Jabber

[Matthew Hawkins]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, jeremy at itassist.net.au wrote:
> > On the firewall issue, I think Jeremy was inferring that a messaging
> > system that can piggy back http is more likely to succeed in most
> > situations where http traffic on port 80 has been permitted and most
> > everything else is blocked (like in a work environment where you have
> > no say in the firewall config).
> 
> That was it.  Jabber can even work thorugh masquerading firewalls, which
> has to be deliberately set up for IRC.

No, IRC works fine through masquerading firewalls with the exception of
"DCC SEND" since the connection is initiated on the client side, so
you'd need to handle that one special case so the masquerading works
properly.

What firewall allows all traffic on port 80 through anyway?  It depends
on the setup, however most places I've been to disable traffic on that
port except via an authenticated proxy server.  So your jabber program
would still break unless you performed special magic in it to let it go
via a proxy server.  This is no different to having to proxy irc
connections to get through the firewall.  In either case, it's a
stalemate.

> I'm quite sure that Jabber has a compressed transmission mode.  All
> those pointy brackets and whitespaces would compress beautifully.

I've never seen it, in any case the compression used would have to be
client dependent because both sides need to know.  So you're immediately
cutting out access to people who aren't in your special "compression
club" (this sounds more and more like a GPL-infected thing)

> In any case the six pages is the usual hyperbole passed aroung by people
> who never actually bothered to check

Sorry to disappoint you then.

> - I have sat there with the debugger and it's a lot more like six
> *tags* for a hello packet, one tag per line.  That's still a lot, but
> reasonable since each tag has a purpose.

Last time I used it, it was 6 pages.  I had to stop using it as
~/.xsession-errors was growing beyond 16Mb of XML crap from it just in
15 minutes of mucking around.

They may have improved the protocol since then.  I certainly hope so.

-- 
Matt