[JDEV] Jabber server redirection

[Dave Dykstra]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 08:34:54AM -0500, Dave wrote:
> I'm starting to feel like that Aflack duck that nobody listens to.
> You can simply forward ports 5222 and 5269 from company.com to
> jabber.sub.company.com and everything will work like a charm :-)

I'm sure that won't be acceptable in my case; the people who run the web
server company.com won't want all that traffic going through their server.
I am asking the network administrators if they might be able to redirect
the traffic for specific ports before it gets the web server, and that's a
possibility but I think that too may be too restrictive.


On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 03:10:00PM +0000, Thomas Parslow (PatRat) wrote:
> > I would like to be able to set up jabber in my company so that people can
> > have a jabber ID of id at company.com, rather than id at jabber.sub.company.com
> > when we run a server on jabber.sub.company.com.  Is there a way to do that,
> > or a plan to be able to do that at some point?  It's conceivable that I'd
> > be able to run a small redirection server on the machine called company.com,
> > but it has to use very little resources because the primary purpose of that
> > machine is web service.  In fact, I'm thinking I might want to set up
> > the redirection server to lookup up IDs in a database and redirect people
> > to different servers for load balancing.  Any suggestions?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > - Dave Dykstra
> 
> Hi,
> 
> How about using SRV record for the domain? The Jabber server should
> recognize the SRV record (it's supported it since 1.2 afaik) and
> connect to wherever it points to for S2S. You'd need to add something
> like this to the DNS zone for company.com:
> 
> _jabber._tcp    IN SRV  30 30 5269 jabber.sub.company.com


That sounds very promising.   Yesterday I happened to be looking at an
ethereal trace of the messages between the Microsoft Exchange Instant
Messenger server that's been set up in my company and one of its clients,
and I saw the client doing a DNS SRV query and thought jabber needed
something like that.  I had searched for something like that in the
gabber source code and in the jabberd directory in the jabber server
source code but didn't think to check other directories; I found it now
under dnsrv.

I don't unerstand how it helps for servers to use this though.  Wouldn't
the clients have to do it?  I don't see anywhere in the gabber source where
it attemps to do anything like this.


> The problem with this is getting the clients to connect to the correct
> server, if you just set them to connect to "jabber.sub.company.com" then
> they will send "jabber.sub.company.com" as the to attribute of the
> opening <stream:stream> tag which makes the server look for
> "jabber.sub.company.com" in the spool directory.
> 
> The only solution I can see to this is for clients to support
> connecting to an address which is different from the server name. In
> the client I am developing I allow the user to specify the name of the
> server in the username field by entering it in the form:
> user at server.com.

I think I know what you mean.  We experimented with changing the name that
the server calls itself to company.com while still saying the server was
jabber.sub.company.com when logging in, hoping that at least jabber ids
could then be thought of as id at company.com, but gabber couldn't handle it.


> Does anyone have any other ideas on how to do this?
> 
> Thomas Parslow (PatRat) ICQ #:26359483
> Rat Software
> http://www.rat-software.com/
> Please leave quoted text in place when replying


- Dave Dykstra