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We are looking to give access to some of our employees to chat with each other - however we are worried about them abusing the privilege and chatting we friends outside work. We have decided to deploy our own XMPP Server to solve this. I'm looking for two things:

  1. Experiences with a XMPP server in the ports tree

  2. Alternative suggestions with related experiences

  3. cross platform clients that are friendly to administrators would be nice, we are currently using pidgin. (I know I can't count)

Thanks in advance, its nice to have somewhere to turn where I feel I can trust the feedback I get.

Chance

EDIT I would prefer if the solution did not require java, it was mentioned that ejabberd did not, however it requires the diablo-jdk16 during compilation. (Open fire also requires a JDK)

Chance
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4 Answers4

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We use Openfire here. I deployed it a little over 2 years ago and it has been trucking ever since. Everything we run is Microsoft Server 2003 w/ SQL Server 2005, but you can find installation instructions for BSD here: Openfire BSD Installation Instructions.

XMPP is very widely supported, so many clients like Pidgin will work perfectly fine. We use Ignite Realtime's XMPP client called Spark. You should be able to find many clients that will work with both Unix and Windows based systems.

Russ Warren
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Using Openfire+Spark here aswell. It works OK, but development on the client has been officially closed (they are working some kind of web 2.0 blah blah service). Users are now submitting patches, so the project is very much alive.

pauska
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Strange that nobody mentioned ejabberd.

I've been using ejabberd under FreeBSD as inter-company messaging system for years. Written in erlang it's adopted for very highloads, don't require JVM (as Openfire do), has integration with LDAP, provides http-bind and http-pool methods for web-based comet/ajax clients and much more.

You can install in FreeBSD from ports via cd /usr/ports/net-im/ejabberd/ && make install clean

Also you can watch screencast: Setting up a Enterprise Instant Messaging server in 180 seconds

SaveTheRbtz
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  • Not needing the JVM will probably be the big selling point here. I had looked at ejabbered, but I'm going to take a second look now. Thanks for the screencast link! – Chance Jul 01 '09 at 13:27
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We are using Openfire + Spark and are experience strange bugs, many of us get constantly thrown out from the server. I would go for Ejabberd + Pidgin.