After a lot of frustration, reading of documentation and even giving up completely on certain paths of action I finally got Jabber up and running. The “Jabber burnout” as Adian called it was terrible and only now do I feel de-stressed enough to write about it.

I initially setup an installation of jabberd2 as I have had previous experience with it and was comfortable with it's administration. I got it working without difficulty and could connect to it via a standalone client but ended up abandoning it when I tried to get a web interface working with it.

As is, jabberd2 doesn't have it's own http polling system, which is necessary for use with a web client and I looked at a couple of mplementations, including Punjab

but decided to throw in the towel and go with a different Jabber server which had this facility built-in, along with logging and multi-user chat: all things jabberd2 didn't provide. Enter ejabberd.

I found configuring ejabberd a bit awkward and the documentation a bit unclear but it eventually bent to my will. This was followed with a lot of playing about with mod_proxy which made me want to cry more than once, but the result was that I got JWChat working and from behind a restrictive corporate firewall

Getting multi-user chat operational was the final piece of the puzzle and I learned an important lesson: ejabberd's mod_muc module likes to be configured to use a subdomain of the virtual host, even if it doesn't resolve to anything in DNS. This was a painful lesson to learn…

Today, we have a groupchat facility, with logging, that's accessible from anywhere on the web, magic!

As I previously mentioned, my current task as Infurious system admin is providing the team with a bug/task tracking system, namely Trac.

My initial thought was: “our server runs Ubuntu, this should be easy…”

I could get Trac running via tracd and I could see that mod_python was working via mod_python.testhandler but the two didn’t seem to want to play together. Last night, after much frustration, I just gave up and configured Trac to run as a CGI application. Problem solved.

Unfortunately this solution will introduce a performance penalty but at this stage it’s my priority to get the system functional before I start worrying about access speed.

All I have left to do is get the Trac permissions set up and I’m going to move on to configuring a Jabber server which will free us from our dependency on Campfire.

Me? A Linux hippy? You bet!

It’s been a busy week. The lads and myself have been quite industrious, making plans and Getting Things Done.

I’ve taken on responsibility of taking care of the Linux side of things and last night finished setting up an SSL enhanced, WebDAV accessible Subversion repository, for which Aidan has written an introductory guide.

My current task is getting Trac installed and I’m quite enjoying being up to my elbows in command line goodness. It must be the Linux hippy in me

There’s definitely an atmosphere of excitement about the endeavour and it makes the day job seem more tolerable knowing there could be more interesting things on the horizon. Geek on!