Paul's Web Pages

Technical Stuff

Paul van Tilburg — 2007-03-21T00:00:00+01:00

Hobix

There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental.

Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental!

Ruby D-Bus

A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API.

I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens…

OpenID

I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service.

Koditoj

Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

Moved Jabber Server

Paul van Tilburg — 2006-09-18T00:00:00+02:00

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 that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, 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.net to 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.net that 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.