As I work in a large corporation who have all their satellite offices (like my own) connect to the Internet through a central structure, I decided I didn’t want some IT nerd reading all my IM’s. SSH wasn’t good enough - I wanted a robust solution that didn’t take much tinkering and would support all the protocols I use (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk, soon SIP).
That’s when I came across Jabber, mentioned by a friend of mine on his blog.
There’s a good list of Jabber components on Wikipedia, but for ease of install and use, I went with OpenFire. OpenFire has a free version and a commercial version. No guessing which version I chose to run 
OpenFire can be found in ports (/usr/ports/net-im/openfire/) so is pretty easy to install.
Anyway, lets get cracking. First make sure you have these things:
- Up to date ports tree
- root
- Full firewall control (if needed)
- MySQL
Lets start:
cd /usr/ports/net-im/openfire
make install clean
then:
edit /etc/rc.conf
and insert this line:
openfire_enable=”YES”
Manually start the server
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/openfire.sh start
This should start the web interface. This interface runs on port 9090 (open your firewall if you need to!) and will guide you through the setup of OpenFire jabber server. You will need to have created a MySQL database and a user to authenticate against the database.
You also are given the option to use LDAP for users, this isn’t covered here because I don’t use LDAP.
Finally set the admin email and wait for it to complete the setup. Once that’s done it’ll take you to a login form for admin.
Login using the username AND password admin
You’ll get the gist of things from there.
December 16th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
As part of Jabber Inc.’s compliance initiative, they have partnered with FaceTime communications, makers of IMAuditor, the RTG device and other products like the RTDiscover.
As you all should know, Jabber is on the list of audited, logged, and fully supported IM protocols. This means that your jabber chats are capable of being read by “IT nerds”, just as much as your MSN, Skype and AIM sessions, for example. This includes file transfer logging capabilities, by the way–that hilarious 4chan image you send or receive can be set to be logged on the IMA database. I’m not talking about just the filename or the URL, I’m talking about the WHOLE file from bit 0 to -1.
The only way to be sure on Jabber is with OpenPGP through XMPP.
Good thing most companies (as of yet) aren’t using FaceTime products.
- Art
December 19th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
I’d probably not follow this method now. The best route would be to download the most up to date release from the OpenFire website, extract that and follow the INSTALL instructions included. It’s pretty simple.
Another advantage: Plugins will tell you when they need updating