Subject: [Wocky] 2 instances of Jabber, with Adium

From: Alicia Hunt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:40:33 -0500

Hi,

If I accidently leave myself logged into Adium at home (running 
Jabber, AIM, Yahoo and Gmail IM) , and then log into Jabber at work 
(running the same 4 protocols),   Jabber cannot handle it,  and 
starts logging me in and out repeatedly,   annoying my Jabber 
contacts.

In the same situation:
AIM -  tells me that I'm logged in twice, and do I want to log the 
other instance off
Yahoo IM - logs the other  instance off, and notifies that instance 
that I've logged on elsewhere
Gmail IM - I don't know what it does

I am running Adium 1.0.1 (I believe on both machines).  At work (the 
2nd login) I'm running MacOS X 10.3.9 on a Dual 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4. 
At home I'm running an Intel Mac laptop with I think 10.4, or 
whatever is latest.

Is there a setting I can change?  Or is this a Jabber bug that needs 
to be fixed?

thanks,
Alicia
-- 

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Alicia L Hunt                                            [email-masked]
Assistant Director for Graduate Housing      (617) 253-0191
Division of Student Life, MIT                            E19-429C
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From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:08:23 -0500

I believe this is an Adium bug, though I'm surprised it hasn't been
fixed yet.  It shouldn't be automatically reconnecting when you get
logged out due to a resource conflict.

It's easy to work around.  Pull up your account info for your Jabber
account and look for a field named "Resource".  (I don't know exactly
what the dialog looks like; you may have to select advanced options.)
Change the resource on your home machine so that it doesn't match what
it says on your work machine.  Then you should be able to log in from
both places at once with no conflict.

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From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:08:41 -0500

> starts logging me in and out repeatedly,   annoying my Jabber

In the "Accounts" preference pane, if you double-click on one of the  
Jabber accounts, you can configure a bunch of stuff for the  
connection used for that account.  Under "Options", the default value  
for "Resource" is "Adium".  As I understand it, only one connection  
at a time can use a given resource name, but if you change the  
resource name (maybe "work" and "home", if you feel like revealing  
that information, or "Adium1" and "Adium2") you can have multiple  
connections active at the same time.

There's been some discussion in the past about which client will get  
messages when you have multiple connections.  The priority value of  
the connection can determine this, and Adium lets you select priority  
values to use when you're "available" versus "away", though I don't  
know what the default value is (for Adium, or if Jabber has a  
standard default priority value... anyone?).  So if Adium marks you  
as "away" if you're idle for a while, like if you've gone to work  
while leaving yourself logged in at home, and you've set the  
"available" and "away" priorities properly, you shouldn't have to  
worry about missing any messages while you're using one of your  
computers; if you're "away" from both, though, messages could wind up  
not going to the computer you next sit down at.

I understand that most Jabber servers will only send to one client if  
they all have the same priority, but that we could patch our server  
to send to all of them; I don't know if that's been done.

> Gmail IM - I don't know what it does

I think Google's system is based on Jabber, so it should probably do  
the same.

Ken

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From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:18:58 -0500

> not going to the computer you next sit down at.

The default priority for just about any Jabber client is 0.  So the
normal case is that all clients have the same priority.  In this case,
the server will generally send messages to the client which logged in
most recently.  (I did prepare a patch to make messages get sent to all
highest-priority clients in this case, but it was never deployed.  I may
try again with that when we switch to Wildfire.)

Regardless of how the server handles that situation, if you were in the
middle of a conversation with someone at home, and your conversation
partner still has a window open from that conversation, messages typed
into that window will be sent to your "full jid" (with resource),
forcing them to go to your home client.  This practice keeps
conversations in one place, but is decidedly inconvenient when it causes
you to miss messages.  Moral: close Jabber conversation windows after
long gaps in the conversation, just in case the person you're talking to
has switched clients.