ideas for a personal cluster with gta04

joakim at verona.se joakim at verona.se
Tue May 22 10:00:32 CEST 2012


Christ van Willegen <cvwillegen at gmail.com> writes:

> On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 11:37 AM,  <joakim at verona.se> wrote:
>> *** instant messaging
>> irc clients on the laptop or phone uses the server as gateway to other
>> systems. Bitlbee is used for the proxy. znc fronts bitlbee, which
>> handles the connections and logging.
>
> Any reason not to use Jabber (XMPP)?

I'm not sure how to answer this withouth the answer turning into a
rambling mess. I'll make an attempt.

Bitlbee is so far the best IM aggregator I have used. It accepts many
IM protocols for input, and provides IRC for output.

The stack I use everyday currently looks like this:

ERC(an Emacs IRC client) - ZNC - Bitlbee

Bitlbee connects to: MSN,  Facebook, corporate networks
using libpurple, Skype, etc.

Facebook uses Jabber, so Bitlbee can in fact front Jabber connections as
well.

I've also added an Ejabberd to the system recently but I haven't gained
much experience yet. Bitlbee will front it also.

So, to summarise pros and cons:

+ bitlbee + znc is a reliable stack that connects me to all my friends.

Even when using the GTA02 I got complimented how well the stack worked
even when I was in the Subway or something. chat connections are held by
ZNC even when the network is flaky.

- I can't do everything over IRC, that XMPP could do. OTOH no one
  complains so I'm not really sure what I'm missing.

- it is distressing that my friends like to use non-free IM services,
  but when you look closer at it, only Skype really really sucks, and
  I'm trying to find solutions for that.

There is much more to be said about this, but in closing, the short term
goal is a pragmatic solution, the long term solution will allow people
to easily use a free system.  



> Christ van Willegen

-- 
Joakim Verona




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