My own XMPP/Jabber server

In the last week I took some time to set­up my own jab­ber server.

I decid­ed to have a look at ejab­berd. Seems to be nice. The ini­tial con­fig  was done with­out a prob­lem. Then I tried to enable some addi­tion­al stuff and then the docs start­ed to be not clear enough. It seems you have to con­fig­ure addi­tion­al host names if you want to add e.g. the echo ser­vice and an ICQ trans­port. I tried first with just the name of the sys­tem, but this did not work out as expect­ed. Now I have sev­er­al DNS entries to the same sys­tem, just to be able to run a XMPP serv­er with some addi­tion­al fea­tures . The default set­tings of the trans­ports are also to lis­ten on local­host, instead of a real inter­face of the machine.

Not real­ly user­friend­ly, and the docs do not explic­it­ly tell that you have to have those addi­tion­al entries (it is some­how told implic­it­ly, but if you go this way for the first time, it may not be obvious).

To con­fig­ure access via an web fron­tend (via the http_bind/bochs exten­sion), the docs are also not very clear. It is easy to over­look that you have to make a change in the lis­ten part and in the mod­ules part. After get­ting every­thing right, all seems to work good. I already have sev­er­al users and it seems that they are sat­is­fied. The only “bad” thing is that pid­gin does not seem to give a nice UI to add your ICQ (or what­ev­er trans­port you have con­fig­ured addi­tion­al­ly) account. While pid­gin can do ICQ, peo­ple may use the webin­ter­face at some loca­tions, so it would be nice if pid­gin would sup­port this better.