the numbers for each window light up in different
colors when someone joins/leaves a channel (blue), talks in a channel (white),
or calls your name in a channel (pink).)

(All the normal IRC commands work as expected, and so does tab-completion.)

(a note on /whois: if you have a PM window open for that person, the whois
information will appear in the PM window. Otherwise, it will appear in window
1.)

3. When you want to stop, do

/away <away message>

and then detatch from screen, which is

CTRL-a, d

(ctrl-a followed by d)

which will dump you in your normal sunjammer shell outside of screen.

Or you can just kill the terminal by typing

~.

or whatever.

When you log in again, restart the screen session with

screen -raAd

...and you'll be back. If you then type

/away

...you'll see all the messages sent to your nick in the meantime in window 1,
and you'll be set to not-away.

4. More docs at http://www.irssi.org/documentation/startup
and http://quadpoint.org/articles/irssi
.

I mostly find irssi useful for being always-on all the time and having backlogs
of conversations that have happened while I'm away. It also means that anywhere
I have ssh, I have IRC.