So I've finally divested myself of the last piece of Livejournal infrastructure that I actually used. Plonk. If you have me in your Jabber contact list as "jwz@livejournal.com" switch that to "yesthatjwz@gmail.com". (Not actually used as an email address.)
Google seems to realize that my real email address is jwz@jwz.org. If anyone can tell me how to make Google's Jabber server believe that jwz@jwz.org is my Jabber address, that'd be nice.
In theory, if you want to delegate the Jabber responsibility for jwz.org to Google's Jabber servers, you would need to publish the following DNS entries:
_xmpp-client._tcp.jwz.org. IN SRV 0 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.jwz.org. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
FWIW, I run my own Jabber server and thus don't know if Google's Jabber servers will let you do this kind of delegation, but in theory, this is what you'd do, if it worked.
I've got it working with this (and "google apps for your domain" turned on for the domain):
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
Ah, yes - you'll probably have to sign jwz.org up for "Google Apps for your domain" so that their servers will be configured to handle requests for jwz.org, etc.
That's cool to know that this actually *works* though. Maybe I'll shut off my own Jabber server and just delegate to Google. Hmm.
No, that's not correct. XMPP is federated (read "can be completely broken due to a computer entirely outside your control") and absolutely does not require that you do "Google Apps for your domain" unless you're using them to host your XMPP too, and don't do that.
I run the Jabber server that is built into Zimbra; it's from Jive. All you need in your DNS are:
_xmpp-client._tcp SRV 0 0 5222
_xmpp-server._tcp SRV 0 0 5269
If you do this, federated XMPP will work (except when it doesn't).
Fuck; that should have read:
_xmpp-client._tcp SRV 0 0 5222 <XMPP server name>
_xmpp-server._tcp SRV 0 0 5269 <XMPP server name>
The rest of us were all talking about not running our own Jabber server and letting Google do all the work. :)
Note that "google apps for your domain" doesn't require you to actually point an MX record at their servers if you don't want email for that domain to work on their servers. Might even be possible to disable the email service in the control panel. They're still evil, but at least they're flexibly evil.
I tried running my own Jabber server but couldn't get any of them to actually work. What do you use and how much of a pain in the ass is it?
I use bradfitz's Djabberd. http://danga.com/djabberd/
It was butt-simple to get running. It hasn't been updated since, what, 2008, and I haven't had any reason to care - it works and it's stable.
They are all pits of horror and despair. The canonical favorite, last I looked, was ejabberd. The 'e' is for 'erlang', because, well, of course you want to write your jabber server in erlang. If you only want to set it up to serve a single user on a single domain, it probably won't gnaw your face off more than once a year.
Don't even attempt to use either of the 'official' jabber.org servers (jabberd, jabberd2): there be dragons.
If you can set up jwz.org as a google apps domain without actually using google to handle your email (I think this is possible, but don't hold me to it), you'd get jabber under your domain name in the bargain. Of course google would be logging all of your chat history, so this may not suit your requirements.
I tried to set up ejabberd for myself once. I never got S2S to work right with people on Gchat; this is probably because I sacrificed the wrong color of goat over the SSL stuff. Since I don't use IM much, I said “fuck it”, notified the ~1 person who contacted me at that address, and killed it.
(This after taking the beehive that is clustered ejabberd and smashing it over my head. For fun.)
As I just mentioned earlier in this thread, the XMPP server in Zimbra Collaboration Suite just works. As long as you can spare a VM (or a machine), I recommend it -- I'm totally in love with ZCS OSS edition. It's like having Google Apps for my Domain, except I get to control it.
Also, theoretically if something is broken I can fix it, but I haven't tried to set up a build environment so I have no idea how heinous that might be.
I made this for you in '09. And I'm pretty certain it still works.
https://gist.github.com/204648
I tried ejabberd and jabberd and had problems in various spots, and found that OpenFire worked best for us.
(But this is at work where I really care about things like LDAP and SSL. I think one of the ejabberd problems was not dealing well with LDAP connections going away, and I suspect you don't have ldap servers, load balancers or firewalls to worry about)
Double-checked my setup and I since OpenFire is in java (see "pit of horror and despair"), I have a cron job restart the service every day. Otherwise after about a week it will fall over with mysterious 300 line long stack strace error messages in the logs.
Installation basically consisted of installing the right (sun) java package, installing the openfire package and then connecting to the thing with a web browser and poking around in the configuration options.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
I'm assuming that jwz doesn't have jwz.org on Google Apps and that he probably won't want to do that. So ....
Log into gmail with your fake account. Go to settings. Click on 'edit' near 'E-mail Addresses' and add jwz@jwz.org. Click on the link in the verification E-mail.
In your Jabber client, add the fake E-mail address as an account. People will then be able to send chat requests to either yesthatjwz@gmail.com or jwz@jwz.org. It will effectively use jwz@jwz.org as an alias and will pass everything through yesthatjwz, but at least people will be able to initiate chats through jwz@jwz.org.
This would seem to be the "wishful thinking" part of your suggestion. I don't see any way to make this work with either Adium or iChat.
Of course, I'm using something else (Pidgin.) When I create a Google Talk entry it defaults back to XMPP protocol, user (for you) yesthatjwz, domian gmail.com.
In Adium, for username, just put the full email address.
As for a local server, I've used Openfire. It's Java but it seems to work reliably. I've never tried to connect it to Google though.
I recommend running your own XMPP server. Prosody works very well, though they do not (yet) support IPv6, if you care.
Then hook up your SRV records and everything should be good (something like this):
_xmpp-server._tcp IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp.jwz.org.
_xmpp-client._tcp IN SRV 5 0 5222 xmpp.jwz.org.
_jabber._tcp IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp.jwz.org.
I can second Prosody.
I just installed its package, gave it my SSL key, and added myself an account from the command line admin. That was probably a year ago and I haven't touched it since.
My understanding is that you either need to set up Jabber on the server that the ID states (i.e. on jwz.org), or you need DNS entries to forward it over to somewhere else which is set up to run Jabber for you (hence all of the comments above about Google Apps for Domains).
Because, like with SMTP, when a Jabber client (or server) wants to talk to a particular ID, the first thing it does it do a lookup on the associated server and see where it should be talking to.
It's great to see the YesThat___ trend is getting legs.
YesThatTom on LJ, Twitter, AIM, Y!C, and others
It's a trend? Did I start this trend?
If you hadn't cut through the clutter by now, I'll just summarize: you don't. You would need to run your own server. (I run ejabberd. It is a massive pain to set up, but is zero maintenance after that.)
That being said, I think the blame for the final straw may have actually been Google. I had a week or so where my ejabberd couldn't reach any Gmail or Google Apps users. No idea why; all other non-Google Jabber contacts worked fine. And it's working now, as of maybe a week ago.