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Reinventing IRC - Jabber is go

After a lot of frustration, reading of documentation and even giving up completely on certain paths of action I finally got Jabber up and running. The “Jabber burnout” as Adian called it was terrible and only now do I feel de-stressed enough to write about it.

I initially setup an installation of jabberd2 as I have had previous experience with it and was comfortable with it's administration. I got it working without difficulty and could connect to it via a standalone client but ended up abandoning it when I tried to get a web interface working with it.

As is, jabberd2 doesn't have it's own http polling system, which is necessary for use with a web client and I looked at a couple of mplementations, including Punjab

but decided to throw in the towel and go with a different Jabber server which had this facility built-in, along with logging and multi-user chat: all things jabberd2 didn't provide. Enter ejabberd.

I found configuring ejabberd a bit awkward and the documentation a bit unclear but it eventually bent to my will. This was followed with a lot of playing about with mod_proxy which made me want to cry more than once, but the result was that I got JWChat working and from behind a restrictive corporate firewall :)

Getting multi-user chat operational was the final piece of the puzzle and I learned an important lesson: ejabberd's mod_muc module likes to be configured to use a subdomain of the virtual host, even if it doesn't resolve to anything in DNS. This was a painful lesson to learn…

Today, we have a groupchat facility, with logging, that's accessible from anywhere on the web, magic!

{ 4 } Comments

  1. Phil | November 7, 2007 at 11:23 am | Permalink

    And since it’s on the web, it’s also on iPhone.

  2. steve | November 8, 2007 at 6:18 pm | Permalink

    Yep, accessible from anywhere on the web and from any web-enabled device :)

  3. John Bäckstrad | November 15, 2007 at 7:01 am | Permalink

    How does that logging work? Is it specific to JWChat somehow, or built into ejabberd? I run the same server at home, sans web-chat, and last time I looked there were only somr obscure way of getting server-side logging. I wonder if that has changed since? I would love logs on my server…

  4. steve | November 15, 2007 at 8:27 am | Permalink

    John: the logging I set in place is only for the multi-user chat and uses ejabberd’s built-in mod_muc_log. I found that once I had mod_muc up and running getting the logging working was trivial :)

    To log all jabber traffic you could make use of mod_service_log. I haven’t looked at this so I don’t know how easy it would be to implement.

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