Here comes a decent XMPP server!

Fed up with the carouselle of Proprietary Messaging Networks of the Day? Try an open, federated network running and evolving since 1999, based on free and open source software and the protocol standartized by IETF! Today, XMPP practically supports such long-desired features as video calls and convenient end to end encryption.

This page used to say: "stay in touch with your contacts using provided gateways to other IM networks!". Nowadays, it's a violation of Terms of Service of proprietary networks to use non-official software. So bridging is practically possible only to other open networks where owners respect your freedom. Currently decent.im runs a gateway only for IRC.

Server configs and code are public.

===> To request for an account, just drop me an email! <===

No troubles, no new features/developments. So this is really a no-op report.

During this time, not much happened:

• staging server dev.decent.im shut down

  It wasn't actively used by me for few months, but it costs the same as production host. I decided to stop this waste of funds.

  Of course now I need to be more cautious when applying changes to produciton, or at last I should not start testing stuff on production server. I am thinking of making it more possible to replicate entire setup in a locla environment not having all properties of real public server (e.g. public static IP). But this is yet to be resolved in future.

• intermittently, unattended upgrade was broken because lua-expat upstream website was down:

  lua-expat author has kindly brought up the site on my request. It was brought down manually to stop DoS attack which was mounted against his website.

->  http://code.matthewwild.co.uk/lua-expat/
--> hg identify --id --rev default http://code.matthewwild.co.uk/lua-expat/ --config trusted.users=portage
abort: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
!!! Error updating dev-lua/luaexpat:0: [Exception] update command returned non-zero result
...
* Updating /usr/portage/distfiles/hg-src/luaexpat/lua-expat from http://code.matthewwild.co.uk/lua-expat/
pulling from http://code.matthewwild.co.uk/lua-expat/
abort: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

• again, one more user joined decent.im :)

Happy new 2018 year!

During last month, this happened:

• spectrum build failure was resolved

  To fix that, I submitted upstream a pull request with a trivial patch, which was accepted (not without a bit of bikeshedding with upstream maintainer).

• biboumi, the awesome IRC gateway, was integrated to production service

  biboumi is a great software, featuring a bunch of nice capabilities, for example, message archive access for IRC rooms user is attending. This means no more missed bits in IRC conversations!

  biboumi previously could use only SQLite database, which was considered by me a major downside. Finally, with a help of our very humble donation, the upstream maintainer recently added PostgreSQL support! Then, I have added it to production server (as well as staging server dev.decent.im). Existing irc.decent.im component, previously served by Spectrum & libcommini based gateway, was replaced with biboumi, for convenience and clarity. (Previously I considered putting it to horrific URI biboumi.irc.decent.im).

• one more user joined decent.im :)

  Our server is not boasting a huge user base, but I value every person who puts trust into decent.im!

It's been a while since I've put any updates here. But all this time maintenance and development efforts never completely stopped. And this time I kinda am serious about starting to keep writing service status updates regularly. Promise :)

Quite important recent change is switching from hardened-sources to gentoo-sources as the former is now unsupported since grsecurity no longer publishes updates.

Also the make.profile was changed from modified "hardened" profile to bleeding edge default/linux/amd64/17.0/no-multilib (again with a mixed in decent.im profile feature). This is to enable new compiler gcc-6.4.0 which is required to build net-im/spectrum since recently.

Last cycle of weekly automated system update failed at building net-im/spectrum-9999:

In file included from /usr/include/qt4/QtCore/qobject.h:47:0,
                 from /usr/include/qt4/QtCore/qabstracteventdispatcher.h:45,
                 from /usr/include/qt4/QtCore/QtCore:3,
                 from /var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999/backends/libcommuni/main.cpp:20:
/usr/include/boost/signals/detail/signals_common.hpp:26:13: error: expected identifier before 'protected'
   namespace BOOST_SIGNALS_NAMESPACE {
             ^
/usr/include/boost/signals/detail/signals_common.hpp:26:13: error: expected unqualified-id before 'protected'
In file included from /usr/include/boost/scoped_ptr.hpp:14:0,
                 from /usr/include/boost/smart_ptr.hpp:19,
                 from /usr/include/boost/signals/connection.hpp:14,
                 from /usr/include/boost/signals/signal_template.hpp:18,
                 from /usr/include/boost/signals/signal0.hpp:24,
                 from /usr/include/boost/signal.hpp:27,
                 from /usr/include/boost/signals.hpp:9,
                 from /var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999/include/Swiften/SwiftenCompat.h:50,
                 from /var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999/include/transport/Config.h:29,
                 from /var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999/backends/libcommuni/main.cpp:22:
/usr/include/boost/smart_ptr/scoped_ptr.hpp:26:28: error: expected '}' before end of line
 #pragma GCC diagnostic push
                            ^
/usr/include/boost/smart_ptr/scoped_ptr.hpp:26:28: error: expected declaration before end of line
make[2]: *** [backends/libcommuni/CMakeFiles/spectrum2_libcommuni_backend.dir/build.make:102: backends/libcommuni/CMakeFiles/spectrum2_libcommuni_backend.dir/main.cpp.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999'
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:646: backends/libcommuni/CMakeFiles/spectrum2_libcommuni_backend.dir/all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory '/var/tmp/portage/net-im/spectrum-9999/work/spectrum-9999'
make: *** [Makefile:152: all] Error 2
 * ERROR: net-im/spectrum-9999::mva failed (compile phase):
 *   emake failed

Interestingly, this failure doesn't occur if we use net-im/swiften-9999 (currently we have 3.0 installed on production server). This will be further investigated.

Another nice pre-announcement is that, with help of our donation, the innovative IRC gateway implementation Biboumi is getting PostgreSQL support, which will enable us to have it on production system with no extra maintenance effort. Currently Biboumi supports only SQLite, which is a bit questionable in my opinion, especially with regard to taking backups of it while having service working.

Have deployed a couple of webapps for Jabber chatting and calling.

• Jappix
• JSXC

Both are not perfect, but still it's something. I hope things will get better in future.

Also this simple test webpage is quite good for testing Jabber calls capability. Just be sure to enter full JID (with resource part) into participant JID input. The full JID of the connection made by this page shows up on the page itself. WebSocket URL is wss://decent.im:5281/xmpp-websocket

For your information, I am working on implementing Jingle calls in Conversations, please join to Bountysource campaign.

Also I am thinking about adding support of videocalls into mcabber using ffmpeg. Please drop me a line if you want this, or if you want to help.

TLDR: commonly not accessible XMPP feature. Badly maintained or just absent in client implementations.

Tried to make calls with Jitsi, Gajim, Pidgin, webapps Jappix and JSXC - nothing worked in this domain setup.

But I am obsessed with an idea to bring this feature to decent.im users. Decent.im is supposed to be ass-kicking!

For your information, I am working on implementing Jingle calls in Conversations, please join to Bountysource campaign to appreciate me (and/or competitors).

Still cannot get Jappix or JSXC webapps to work with calls on this server, despite my numerous attempts.

But a kind person Philipp Hancke from operators@xmpp.org ML pointed to this brilliant test page, which just works without any issue! This testing page is by far the most accessible and convenient way to make calls with Jabber! :) Also works the same good way in both Chrome and Firefox, which feels exceptional.

In other words, you can go on and make your calls using that test page! Just be sure to enter full JID (with resource part) into participant JID input. The full JID of the connection made by this page shows up on the page itself. WebSocket URL is wss://decent.im:5281/xmpp-websocket