Chronophage.net Blog

Jabberd 2.0, unfortunately, was a beast to configure, and a beast to keep running. It was, for lack of a better word fragile. And, most unforgivably, IM+ could not authenticate to it properly. So I started investigating Jabber server alternatives. I originally wanted to try Ejabberd, but the long list of dependencies ultimately forced me to move on. OpenFire’s install, while not exactly daunting, flirted with my tolerance for jumping through hoops. Sun liscences + FreeBSD ports + annoying, multiple download, Google searches. (I’m looking at you TimeZone Update tool)

In anycase, once I installed OpenFire, everything fell into place. Concepts that I was trying to execute in jabberd, were a mere clicks and toggle in OpenFire. Transports, Multi-user Conferencing, Broadcasting (courtesy of a plugin) The only thing I was missing from Jabberd was multi-domain support. Oh well. Maybe one day OpenFire will support it. If not, and if I’ll need it, I’ll find something else.

One problem did cause me to think that I chose the wrong product was the seemingly random way it routed messages when you have more than one session open. Generally, the last login got the message, but not always. I use jabber for NAGIOS notifications, and my iPhone and Desktop machines seemed to fight over the message routing.

After a bit of searching, I found the system property route.all-resources, set it to true and whammo! Everything worked!

Now to figure out PubSub…