[jdev] Figuring out what a client thinks its JID is

[Aaron Kryptokos]

On 2009-11-14, I sent a message to this list about about how to resolve
confusion in clients between node name and SASL username, which are not
necessarily the same at our site.  This is a flaw with XMPP client 
implementations, not the specification, but its a flaw that most XMPP 
client implementations seem to have.  And in the intervening time, this 
has been a continuing source of problems in our environment.

Basically, our user instructions for broken clients is to log using
their authentication username as the node in their JID, which is the
only way to make many popular clients (such as Pidgin) work.  The
problem we encounter is that most of these clients will operate in a
reduced-functionality mode, because the client is unable to recognize
stanzas that are directed to them if they have a 'to' attribute.

One way to work around these clients is to perform translation on the
'to' attribute to whatever the client thinks its JID is.  The problem 
with this is the client never actually tells the server what it thinks 
its JID is.  Ideally, clients would always assume the JID that the 
server provides in resource binding, but in practice, most do not do 
this correctly.

Does anyone have any creative ideas on how a server could get the client 
to tell the server what it thinks its JID is?