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.
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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:
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
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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
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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.
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This is the jabber.org service notice for Thursday, January 28, 2010.
I think it’s safe to say that today was fairly frustrating. It was frustrating for our users, because login times were extremely slow. It was frustrating for the Isode team as they struggled to find the causes of high memory usage and deal with a few nasty bugs related to DIGEST-MD5 authentication. It was frustrating for the jabber.org admin team as we worked to diagnose some strange disk I/O behavior on the server machine itself.
This evening, Isode’s Curtis King and I completed some further testing and the initial results look promising, but we’ll know more tomorrow.
Thanks for hanging in there with us…
Peter Saint-Andre
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This is the jabber.org service notice for Wednesday, January 27, 2010.
There’s not as much to report today. The Isode team continues to track down the memory issues as well as a few less significant bugs and feature requests (DIGEST-MD5 login issues, vCard fixes, enabling chatroom logs, etc.). On the jabber.org team we are working to diagnose connection problems experienced by some users of Finch, Gajim, GNU Freetalk, Kopete, Meebo, Palringo, and a few other clients (most of the issues seem to be related to our disabling of the old SSL-only port 5223, but there might be other bugs involved). We also discovered an IP address that was making about 50 TCP connections a second without ever trying to start an XMPP stream, so we have blocked that IP address. We’re on the lookout for other abusive traffic, which might be causing more general problems at the jabber.org service.
Today we also held an impromptu meeting of jabber.org users in the jabber@conference.jabber.org chatroom. If our users would like us to hold a weekly meeting for a while, drop by the jabber@ chatroom and let us know (you can even join via the web as described on the help page).
Tomorrow (Thursday) we plan to fix a problem with our certificate chain, deploy several fixes from the Isode team, and track down more of the client connection problems mentioned above. We’ll keep you posted via identi.ca (mirrored to Twitter).
Peter Saint-Andre
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This is the jabber.org service notice for Tuesday, January 26, 2010.
The team feels that it turned the corner yesterday and that we are on the path to a very stable and full-featured IM service. Some of the changes we’ve made are “behind the scenes” (better work processes for monitoring the service in real time, rotating logs to prevent a full disk on our server machine, etc.) so you won’t immediately notice them, but they are definitely improving reliability. In addition, the Isode team is hunting down some elusive bugs (e.g., regarding DIGEST-MD5 authentication, which is notoriously confusing for developers and has a lot of interoperability problems).
Our primary open issues are:
1. Memory usage. For reasons that we and Isode still don’t fully understand, memory usage slowly increases after a restart, causing the server run out of memory on the machine. We now have automated processes in place to restart the server when memory usage approaches the limit. This means that we’re having a few restarts every day, but they are controlled (even if not announced ahead of time). Fixing this problem is the top priority right now.
2. Google Talk connectivity. Some messages get lost from Google Talk to jabber.org. We’re working to figure out the conditions that cause this problem, because it is intermittent and might depend on which client you use.
3. vCards. Currently birthday and home page are not saved in user vCards. Isode is working to fix this relatively minor bug.
4. Chatroom logging. Currently this is disabled but we are working to bring it back so that we can archive the conversations from selected rooms at logs.jabber.org.
We will post again tomorrow with a full update, or follow our identi.ca feed (now also a Twitter feed) for regular status messages throughout the day.
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We have reports that older versions of Kopete have trouble connecting to jabber.org after the server migration. These issues do not affect Kopete on KDE 4, only on KDE 3. Kopete 3.x does not support STARTTLS (encryption upgrade on port 5222) and right now jabber.org does not support the old SSL-only port 5223, so you will need to disable SSL connections via port 5223 and connect unencrypted on port 5222. Unfortunately that is *not* secure and we do *not* recommend unencrypted connections (in fact we might forbid unencrypted connections in the next few months). However, we also have reports that even unencrypted connections are not working for all KDE 3.x users. We are working to debug the problem and will post again once we have determined the cause. In the meantime you might consider upgrading to KDE 4 (yes, we know that is a big upgrade) or using another Linux or cross-platform client, such as Gajim or Psi. We apologize for the inconvenience.
UPDATE: It seems that there are issues with KDE 4, too. We are working to isolate the problem and will report back as soon as possible.
UPDATE #2: A fix is in place for a server-side bug here, and we have reports of successful connections using versions as early as Kopete 0.12.
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If you use Apple’s iChat client and have been unable to connect to the jabber.org IM service in the last week, you might need to change your account preferences. The change you need to make is unchecking the “Use SSL” option, as shown in the following image.
For security reasons, you will definitely want to check the “Warn before password is sent insecurely” option. This ensures that your password is never sent over an unencrypted connection (iChat supports encrypted connections over the standard port 5222 using a feature called STARTTLS, so your communications will be encrypted even if you uncheck the “Use SSL” option).
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This is the jabber.org service notice for Monday, January 25, 2010.
We made good progress today in solving a number of open issues. The Isode team found and fixed several critical bugs today and over the weekend. The jabber.org admin team cleaned up contact lists for the ~250 users whose data was corrupted last Saturday, instituted several automated monitoring, reporting, and data backup tasks as well as log rotation to help prevent further problems, and has committed to improved communication, including notices throughout the day via the identi.ca microblogging service.
Some of these code and configuration fixes have required restarts of the service. Our users should expect that to continue for several more days, but we will attempt to announce all restarts beforehand on identi.ca.
We still have several open issues to address this week, and we shall post about those in the coming days.
Thanks again to our users for their patience.
Peter Saint-Andre
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