Author: Stian B. Barmen

Possible kernel problem again

I upgraded the kernel when we did the firewall change and it might be that we got a panic tonight because of this. The problem is that the screen was blank so I am uncertain just what happened. In any case I will give this kernel a second shot so we run it tonight aswell.

A warning, this might cause the server to panic again tonight, we will reboot it in the morning, you have been warned. 🙂

We really need to figure this one out!

Jabber.org and SSL support

It says on the news page of jabber.org that they are installing a CA cert SSL certificate for encrypted server to server communcation support. This is great news, jabber.no has SSL support for S2S ready and installed, so we should be able to provide encrypted connections to jabber.org as soon as they are ready.

Jabber Norway 1 year!

Today it is one year since we decided to publish our service more actively against regular users. We have had some users longer than this but those were more accidental. From 3rd of May last year the mission to create a more stable and professional service, but with an ‘easy’ profile. This we have managed to achieve in many ways, even though we have har periodic problems with unstability. Many of these things will improve in the time to come, but with our limited resources we have to take it easy on investments.It is very fun that so many has chosen to register as a Jabber user with us. Almost 1800 users in a year is impressive, at least when we have not used a dime in advertising or publishing of the service.

Alot happened when we started to write about Aplle and Mac when they came with iChat and the iChat server based on Jabber/XMPP. Suddenly Google started to send lots of Mac users our way and many of them (you!) registered and became Jabber Norway users.

In any case, happy birthday to us! 🙂 Hope many will continue to use and support our service, and have a nice summer!

Google Summer of Code

This year too Google decided to have another Summer of Code (SOC). Basically Google pays you to code software for one of the sponsored projects. If you look into the list of software you can see many Jabber projects like Jabber Software Foundation, Gaim, Adium and probably more (I think I read about Ejabberd too but could not find them in the list).

Most of the other projects are Linux / Open Source, but just go over to the page and fine one!If you are a student, or just like sitting inside and code all summer, please find a nice project and join the program.

Thank you Google! :)

Upgraded to Ejabberd 1.1.1

Because of an error in Ejabberd 1.1.0 that made anonymous TLS enabled even if it was off in the config we upgraded to Ejabberd 1.1.1. This error is not very critical but it is good to be on the version that works like it should.

For more information look here: ejabberd 1.1.1: bugfix release

Petter Millard passed away

Maybe you don’t know who Peter Millard was, but he was the main developer for Exodus, a popular Jabber client for Windows. He was also one of the ones administering www.jabber.org and a very important person in the Jabber/XMPP community. Peter has fought cancer for some time and thought he was well untill a few weeks ago, but he had to give up the fight on wednesday night. He leaves behind a wife and a young daughter, our condolanses.

Read more on St. Peters blog and Planet Jabber.

Upgraded to Ejabberd 1.1.0!

Finally the upgrade was successful. Thanks goes out to Alexey Shchepin who could read the log files, and for those who does not know, he is also the main developer of ejabberd.

The upgrade problem was related to the fact that we earlier tested out a two node cluster, and now one node has been offline (terminated), thus removed uncleanly. Even if the node was removed it still existed in the database, and needed to be cleaned manually before the upgrade.  I have been looking for information about how to do this for a while because I was aware of the dead node, but did not think that had anything to do with the upgrade. Maybe I should type a quick howto for ejabberd.jabber.ru?

In any case I am happy the upgrade was a success! 🙂

Ejabberd 1.1.0 is released!

Ejabberd 1.1.0 has shipped and is packed with more news and updates. New functionality worth mentioning is zlib compression of client to server traffic (I know Pandion support this), sasl anonymous logon (for anonymous access to MUC/Chatrooms), native support for MySQL as the database backend (we are migrating to this in a while!), logging for MUC/Chatrooms integrated (we have used a patch for this till now).

For more information about this release you can read the release notes here.

For your information we did try to upgrade the server to ejabberd 1.1.0 but we had some problems with TLS and klient to server handshake. I need to sort out these problems before we can shift over to the new version, but it will not be long! 🙂

Easter is over, now I go to work!

Finally the easter vacation is over and I am back to work. I am now starting to asess the problems we have had this easter and getting these sorted. It is not easy to do work on narrow cellphone lines so I am glad to be back in civilization. These days I am wondering about migrating to another server that is more stable but this is currently running mail on windows so I have to migrate and reinstall it first. This might be the best way to get a better uptime. Sorry for all the problems this easter and I promise that I will do what I can to get these problems fixed!