next »

[Wayan Vota]

XO laptop owners need more jabber servers to mesh network on. Every time I look at my empty neighbourhood view I am sad.  Yet I am not geek enough to  run a jabber server solo. I need the help of a jabber expert to set one up for DC.

This is just the start of my call to jabber action.  My goal: meshing north america and europe - let there be a jabber server for ever 100 laptops! 

810 jabber servers is our goal.  Reply to this post if you can help.

[kaerast]

I don't have much experience of Jabber, but I do have experience of general Linux servers and could assist as much as possible.

IMHO the whole mesh networking thing is fundamentally flawed for G1G1 users.  It's designed for schools, not a large number of disparate Western users.  Either it needs to move towards a more normal jabber server, with usernames and the ability to add friends, or we need to look more at topic-based jabber servers and the ability to change servers easily (or use more than one).

Interlinked Jabber servers with every single G1G1 user on them would just not work.

[moocapiean]

I don't have much experience of Jabber, but I do have experience of general Linux servers and could assist as much as possible.

IMHO the whole mesh networking thing is fundamentally flawed for G1G1 users.  It's designed for schools, not a large number of disparate Western users.  Either it needs to move towards a more normal jabber server, with usernames and the ability to add friends, or we need to look more at topic-based jabber servers and the ability to change servers easily (or use more than one).

Interlinked Jabber servers with every single G1G1 user on them would just not work.

I think you're right (although I don't speak from personal experience since I never used the chat activity), the chat activity doesn't seem designed for the G1G1 people.  To me, that just means we need to develop an activity that will meet our needs.

Switching servers in Sugar is inconvenient, but switching Jabber servers for chat doesn't have to be.  Right now, I can run Pidgin, connect to any number of servers, and switch between servers without any problem.  In fact, it should be possible to connect to an XO jabber server and start chatting with anyone...I just tried it and I couldn't connect to the Chicago server (the only one that still seems to be working), I couldn't connect without giving a password and I wasn't allowed to register, so maybe it's not possible, or at least not as easy as I thought.

It'd be nice if we could just make a change to the chat activity so we can change the jabber server without having to restart Sugar.  Unfortunately, I doubt it'd be a simple fix since if it was, someone probably would have done it by now.  I could be wrong about this since I haven't actually looked at the code.

But, I guess what I'm leading up to is that we should write our own Chat activity.  The existing one wasn't designed for our needs, so maybe creating one based off of purple (Pidgin's library) could work since Pidgin and Finch meet our needs a bit better (and people have been wanting an IM client on their XOs for awhile) already.  There was some talk of Python bindings for purple back in June (http://pidgin.im/pipermail/devel/2007-June/001602.html), but I can't find any progress since.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether or not the existing Chat activity will work?


As for the server side, I don't have much experience with Jabber servers, but I ran one over the summer.  It never had more than two people on it and I did nothing more than what the installation HOWTO told me to do, but it did work.

[Sarah Elkins]

Wayan,

Here's the xochat guy's offer I mentioned at the meetup last night:
Tom Hoffman offers to give out xochat.org subdomains in comments at
http://morgancollett.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/olpc-community-jabber-servers/

So, if we wanted, we could probably set up a dc.xochat.org, or an olpclcdc.xochat.org  :-)

According to Morgan Collett, in
http://morgancollett.wordpress.com/2008/02/27/olpc-community-jabber-servers-ejabberd-200-from-source/, "To run ejabberd as a public server, you will need to run it on a public server where you have root privileges"

So maybe the first thing to do is identify some possible server space?  Any volunteers? 

[Dinky]

I have a vision of schools pairing in different communities as in the international pairing of
"sister" cities or the pairing of sports games beween the US and Canada.

I do not have any experience in the exchanges or jabber servers but IMHO selectively linked local jabbers appear to offer some sort of limited syncing of learning topics to the advantage of each school.  Maybe sync for a week.  What a geography lesson -- have a kid present his community.   Just rambling.

EDIT UPDATE:   On this occasion of the CANUSA games between Hamilton, Ontario and Flint, Michigan in Flint, Michigan (August 8-10, 2008),  an update is in order.

This concept now has form.  I have implemented a jabber server with gated IP addresses.  So, any classroom with web access can be grouped with another classroom.    Anyone who wants an IP address grouping for linking two classrooms, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers.   Lookup xo1share.org in the table.

[Sarah Elkins]

According to the community server wiki page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers, an individual server ought to be able to handle up to about 150 users at a time.  The OLPCLCDC list has about 160 folks on it, Mike says, and I think it's unlikely all would be on it at the same time.  The question is, would other folks pile in from other regions and overwhelm a DC server?  However, since the xochat.org server went into hibernation, several other local chat servers have sprung up (see wiki link above for links to them). 

I see that Chicago is running theirs on Amazon EC2.  Maybe DC could do the same?  It's not free, though, and it looks like we'd have to build something locally anyway, to package it up and run it as a virtual machine there.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud

[kaerast]

Unless I'm getting something wrong, Amazon EC2 looks very expensive.  I mean, sure it comes with lots of power, but is it all needed when a real VPS would be much cheaper?

Dinky - I like your idea of pairing up schools and using the jabber servers, not sure how it'd be implemented given the current technology though.  I guess it's something that would have to be thought about when working on the bigger picture of instant messaging on the XO.

[tacotaxi]

Hello ole "wise one"

This is the guy who setup the Chicago jabber service - his blog site -> http://www.nata2.org/

I just copy and pasted below from his site his writings on Chicago jabber server.  I hope this helps you.

