rullzer

It is still vacation and I decided that I needed something today on this not to sunny day. So after cycling trough the city and discovering that some places in Amsterdam could really use some attention in OSM (will do that later this week), I decided to setup my own jabber(XMPP) server.

After browsing trough the portage tree landed on jabberd2. It is writen in C (no java or whatever on my server!) and easy to setup. This basically means that I could register and login using kopete in no time!

Now the things I like about open protocols (and software of course) is that most of the times you can do way cooler things with it. Take the MSN (of Live) protocol for example: sending messages in plain text over the net! I prefer secure connections, all the time actually, and that is possible with jabber. It is even specified in the RFC. And not just my connection to my server, also the server2server connections are secure. I mean that is just awesome! Since I see no point in securing only one part of the route.

Now of course some of the people I chat with can still not use SSL which would mean kind of a security risk, and we do not want that. But since you can use a client of your liking I can also use OTR encryption while using jabber.

Now I already told you that jabber is open. Which means anyone with enough time (and some skills) can write a library for this protocol. Which in turn makes it easy to use for status messages of your bash scripts or for elog messages from portage! Now I have not checked on any of this but I could imaging jabber plugins for torrent/usenet deamons (informing you of your finished download) or even bootup messages from computers that you maintain informing you of several useful things!

Long story short. I like Jabber!

Edit: I am now using ejabberd (or recomandation of a fried) and the webinterface rocks!