XMPP - Jabber - Instant messaging

Jabber is open instant messaging and a whole lot more, powered by XMPP. Jabber allows you to provide service just like AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, etc. However, you it should be noted that jabber is unlike other IM protocols because it is decentralized. It works much like email servers in which anyone can setup a Jabber server and register users on a specific domain.

Some of the benefits of using Jabber is that it is open, extensible, secure (SSL!), it can interoperate with other messaging systems (this means you can connect to one server and still communicate with other services like AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo, GTalk, etc), provides means for file transfer, and its just plain neato.

Setup on Fedora was pretty straight forward:
Download the jabberd2 server, untar,etc.
By default, jabberd2 requires Libidn2, download and install.
One thing I noticed was that the mysql client libraries are not in the default library path, so you've got to run configure with:
./configure --with-extra-library-path=/usr/local/lib:/usr/mysql

More web resources:
Playing Catchup with Jabber
Jabber install HOWTO

Need to get access to a jabber server that sits behind a firewall?
If you need to connect to a server sitting behind a firewall, and you have ssh access through that firewall... setup an ssh port forward. It is easy. Jabber typically runs on port 5223 or 5222. Find out from your jabber server administrator, and use the following command: ssh -f username@sshserver.firewalledhost.com -L 2000:lanjabber.behindfirewall.com:5223 -N This will port forward the local LAN jabber machine on port 5223 to your localhost on port 2000. Now just use your Jabber client to connect to localhost @ port 2000. Everything is sent encrypted across the internet in your ssh tunnel. Simple!

ejabberd
ejabberd Community Site | the Erlang Jabber/XMPP daemon

Jabber clients

I've become very happy with pidgin. It is free and works across most everything...
Pidgin, the universal chat client

Strophe - a library for writing XMPP clients. It is implemented in both JavaScript and C for use in a wide variety of languages. The implementations are production ready, well documented, easy to use, and easy to extend.
XMPP Service Discovery extensions for M2M and IoT | Servicelab.org
Prosody IM - Jabber/XMPP server

Created: 2005-03-26 15:35:58 Modified: 2013-04-25 01:30:32