Greg Hudson’s MIT blog

A little background since this is my first XMPP post: XMPP is the protocol behind the federated chat network commonly known as Jabber (although “Jabber” is a trademark of Jabber Inc. and people don’t always feel right about using that term any more).  Google Talk uses it.  MIT currently runs an XMPP server using the jabberd2 code base, which isn’t really maintained any more.  In a month or so we expect to switch to running Openfire.  Right now our XMPP service isn’t used by as many people as use our older in-house Zephyr messaging service (to the best of my knowledge, anyway), but we’d like Zephyr to die out in favor of XMPP some day.
I haven’t had much to write about lately since I’ve been working on something intensely uninteresting: scripts to convert roster data and queued offline messages and vCard data between jabberd2 and Openfire database formats.  Since I know only a little more than jack about databases, it was slow going.  I think I’m done now.

On Monday I went to a meeting with Matt Tucker, the CTO of Jive Software (the people who make Openfire).  It was a useful meeting, and it prodded me to check out the changes Openfire has made to SASL and GSSAPI authentication.  They made me realize there’s a way I could do account auto-creation for GSSAPI authentication without modifying the core Openfire code, which is neat.  But it looks like they’ve done a huge rework destined for the 3.4 release which will make me redo all my work.  I’m not sure how that affects our deployment timetable.

That’s the summary of the boring stuff in my work life.  During the meeting Matt and I brainstormed an idea related to multi-user chat while is more interesting; I’ll write that up in a separate entry.