[Cerowrt-devel] making cerowrt chattier

[Jim Gettys]

On 06/12/2012 10:22 PM, dpreed at reed.com wrote:
>
> I have an awkward worry that the functionality here is expanding to
> fill all possible space on the machine, so it is less a router than a
> complete "home appliance".
>
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> On a machine that has almost no internal isolation capabilities,
> lurking potential alignment bugs whenever the kernel is updated by the
> x86 maintainers, vulnerable to the first compromised service, it may
> be a bit risky to load on to the system every app except the kitchen sink.
>
>  
>
> My personal bias would be to make a darn good router, and leave the
> other stuff entirely out of the picture.
>

I mostly agree with you, particularly when it comes to running a chat
server.

But we've identified a number of situations where having the router be
able to inform you of goings ons/events is needed. One other low tech
solution is sending email, but you also have a configuration problem
then (as you will for a chat service too, of course, unless you run via
multicast, and I doubt if anything but a Linux system will receive those
without fuss).

That's why I sent a pointer to telepathy; it allows you to send messages
to a bunch of different back ends, and stays out of the server
business.  And it's being used on embedded systems (though I don't know
if they go as small as what a typical home router is today).
                    - Jim

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> -----Original Message-----  On
> From: "Jim Gettys" <jg at freedesktop.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 9:41pm
> To: "Robert Bradley" <robert.bradley1 at gmail.com>
> Cc: cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] making cerowrt chattier
>
> 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
>
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