[JDEV] Jabber in the real world.

[Thomas Muldowney]

More replies down there...

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 01:43:53PM +0000, Michael Wilson wrote:
> > What is the XML you are sending it?
> 
> The main problem with valid XML is the initial identification; if
> you send a registration or logon request that fails followed by a
> successful one, the socket hangs and the server stops accepting
> new connections. We also tried throwing random characters and XML
> fragments at the server which sometimes caused the same failure.

We actually found some good bugs for 1.4, most of these issues should be
solved.

> >  Have you tried CVS which will be 1.4 soon?
> 
> We usually only work with stable releases, but I do keep meaning
> to set up and have a play with 1.4 when I get the time.

I totally understand, it just might be good to keep your eye on CVS every once
in a while, it's usually fairly rapid development in CVS, and a lot of new
features get put on.  It's probably good to know where you can slim down your 
proxy code when possible =)


> > Could you be more specific?  I believe all our handling is per XML
> > standards regarding CDATA and PCDATA sections.
> 
> What I suspect is happening is that Jabber is treating everything
> as UTF-8. Jabber 1.2 won't accept non-ascii characters at all; it
> drops the stream. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that it
> unescapes most (but not all) escaped characters even if they're not
> ascii. It also inserts a 196 character before the special character
> (which I have to strip out since the client is expecting just
> ISO-Latin 8 bit encoding). It would be far preferable if Jabber just
> passed through escape and special characters without modification.
> 
> I logged these issues in Jaber's Bugzilla a couple of months ago, but
> the
> page seems to have dissappeared; I presume this has been discontinued?

I'm a little confused by what your trying to do versus the functionality of the
server at this point.  As far as my tests have shown, the jabber server follows
the XML standards:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006#charsets

As described all encodings should be in UTF-8 or UTF-16.  If you could give me
more info on what your sending, I could explore it as a bug.  I'm sorry about 
the bugtraq, but it somehow didn't get moved to the new site.  A new bug system
is on the way with major site upgrades the primary webmaster and I are working
on.


> > ACL is scheduled to be in 1.4, I'm not sure how far along it is.
> 
> Is this per user, per group or per server? Does groupchat have
> IRC-style channel access control too? Certainly would be nice...

ACL is server based for the 1.4 release.  Groupchat will gain better
functionality now that jabber:iq:browse is becoming an accepted standard.  Docs
should be published shortly.

> > Virtual Servers are already in and work fine.
> 
> Do they need to run on seperate port/IP combinations or will they
> multiplex onto a single listening socket?

multiple host definitions for a service works great.  I use it for testing on 
my box all the time.  I run a "localhost" for local testing and a 
"192.168.1.100" host for my external testing, and then a "temas.xxxxxx.net" for
my s2s testing.  All of those are from within the same basic config.


> > Could you be more specific for what you are looking for?
> 
> Well, an example would be someone in the 'support' domain
> sending a broadcast message of 'Anyone over there know anything
> about the ADSL NAT setup?' to the 'networks' domain. Everyone
> in the 'networks' domain would get this (in our client it pops
> up in a seperate window). Our system also supports sending
> broadcast messages to all logged in users in all domains for
> things like 'Restarting all servers, please re-login in 5 mins.'
> If this maps onto virtual servers in Jabber 1.4 this would mean
> the ability to message all users on a particular virtual server
> or the entire cluster.

The broadcasting to a group I'm not so sure about, sounds like something that
mod_groups would have (which I'm not sure about status on).  The admin level
messaging is (and has been) there.  If the user has admin level rights they can
send a message to servername.com/announce/online and it will be broadcasted to 
all of the online users.  You can also send it /all and have it sent to everyone
regardless of their current login state (This was put in for 1.4).

> > There are some better statistics given by the 1.4 server, but more
> > is always better in some environments =)
> 
> HR tend to say that they can never have too many metrics ;>

What is it... 80% of all statistics are wrong?  ;-)  Gotta have something to 
back up crazy funding and ideas ;-)

> > Have you played with jpolld at all?  This is a front end that handles TCP/IP
> > multiplexing into jabber.
> 
> Nope; sounds good though. Does it hide the fact that there are actually
> several back end servers from the users? Where would you run it in this
> configuration (presumably on multiple machines)?

Yes, it is designed with that whole idea in mind.  Check it out from cvs, along
with the scale directory.  It's fun =)

Feel free to jabber me any questions you have.

JID: temas at jabber.org

--temas
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