IRC connection help, please.

All right, so there have been several times while at school where I have found that being able to chat via IRC would be seriously A+. However, it's a no-go. I have tried it from my laptop, as well as school computers, and I have tried it from various clients. They all give me the same kind of message. Here's the one I get when trying to connect to the EoFF IRC via the built-in Java webapp:

Connecting...
Logging in...
Disconnected from irc.calindora.com

That's it.

I'm guessing this has something to do with blocked ports? So is there anyway to get around this?

Surely the school has blocked this traffic. If you have a server, you may be able to make an SSH tunnel for the traffic, but it doesn't sounds like you have a server to do this otherwise you would have done so already. :(

That would be strange if it were blocked ports specifically to block irc, since the java chat doesn't use the typical irc ports (it uses 49233).

Try typing
/server irc.eyesonff.aexoden.com:6667 and
/server irc.calindora.com:55555 to see if those are both blocked. (one typical irc port, one more nontypical.)

All right, didn't know that. Clearly not blocked ports then. I have trouble connecting to any IRC via Chatzilla as well as a few other clients that I tried and uninstalled so their names are escaping me.

My next guess is that my school's network blocks IRC traffic in general. That's possible, yes? Also, if that's the case is there a way to get around that?

Sounds like your school is doing layer-7 filtering, seeing as you get the disconnect message after the logging in message, and not before :p Kind of lame really, IRC has real uses too like collaboration on open source - in fact we used it to keep in touch when doing our second year project back at uni :p Basically means they're blocking IRC traffic on any port with deep inspection.

If you're lucky though, you might be able to get around it using secure IRC, which is encrypted, so not subject to such advanced filtering :p Try "/server irc.calindora.com:+49243" or whatever is required in your irc client to attempt to use an SSL or secure connection instead, where 49243 is our secure SSL IRC port :p