We’re intending to upgrade the OS on our XMPP system tomorrow evening. Although we’ll try and limit the turbulence, we’ll have to suffer at least a brief period of outage while we restart the server etc.

There was a minor outage this morning due to an upgrade to the jabber server software (ejabberd)

Kernel updates etc required reboot

On Wednesday we installed an updated build of M-Link, but we didn’t want to post about it yesterday because it was April Fools Day. This new build includes fixes to a few small bugs (persistence of chatroom subjects and vCard updates) as well as support for the SCRAM authentication mechanism (which we still need to enable before you can start testing with cutting-edge IM clients).

This morning the jabber.org admin team installed a new build of M-Link provided by Isode. This build addresses the major issues we’ve had over the last month or so.

First, communication between Google Talk and jabber.org appears to be fixed. We can’t promise that you’ll never experience any difficulties chatting with your Google Talk friends, but the previous problem (lagged and in some cases lost messages) has been solved.

Second, the old legacy SSL port 5223 is working again, enabling you to connect using most older clients (e.g., iChat on Tiger) as well as various “crippled” clients that still don’t support STARTTLS on port 5222 (e.g., mobile clients like QIP and SIM). We will continue to encourage developers of those clients to add STARTTLS support and we reserve the right to turn off port 5223 at some point in the future, but we probably won’t do so until platforms like OS X Tiger and KDE 3 have been end-of-lifed.

Several smaller issues have yet to be fixed (e.g., chatroom logs and persistent storage of changes to personal vCards and chatroom configurations), but we will be working with the Isode team on those fixes in the coming weeks. We are also aware that we still need to get web registration working again. If you really need a new jabber.org account instead of an account at one of the many other open XMPP services, please use the contact information provided on the Get Help page for assistance and we’ll try to take care of your request as soon as possible.

This is just a quick note to let jabber.org users know that the folks at Isode have been working on fixes to a number of the open issues we mentioned in our last update, including our communication problems with Google Talk. Testing is underway and we hope to be installing updated software this week.

It turns out that the Miranda IM client for Windows does indeed support encrypted connections on the standard XMPP port 5222. As explained by Boris Krasnovskiy on their developer list, if you are a Miranda user then you need to configure your preferences under Main Menu > Options for “port 5222″ and “Use TLS” in order to connect securely to the jabber.org service.

Our apologies for the lack of reports over the last 10 days or so — most of the jabber.org admin team was at FOSDEM 2010 / XMPP Summit #8 the weekend of February 5-8, and it takes a little while to recover from so much Jabber fun.

As you might have noticed, last Friday we installed an updated build of M-Link, which incorporates a number of fixes and has been quite a bit more stable.

There are still some unresolved issues that are being worked on by the jabber.org admin team, the Isode M-Link team, or both:

1. Communication between Google Talk and jabber.org has unacceptable lag most of the time. We’re still working to debug this problem.
2. Some old or incomplete clients simply cannot connect to the server securely since we turned off the legacy SSL-only port 5223, including Miranda (see update!), Palringo, QIP PDA, Sameplace, and old releases of clients like Kopete on KDE 3.x and iChat on OS X Tiger. Although most clients are working just fine on port 5222 with encryption upgrade using STARTTLS, we will turn port 5223 on again in the near future (this requires a new build from Isode because they never expected that people still needed port 5223, given that it was deprecated in 2004!).
3. Room logs are not enabled yet for posting to logs.jabber.org. We should have those working again in the next week.
4. New user registration is not working yet at register.jabber.org. We’ll try to have it working again this week or next (there are some backend changes required). Until then, feel free to create an account at one of the many other XMPP-based IM services.

We think those are the main issues at this time, but as always feel free to join the jabber@conference.jabber.org chatroom via XMPP or HTTP if you have questions or comments.

– Peter Saint-Andre

As you might have noticed, the jabber.org IM service has been much more stable in the last few days, thanks to a number of bug fixes from our friends at Isode. There are still several known issues that have been fixed in M-Link, but both Isode personnel and jabber.org admins are travelling this week for the XMPP Summit in Brussels this weekend, so we won’t deploy any updated software builds until sometime next week. This will also give Isode’s QA department an opportunity to complete some more thorough testing than was possible while we were all in “crisis mode” over the last two weeks. Finally, we are also still working to pinpoint some remaining issues (such as delayed and even dropped messages from gmail.com to jabber.org), which the admin team will discuss with the Isode team this weekend. If pertinent information becomes available, we will post again in the next few days. Thanks again for your patience during the recent migration.

Peter Saint-Andre

This is the jabber.org service notice for Friday, January 28, 2010.

For the most part, today was a good day at the jabber.org IM service. We installed a new build from Isode earlier today that seems to have solved the login delays our users experienced, as well as most of the memory usage issues. This build isn’t perfect, because we had a hard crash this evening, followed by some false restarts, so we’ll be monitoring it closely over the weekend. In addition to these fixes, the jabber.org admin team corrected a problem with our digital certificate and continues to debug connection issues with a number of different IM clients.

We will post updates over the weekend, so stay tuned.