Re: [Cerowrt-devel] making cerowrt chattier

[Jim Gettys <jg@freedesktop.org>]

On 06/12/2012 08:52 PM, Robert Bradley wrote:
> On 12/06/12 14:10, Dave Taht wrote:
>> Now, I've implemented a tiny jabber server in my current builds and am
>> looking into javascript based chat servers that I could incorporate
>> into the introductory web page, which could be used for notices of
>> this sort, and jabber users could also merely subscribe to notices
>> from the router so that they get chat notices when something is going
>> wrong - "upgrade needed", "we are under a syn attack", "Earthquake",
>> "out of memory", etc.  I haven't found a lightweight version of
>> sendxmpp yet, and have never been fond of centralized chat services in
>> the first place (the venerable "talk" protocol has no ipv6
>> implementation, I note) , so perhaps there's a better standard or
>> system I can use that is more aggressively p2p/distributed? I have
>> seen chat demonstrated over ccnx, but don't know anything
>> about the implementation.
>>
>> ejabberd is NOT lightweight but supports muc and other services.
>
> ejabberd is probably a bit extreme for this unless you want to add
> more services, but I think simple broadcasts could actually be done
> via the Bonjour variant of XMPP
> (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0174.html).  I've no idea if a
> command-line client exists for that, though, and my attempts to send a
> basic message using netcat and Empathy failed badly.  Maybe I need to
> publish more services with Avahi?
>
>>
>> There is also the possibility of a lightweight email tool or the
>> winpopup utility for samba.
>>
>
> Winpopup might work, but is generally disabled on the Windows side
> these days (since SP2?) thanks to Messenger service spam.
>
Hmmm....  I guess I should excavate a bit of stuff out of my memory.

Not clear to me that the home router should normally do a chat server;
you certainly don't want ejabberd (which is written in erlang, and will
certainly have a ton of funny dependencies) even if you do.  Openfire is
likely a lot smaller, if you do; but I haven't looked.  There are a
bunch of other xmpp servers around, but ejabberd and openfire are the
most serious I found (and may be overkill) when I went looking 3 years
ago.  Having been badly burned by ejabberd, I'd stay away from it, even
if it is small (which it isn't, at least in RAM footprint), if only
because fixing bugs in erlang has an "interesting" learning curve....

More interesting may be to look at the telepathy library, which provides
pluggable back ends to a ton of different chat systems, and just look
into being able to have the router use whatever server the user prefers
(which might be on the router, if we find a small one that is suitable.

You'll find telepathy here: http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

It's too late tonight to dig into it at all.
                        - Jim