I use Jabberd 2 for my own Jabber server (codepoet at this domain) so when I was investigating Apple’s iChat Server in Mac OS X Server it was a little confusing since they’re using 1.4. I see their reasons for doing so, namely mu-conference, and that’s okay. It’s just that it’s hell figuring out what they’ve done to it.

After some investigation it turns out that they have a pretty sweet setup included out of the box:

• jabberd 1.4.3.1 b35
• mu-conference
• proxy65

This enables the iChat Service to essentially do all the things we expect iChat to do, like, well, chat, file transfers, and chat rooms. It’s pretty nice, and I was impressed.

Until I saw one very, very ill-advised decision. They turned off S2S messaging by default. Both DNS and dialback plugins are commented out in the configuration file, making it impossible to get two iChat Servers to talk to each other. All it takes is a quick hack to get them going again (info found on the jabberd site in their admin guide) but it took me an hour to figure this out. I just couldn’t believe that not only would they turn that off, but then not provide a graphical way to turn it back on again, or any documentation at all that it was done. Not even a note in the config file. Just two, lone commented stanzas. Insane.

After getting those on I was able to get it setup the way it needed, and they did have the foresight to just comment out the stanzas instead of removing them, like they could have, but it seems a bad middle ground to take.