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October 28, 2003

Death of a Jabber Server


If this season had an official motto, it would have to be "Damnit, Jim, I'm an editor/columnist/student, not a Unix sysadmin." Which gives me a certain fresh perspective when I say:

It's 6:52 a.m. Do you know where your Jabber server is?

This morning, unfortunately, I did not. The Jabber server has taken to falling over at odd intervals, and my quick parses of the logs don't really indicate why that may be. Today, unfortunately, I'm under three deadlines, which means that I either spend a few hours trying to figure out why my hobby Jabber server won't stay upright, or I work (and pause long enough to note that I'm shutting the silly Jabber server down and killing it before it drains away more of my precious bodily flu... er... time).

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have editors with whom IM is my primary means of communication, but I do. I'd also consider running a Jabber-capable multi-client like gAIM, but the Win32 builds run for all of five minutes before falling over. Trillian does Jabber, too... for $25. There are also third party jabber servers running Yahoo! and AIM conduits, but every time one of those protocols changes, there are several days worth of unconnectedness to contend with while the server admins decide to get around to fixing things. So my options boil down to:

  1. Run more than one chat client.
  2. Settle on a single chat network.
  3. Run a chat multi-client that keeps me in touch with wife and job, with other networks being a bonus.

Hm.

So, in keeping with my ongoing policy of ruthless simplification, the Jabber server is gone (or will be shortly, once I confirm I'm not orphaning anybody).

You can find me as pdxmph on AIM, pdxyeti on Yahoo!, and mph@puddingbowl.org on MSN. If I ever find a good client that can handle two of those three protocols (MSN is really, really optional) and jabber, I'll probably reactivate my jabber.org account.

This probably sounds fairly huffy and snitty, but it's honest-to-god not. If anything, I'm looking at the process of choking back on assorted services and functionality as sort of liberating, and I'm digging the sense of constructive impatience that's informing that process.

Time to get back to work.

Posted by mph at October 28, 2003 08:47 AM

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