[Wocky] Jabber chatter blabber

[Greg Hudson]

On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 11:46 -0400, Jerrad Pierce wrote:
> 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.

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".

> 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

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.