OLPC Chicago Jabber Server
02 Mar
 
Posted by Harper in Technology at 02:54 AM
Tags: chat, ejabberd, jabber, jabber server, jabber.olpchacks.org, olpc, olpc-chicago, xmpp

Today I spent a minute setting up a Ejabberd Server for the OLPC Chicago group. This will allow all of us OLPC XO hackers to be on the same “mesh.” To get started using the jabber server with your XO follow these simple steps:

Boot the XO
Get connected to the internet
Open a terminal (activity or ctrl-alt-f1)
in the shell, type: su -
then type: sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.olpchacks.org
then press ctrl-alt-erase to restart sugar/X
Once this is done, you should start to see other Chicago XOs. You will know you are successful if you see me (Harper) in the community view. Please let me know if you are able to get on, or if you are having trouble.

Getting the server going was pretty simple. I was able to jump right in thanks to this awesome write up by Morgan Collett of Collabora. The install goes like this: you get your debian install primed, download the source, patch the source, compile the source, install the compiled binaries, edit the config, start the server and edit the server roster config. Then BAM you have a ejabberd server rocking and ready to go with your XO. The only caveat i ran into was that the config file from the ejabberd wiki page details using IPV6 because eventually all the laptops will be using IPV6 to get around. However, the server i used was balking at this - and kept crashing ejabberd with the MOST verbose errors ever (I.E. no error). When i finally figured out what the problem was, it was smooth sailing.

One thing to note - ejabberd is seriously business. Erlang is interesting to work with. I was lost for about 2 hours before I gave up trying to understand what was going on and just dived in. Then it didn’t make sense, but was working and I was happy.

It is really neat how the XO uses jabber to group people together. I really think that jabber is the future and seeing something use XMPP so elegantly is quite inspiring. I found one of the coolest parts of the implementation is how the rosters are forced to see everyone online - which i imagine is what powers the neighborhood view on the XO. This makes me wonder if this could be tweaked to create a more interactive or social networking aspect to the XO neighborhood.

One thing I would like to know about is how the XO uses the Multi User Chat features of the jabber server. I am not sure if the Chat Activity uses MUC to work, but it would be cool if you could chat with XO users with a regular user account on the jabber server by joining a specific room. I will have to research that.


Comment to above post

Jacob

March 2nd, 2008 at 2:25 pm

1
Nice work Harper! This works great!

GLOW

March 2nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm

2
Good work! Do you plan to keep this going?

Harper

March 2nd, 2008 at 9:42 pm

3
I plan to keep it up as long as makes sense. Which means i don’t plan to take it down.

I would like to release some way for people to interact with the OLPC users. I think that would be awesome. So until then, i won’t be bored with it.

Morgan Collett

March 3rd, 2008 at 2:30 am

4
Harper, each shared activity uses a MUC. Unfortunately at this stage the MUC names and nicks are not human-friendly, but if you join the right MUC for a shared Chat, you can chat from a regular jabber client.

Harper

March 3rd, 2008 at 2:36 am

5
Hi Morgan. Thanks for the comment.

I will have to play around with ejabberd to figure out how to get a list of MUCs. So then i could publish said list and allow outsiders to join.

Does it get all messy in the chat activity when people with without hashed start chatting?

[tacotaxi]

moocapien ole "wise one'

I put line below in my boot startup like ax and everytime I boot I'm on the Chgo jabber server

sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.olpchacks.org

[Dinky]

With the current Jabber software, what are the estimates for hardware requirements for a
jabber for a full community at a state level (midwest)?

I have in mind an Athlon 64 3500+, 2.2 Ghz, 1 Gig, 300 Gb, 2000 Gb/month on public
webhosting.   Just mulling it over.

[Wayan Vota]

With this response from my host, I'm out:

Unfortunately you do not have root access. You cannot install or make
any system wide changes on a web hosting package. However you would be
able to accomplish this yourself by switching to a VPS or dedicated
server, since you would have root access. Thank you for your
understanding.

I'm all about OLPC, but VPS or dedicated server is well beyond my skill set.

[joncamfield]

I have some server space to play with, and while I don't have root, I do have the supposed ability to run ejabberd somehow.  I'll see if I can get a jabber server on it for OLPCLCDC (The only thing that'd make that acronym better is recursion).

Also, re Amazon's EC2, check out this post by the guy who runs codepad.org: http://www.hackerdashery.com/2008/03/scaling-at-2am-with-ec2.html

[anna]

I've been poking around with a school server install, trying to learn about how it works so I can assist at Glen Iris.  Of course, the school server includes ejabberd.  Some of my xochat.org friends have been helping me test jabber over the past few days and it seems to be working OK.  Thus far I've had about 8 users online at one time max, with 14 total registered (excluding the admin user). 

Keep in mind that this is a circa 1999 Dell:  1Ghz processor with a whopping 256 MB of RAM.  I shared a picture of it over the record activity to lots of lulz.  I lost the door to the case and the hard drives are sitting on top.  I do have a dual boot - just swap the IDE & power cables.  It's really a mess.

Anyway, if you're desperate for buddies in your neighborhood and xochat.org is down again, you can try my server.  I don't have a domain name, but I do have a static IP.

sugar-control-panel -s jabber 65.5.225.206

My boyfriend is probably going to be working on the electricity here (1913 house - still got some knot & tube and glass fuses going on), so I can't guarantee that it'll stay up.  Also, when we run the microwave it'll probably reboot.

Edit:  I just got user reports.  Last night, while I was sleeping off the mint juleps, they were sharing two record activities with videos and pictures along with the usual chats and write activities.  Guess that took up all the RAM because they report that it slowed to a crawl and then went nonresponsive.  It's fine now, though I didn't reboot the machine or restart the ejabberd service.

[GLOW]

Any info on why a bunch of the jabbers including xochat look to be down last couple of days?  Strange all at same time.

[joncamfield]

I often see random folk on the DC server at dc.olpc.obscure.org ; anyone interested in making a who's who?  My XO name is the same as my forum name