Deploying Jabber and Miranda IM: thoughts and comments

I recently installed a jabber server for my small office(s). We recently expanded to three separate buildings, one in Sandy, one in Salt Lake City, and another in Bountiful. Likewise, suddenly the ability to communicate was limited by phones and e-mail, and for the large majority (80%) of the needed communication, both of those options were either overkill (one-line e-mail?) or impractical (staying on hold for 30 minutes, tieing up a phone line, to ask a single six-word question).

It's funny how little we value the ability to easily communicate until it's suddenly not so easy.

I started out trying to install ejabberd, but failed miserably. In both the Sandy and Salt Lake offices, I have a modest linux router installed, doing all routing/firewalling/networking in general. Likewise, throw in the DNS SRV records on a per-site basis, in theory I would have been able to point all clients to the same host, but end result have them all wind up connecting to their local instance of ejabberd.

For those of you who don't know, ejabberd is famous for it's ability to cluster and fail/fault-over abilities. It uses a database that is essentially distributed by default. Further, it has a very nice web interface for management, along with a shared roster (list of people on the service) built-in. Sadly, I never was able to get the distributed part of it (the reason to use it) working. I would add a user on one side, and magically, that user would never appear on the other. Huh, oh well.

I wound up reverting back to the tried and true method (for me, anyways) of getting a jabber server up and running: jabberd2. Jabberd2 is not distributed like ejabberd, but it also typically uses MySQL as the backend (granted, ejabberd can also, and I've never tried to do so either, but I also know how to make jabberd2 work, and that's what I wanted here), which I'm rather familiar with.

So, about twenty minutes after I gave up on ejabberd, I had a functional jabberd2 server, up and ready to go. (For those of you curious, I have a 1.2TB RAID5 array, on which the database server is running. Overkill, yes, but I don't want to burden the router down with a database server.) Now for the fun part: the client, the program that everyone will actually be using.

All of the clients are running Windows XP, along with two or three Windows 2000 boxes. jabber.org has an impressive list of jabber clients, for pretty much any OS under the sun. In the end, I chose Miranda IM, for several reasons:

• Final distributed file size: I wound up with a 556kb .msi installer that I built for it (more on that later).
• Runtime size: I'm pretty sure that everyone lost maybe a megabyte of RAM from running this, if that. Small, light, and fast are all words that I'd use to describe this.
• Ability to customize: at it's core, it's a small executable with a large army of plugins (DLLs), providing additional functions. Likewise, I just cut out everything except the jabber components, and hey, I have a perfect IM client for jabber and jabber only.
• mirandaboot.ini: A little-known feature of Miranda. Drop this file into the install directory, and you can change program defaults. In this case, it's set to automatically create a user profile in their own user's directory, named after their domain logon name.
• Looks for DNS SRV records and uses them (Hey, gaim, where are you? Oh, right, you're STILL LACKING THIS HORRIBLY SIMPLE FEATURE. What's so hard about a DNS lookup, really?).
• Easy to use, simplistic.

All in all, this is pretty much a perfect client for people. It's simple enough to use, effective, small, and to top it all off, free. The only thing it was missing was a .msi installer package (it is being installed on a windows domain after all), and the official stance from the Miranda devs consists of, "you have a .zip and a .exe installer, and what we provide works. If you want a .msi package, feel free to build it yourself." As a result, I did, and I used Wix to do it. Yay for open source and free Microsoft programs that get the job done, and get it done well. The posts I saw on the Miranda forums included a lot of users wanting a .msi installer, so once I polish it off, I'll post both the Wix .xml file, along with the final .msi for people to abuse. For now, I'll link to the .msi which I'm using here. This includes jabber components only, and installs without prompting to Program Files. This file is suitable for usage anywhere, as it saves all settings in places where anyone can write to, and it is multi-user sane (in the sense that user A can't see user B's settings and contacts).

Earlier, I mentioned that ejabberd has shared rosters, where basically everyone can see the same group of people. Sadly, jabberd2 lacks this feature, but makes up for it in another way: it has MySQL as it's backend. This makes is horribly easy to write a small script which clears the existing roster table, and re-populates it with everyone else who is registered with the service. This makes it pretty easy to accomplish a similar "shared roster", and it bypasses the semi-complicated process to add a user, consisting of:

• Finding the person to talk to,
• Adding the person to talk to,
• Waiting for the the person on the other end to both sign in, and click allow,
• Waiting for the person on the other end to add you themselves,
• Finally allowing that user access to talk to you.

For people who only know how to use computers as far as clicking File, Print goes, the automatic addition of new users to their lists saves time and effort all the way around. Not to mention the new person doesn't have to go and add thirty other people, and then wait for all thirty people to add and authorize the new person.

In the end, I wound up with a setup that's as close to perfect as it can get. Shared rosters, easy to use client, and a client that works perfectly and easily.

I'm rather liking this whole "run your own IM server" idea now that I'm using it on a scale larger than two users. And hey, so are all of the employees.
Links:

• miranda-0.5.1-1st.msi (.msi installer, jabber components only)
• miranda-1st.xml (Wix .xml file, used to create your own .msi, jabber components only)
• miranda.xml (Wix .xml file used to create your own .msi, all Miranda IM components)

Once again, these files do not include a GUI installer of any sort, but rather will install the program automatically without prompting. There's your warning.