I have been using IRC approximatelly ~15 years. I have begun using IRC at the start of the millenium then on public accesible PC's we have been using public webpage services as proxy to enter a IRC network if no local IRC client has been installed. Nowadays this is stll a popular method. Later as a frequent user XChat has been the first GTK client to connect to IRC networks. Pretty soon I have realized IRC is meant to be used as a 24/7/365 service, but with a graphical client it would not work. My personal PC had to run for days. At that time the quick solution was to use a command line IRC client plus screen. This has been, and probably still is the most favourite combination of programs to have a long term connection to a IRC network. It has only one problem. If the client reboots in case of a power failure there is no way to connect automatically to IRC. The final solution to solve this minor problem is to use a IRC bouncer. There are some out there, the most popular and also still in development is ZNC. ZNC is a powerful application running as a daemon, keeping your nick logged into a IRC network. It works as a relay so one can use the IRC client of the choice to connect to ZNC and ZNC connect to the IRC network.

ZNC has a local webserver to configure the needed parameters but it is also possible to configure ZNC from command line, which is my prefered way of doing it. Since ZNC works as a "fire and forget" service "once configured - runs always" it is hard to remember the command line parameters for me.

All command are meant to be working while connected with a favourite CLI irc client to the znc service. Showing help in CLI :

/msg *status help

Saving current configuration:

/msg *status saveconfig

List all available and configured mods

    /msg *status listmods

Showing configured SASL authentication

/msg *sasl help
/msg *sasl requireauth yes
/msg *sasl set username <username> [<password>]

To see SASL debug messages f.e. to debug or verify encrypted connection use the verbose mode

/msg *sasl verbose yes|no

These are only the very basic commands used to configure and verify the znc daemon, for furhther command line check the website of the ZNC procject. Or the project website.