Moved Jabber Server
I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different
server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks
because of the business of the S2S component. The
transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep
his/her JID.
Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:
- First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of
jabber.luon.net, that is:msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber …
Note thatjabber.luon.netstill has the same addresses asluon.netat this time. - I also added SRV records for
luon.netso XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running onluon.netanymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:jabber.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net. xmpp-client.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net. xmpp-server.tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
- With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
- Then, I modified the address of
jabber.luon.netto point to the new host and let it propagate. - Next, I sent a MOTD (
luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client1. - Finally, I installed a second C2S component on
luon.netthat connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.
It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess
the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why
doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).
1 I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com
JIDs <→ talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can
configure the server separately from the JID.