The eJabberd and Tkabber stories :)

The eJabberd Story

For our on going project, I am playing with ejabberd. It is a Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server, licensed under GPLv2 (Free and Open Source), written in Erlang/OTP. Among other features, ejabberd is cross-platform, fault-tolerant, clusterable and modular. It’s just cool for developing jabber/xmpp bots on your local machine. The big guys often use it to run jabber services on their domain.

I am currently developing a jabber bot and had to install ejabberd on my Ubuntu. Installation was quite easy as I am on Linux. One single command did everything for me:

After installation, I had to check the status of the server. So I used the following command:

But I was disappointed to see the “node down” error message. I tried all the commands I knew to revive it but nothing worked right.

Then out of despair, I decided to use root privilege to do that, so I used:

Guess what ! 😀 It worked !! Man, I knew in order to start, stop, restart servers, you need root access. Who knew you’ll need root access for checking status as well? And why did the non-sudo code returned “node down” instead of a plain message asking to use root privilege ? I don’t know 🙁 It was really painful !

Now, I had to register a new user from the command line. I used the following command:

The format is:

Then I had to configure the ejabberd server to invoke admin access to the user I just created. The easiest way would have been to use nano with sudo to edit the config file. But unaware of what the name of the config file is and how to edit the config file, I explored the entire configuration directory with root access. I used the following trick:

Please Note that the /etc/ejabberd directory can be accessed only by the root user. A simple user can’t even view it’s contents.

The good thing was that I could double click on the config file and edit it with gedit without invoking further root access since I have already applied that to the nautilus window I have opened.

I edited the “%Admin Users” section to add me as an admin.

The eJabberd web admin is available at: http://localhost:5280/admin/ 🙂
The web admin panel is simply cool and you can do all sort of things using it except chatting 😉

The Tkabber

I was running my bot from command line and it hardly cared if I was connected to the internet or not. But I was having problem with the GUI xmpp client. I was using Pidgin. It was first working fine. But it required me to connect to the internet even the xmpp connection was being made to the localhost.

And even worse, later on, whenever I connected to localhost, pidgin crashed. So I was looking for alternatives. I have tried out a few other clients and a few web based clients as well. None of them suited me.

Finally, I found Tkabber. It’s based on TCL/TK and looks very very poor. From the look of it, it seems that it was developed for Unix machines. But matters not as long as it serves my purpose. It connects to the local machine even when I am not connected to the internet. It plays really funny sounds on different events. It has a nice tidy interface as well.

I like it ! 😀

That’s the story I wanted to share.. it’s nothing important… I just wrote it to pass my idle time… 🙂