RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

Empathy does not connect to irc if nick is already in use, which is understandable and not a bug per se.

The problem lies in empathys unability to reconnect to IRC server after unexpected loss of connection (e.g. unplugged cable). It is fairly reasonable to assume that connection should be restored asap, albeit at the expense of changing nick (adding underscore, number, whatever -- as most other clients do)  

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
empathy-3.4.2.1-1.el7.x86_64

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect to IRC server
2. Disable your networking
3. Enable networking

You are not supposed to use empathy for IRC in RHEL7, which is why we do not ship telepathy-idle. Please use xchat instead.