Re: Distributed XMPP servers behind firewalls

    From: Liam Friel <[email protected]> [130610 23:42]
    Hi
    
    I have a requirement to make a distributed chat and presence system, with
    some restrictions to be described below, and I *think* that XMPP would be
    an extremely good fit. I have spent quite some time reading up on XMPP,
    however I am looking for some configuration advice: hopefully this is the
    correct list.
    
    This is to support a distributed loose association of computer clubs.
    
    These computer clubs generally run in networks over which they have no
    control (think school networks, or hotel networks: they run in those
    premises, and have internet access, but no control over routers or
    firewalls etc). They may be behind several layers of NAT.
    
    What I want is:
    - to create a central cloud hosted server
    - to run a chat server locally inside each of the computer clubs
      - clients on the local LAN can connect to their local chat server, and
    chat to each other
      - that is vanilla XMPP/Jabber behaviour. I favour prosody as the server,
    for various reasons.
    - each computer club chat server makes an encypted link to the central
    server and announces it's presence
      - this puts the local chat server "online" in our loose federation of
    nodes
      - central server remembers some data about each "local" server which
    connects
    - clients on each local LAN can how ask their "online" local server to tell
    them what other servers are online
    - clients can get a roster of clients either connected locally, or
    connected to other servers
    - clients can initiate a chat session with local clients, or clients
    connected to other servers
    
    I would rather not write this s/w myself from scratch: this is rather close
    to a distributed XMPP network of servers (isn't it?) except that I cannot
    really rely on DNS to find the local server in each computer club, and
    servers in each local club cannot directly contact each other. All contact
    will have to go via the central server.
    
    Any necessary level of ssl certs, unique identifiers for the "local" chat
    servers etc is possible. It's just that local server A cannot see local
    server B: they will have to communicate via the central cloud-hosted server.
    
    Is XMPP the right answer to this problem? Or am I barking up the wrong tree
    there?
    
    TIA for your expert advice.
    
    Regards
    Liam

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Hi Liam,
on my server I run the jabberd-1.4.2 XMPP-server. I use it always as a
private chat network, just client-server-client. Its relieable. The
public jabber servers behave sometimes strange so I installed my own. 

It should do for your network, for what I understand you can connect
various servers to each other and then use clients to chat across the 
network.

Maybe you want to take a look to its configuration file jabber.xml - all
the settings have remarks and help you to understand what you can do
with it. I suggest to download it, get an idea and start with a single
server and a client (pidgin has plenty of settings) where you can
register two users. Then try to send messages between two open chat
windows.

Cheers
herb langhans


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herbert[at]langhans.com.pl
office [at]langhans.com.pl
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+0048 603 341 441

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