As a learning exercise, I’m writing a Python program to connect to a channel on an IRC network, so I can output messages in the channel to stdout. I’m using asynchat and manually sending the protocol messages, rather than using something like Twisted or existing bot code from the net – again, it’s a more useful learning experience that way.
I can send JOIN and USER commands quite happily, and can PING/PONG away as required. However, I’ve noticed when opening a socket to port 6667, I’ll receive some messages:
NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...
NOTICE AUTH :*** Checking ident
NOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname
NOTICE AUTH :*** No identd (auth) response
even if I’ve not yet sent the JOIN/USER commands.
So, is this opening sequence of notifications specified anywhere? As far as I can see, the RFC doesn’t specify for anything in particular to happen before the client sends the JOIN command, and I wasn’t sure whether to wait for receipt of these notices before sending the JOIN command, and if so how do I detect that I’ve received all of the notices?
There’s no RFC requirement to do this, it’s just a common thing that servers in the wild do. Observe that they’re plain old NOTICE commands (i.e. just messages). Just treat them as messages sent to a psuedo-user “AUTH” (since the server doesn’t have a better name for you yet). You’re not required to wait for them, and the server is not required to send them.