Re: XMPP IM federation of .edu's

["Lukas Karlsson" <karlsson@broad.mit.edu>]

FYI, regarding IM federation, we are not running Zimbra currently, but we are running an jabber2 server with mu-conference internally.  Federation appears to be working quite well with nearly everyone we've tried.

Our server is hosting the following zones:

jabber.broad.mit.edu
broad.mit.edu
broad.harvard.edu

We are also testing Google Apps with another domain, broadinstitute.com.  

Google Apps appears to federate with most sites that we've tried.  Our internal server is able to federate with everyone.  The only snag is that both of our *broad.mit.edu zones are currently unable to connect to the main MIT zone mit.edu.  I'm sure this is a problem with the configuration on MIT IS&T's end rather than something here at the Broad.

We are doing all of this successfully using SRV records (except for jabber.broad.mit.edu which is actually the hostname of the jabber server and doesn't require SRV records).

One snag that I will note is we were unable to get "broad.mit.edu" working at all with Google using gmail.com or broadinstitute.com (our Apps domain) for the first few weeks.  I was finally able to get it working because I had a friend at Google who got me in touch with the right folks in the Gtalk group who could fix the problem on their end... which was caused by the fact that someone had setup a @broad.mit.edu account for Google Sites and that caused Google to think that they should be handling that zone instead of honoring our SRV records.  Once I got the right people they fixed it in a few minutes.

We are considering going to Zimbra for our internal system and so I'm very interested in hearing about other folks that are using xmpp with Zimbra and federating successfully with other institutions.

/l

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Steve Hillman <hillman@sfu.ca> wrote:

Just resubmitting..

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: rgraves@carleton.edu
To: hillman@sfu.ca
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 1:08:49 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Bounce to moderator of "zimbra-hied-admins": sender "rgraves@carleton.edu" not authorized

Probably not on many people's radar, but something that Zimbra could enable:

Might it be interesting if every .edu could securely IM every other .edu? And layer presence and VOIP over that?

All you have to do to play around with the possibility today is publish a SRV record. Here's mine.

$ host -t srv _xmpp-server._tcp.carleton.edu
_xmpp-server._tcp.carleton.edu SRV 5 0 5269 mail.carleton.edu.

IM is quite correctly labeled as BETA in ZCS 5.0.5, and I am not interested in supporting it until at least next fall, but it might be fun to play with it in this group.

Google Talk federation works today. I need to verify, but I believe that federation with schools that outsource to GMail, like Arizona State, would also work if they were to publish XMPP SRV records.
--
Rich Graves http://claimid.com/rcgraves
Carleton.edu Sr UNIX and Security Admin
CMC135: 507-646-7079 Cell: 952-292-6529




--
Steve Hillman                                IT Architect
hillman@sfu.ca                               IT Infrastructure
778-782-3960                                 Simon Fraser University
Sent from Zimbra

-- 
Lukas Karlsson, Manager, Administrative Computing
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
7 Cambridge Center, 7112G, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
karlsson@broad.mit.edu, +1.6172587108