Subject: [Wocky] Jabber chatter blabber

From: Jerrad Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:46:33 -0400

Hello,

I saw the sidebar about Jabber in the recent Tech Talk, I'd like to point out
that's inacccurate when claiming "Jabber is not a multi-protocol IM client,
but IM clients that support jabber let you chat with users on..." This implies
that it is the Jabber client doing the work (which is what a multi-protocol
client does), when in fact it is the server which must be configured to act as
a gateway.

Pedantics aside I have two questions about this, moving forward will there be
a zephyr-jabber gateway? And will you be contributing to jwgc to bring it up
to snuff (a drop in replacement for zwgc et al)? http://jwgc.blathersource.org
-- 
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--
MOTD on Pungenday, the 45th of Discord, in the YOLD 3172:
In Bob We Trust, All Others Bring Data. --Demmings

---

From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 11:56:37 -0400

> client does), when in fact it is the server which must be configured to act as

When the server is configured to act as a gateway, it generally stores
the AIM (or MSN or whatever) username and password for each Jabber
client making use of that gateway.  That is a rather insecure model of
credential management, and we don't recommend it for any MIT user.  We
were, actually, talking about multi-protocol clients like Gaim.  It
might have been clearer to put a word like "many" before "IM clients
that support jabber".

> to snuff (a drop in replacement for zwgc et al)? http://jwgc.blathersource.org

jwgc development looked pretty moribund when I grabbed it, so I have not
contributed patches upstream.  But it is installed on Athena, with
GSSAPI authentication support (replacing the password authentication
support) and a bunch of bugfixes.

As to whether there will be a zephyr-jabber gateway: maybe.  It's
something we've been looking into.  Unlike most Jabber transports, we
could give our Jabber server a copy of the zephyr/zephyr keytab and let
it fake up Kerberos credentials to the Zephyr server, so that the server
would not need to store users' Kerberos passwords.

---

From: Jerrad Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:07:07 -0400

>might have been clearer to put a word like "many" before "IM clients
Gotcha (not that any of those protocols are secure in the first place)

>support) and a bunch of bugfixes.
Yeah, I saw. However it certainly doesn't qualify as a drop-in yet.
And unfortunately all of the other CLI that I know of are more like owl,
and lock you in away from your shell and the ability to mix commands.
Long long ago (biting off more than I could chew for the time) I attempted
to use Net::Jabber to create a zwgc analog. Net::Jabber, while kind of
arcane/OO happy, is apparently stable and thorough enough now to have a few
clients based on it. Of course, you may not want a few dozen instances
of perl running fulltime on the dialup servers.
-- 
H4sICNoBwDoAA3NpZwA9jbsNwDAIRHumuC4NklvXTOD0KSJEnwU8fHz4Q8M9i3sGzkS7BBrm
OkCTwsycb4S3DloZuMIYeXpLFqw5LaMhXC2ymhreVXNWMw9YGuAYdfmAbwomoPSyFJuFn2x8
Opr8bBBidccAAAA=
--
MOTD on Pungenday, the 45th of Discord, in the YOLD 3172:
In Bob We Trust, All Others Bring Data. --Demmings