[Systems] ejabberd

[Bernie Innocenti]

Since a few days ago, our ejabberd instance on sunjammer could no longer
connect with gmail.com users.

In the attempt to fix the problem, I upgraded ejabberd from 2.0.3
(jaunty) to 2.1.2 (lucid), which luckily is still compatible with our
system libraries. The upgrade did not end up fixing the problem, but did
not seem to cause new problems either, so I'm leaving it there.

It turned out that the erlang runtime has problems resolving SRV records
when started with "-sname ejabberd". It's not clear why it was working
before, because this is the default and I haven't touched anything.
Perhaps GMail changed something in their DNS configuration.

Anyway, to fix the issue quickly I've hacked /etc/hosts to associate
gmail.com directly with the IP of one of the jabber servers. This
particular kludge is described here:

  http://www.ejabberd.im/fix-dns-srv

Now, I'm very surprised that the default setup of ejabberd would be
incompatible with the standard way to find a jabber server from a
domain. wtf??

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/