Jabber Instant Messaging
For instant messaging, we are testing the jabberd server.
Besides instant messaging, the jabber protocol is a very basic and
useful streaming xml protocol that can be used for all sorts of
functions from group chatting to controlling juke boxes and monitoring
systems. More information on jabber can be found at the jabber homepage.
Clients for various operating systems are available from the jabber.org clients
page. Unlike most other instant messangers that depend on a single
central server or server-cluster, jabber uses smtp-like server to
server communications to allow jabber users on any server to talk to
users on any other publicly available jabber server. So jabber IDs take
the form of 'username@fqdn.servername'.
Connections also generally have another session section added with a
/sessionname after the jabber ID so people can be logged in from both
home and work at the same time.
Information needed to connect to our test server.
servername: jabber.fnal.gov
username: your-mail-gateway-username
password: your-mail-gateway-password
nickname: can be anything you want, i recommend using your username or
your full name to avoid confusion once lots of people start using this.
Some clients are not smart enough to negotiate authentication methods
on their own. if you have problems and there is an option to select:
enable SSL
plain-text authentication
Note that SSL only encrypts client-to-server communication so if you
are talking to someone using another jabber server, parts of the
conversation may be unencrypted.
There is a conference server set up for using chat rooms. The servername is
conference.fnal.gov.