As promised, until further notice the jabber.org team will provide a daily notice about our IM service, as well as more frequent updates as needed. This is the service notice for Sunday, January 24, 2010.

We experienced database problems yesterday (Saturday). As a result, some user accounts were corrupted. If that happened to you, everyone in your buddy list received an “unsubscribe” notification and those people probably think you’re blowing them off (I know, because this happened to me, too). We are working to fix this problem.

More significantly for everyone else, the machine on which we host the jabber.org IM service is currently unreachable via XMPP or SSH (although it responds to pings). The machine will need to be manually rebooted in person by the folks who run our data center. Given that it is 21:30 on a Sunday evening at the data center and they don’t have round-the-clock coverage, the jabber.org service will probably be offline for the next 12 hours or so. Once the machine is back online we will diagnose the problem and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Peter Saint-Andre

UPDATE: Matthew and I were able to remotely power-cycle the machine. We’re back in business.

You might have noticed that the jabber.org IM service has been up and down in the last few days. We are performing some final tests before moving forward with the software migration from ejabberd to M-Link, which should happen in the next few days. Please be aware that as we get closer to launch, it is possible that some of your data (e.g., new buddies in your contact list) will not “make the cut” and that you will need to update that data yourself after the migration is complete. We will post again to www.jabber.org and the juser@jabber.org list with any instructions you might need to follow. Thanks again for your patience.

In consultation with Isode, developers of the M-Link software chosen to run the jabber.org IM service, the jabber.org admin team has decided to delay the planned migration until after January 1. We have every confidence that M-Link will provide a stable platform for our service and we are working with Isode to complete the migration as soon as possible, but we want to make sure that we do so without undue haste and with minimum interruption to our users. Expect further updates in early January.

Steve Kille, CEO of Isode, provided the following statement of explanation.

To Jabber.org customers,

It was planned to switch jabber.org to run the Isode M-Link server this week.

Work on this transition has caused a number of outages, including a three hour outage as a consequence of a particularly nasty bug which took the machine out.

This note is to apologize for all the inconvenience caused to the very many jabber.org users.

At the end of this week, I’m sorry to report that we did not make the transition to M-Link, and have decided to defer this until next year, as for a number of reasons it does not seem sensible to make the switch during the Christmas holidays.

I am confident that the switch to use M-Link will give an overall improvement to the jabber.org service, and look forward to seeing this next year.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the jabber.org team for all their efforts during the week, in particular to Matthew Wild who has been online with us most of the week and to Jerry Pasker who drove back to reboot the machine.

Yours Sincerely,

Steve Kille
CEO, Isode

We’ve just installed a new security certificate at jabber.org to replace the old one, which was due to expire on December 17. This new certificate should solve the recent connection problems experienced by users of Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system (OS X 10.6).

In other security news, our service will soon shut down the old SSL-only port 5223 because all IM clients should be able to upgrade port 5222 to a secure connection using the XMPP “STARTTLS” feature, which was standardized 5 years ago in RFC 3920. If your IM client was configured to prefer port 5223, you might need to adjust the configuration to use port 5222. (For improved security we would prefer to force the use of encrypted connections on port 5222, but won’t make that change until sometime in 2010.)

The jabber.org admin team will migrate to its new server software soon. We will make a copy of the data for all 330,000 users on Saturday morning, complete data migration over the weekend, and then switch to the new software Monday morning (European time). Once we copy the data, any changes you make (e.g., adding new buddies to your contact list) will be lost, until the new software is installed and running on Monday. It is also possible that we will experience delays with the migration process. If so, we shall make an announcement on the juser@jabber.org email list and on our identi.ca microblogging account.