Yesterday's adventure was to set up a jabberd on babylon4, partly for hosting for a chat that's been suffering badly from continuing (and progressively worsening) problems on AOL's exchange servers, but also just to find out how to set one up and run it. I started out first with ejabberd, for two main reasons: It includes multi-user-chatroom capability out of the box, and, well, it's written in Erlang, and that's cool. Ejabberd is claimed to run on multiple Unix platforms as well as on Windows.
Installing the Erlang suite on babylon4 went smoothly. Installing ejabberd did not. I ran into a variety of problems, many of them apparently spawned out of the All Unices Are Linux mindset — for instance, #!/bin/sh scripts using bash-specific syntax ... /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash on Linux, so that means it's true everywhere else as well, right? (Wrong.) The long and short of it is, I never did manage to get ejabberd working on babylon4, which runs Solaris 10 x86.
So, I ripped out ejabberd and moved on to the next candidate, OpenFire (formerly known as Wildfire). OpenFire is written in Java. Installation was dead easy, and configuring it to use my existing mysqld as a back-end took literally moments. I had a little difficulty getting it to start up once configured, until I discovered that the departed ejabberd had left a non-functional zombie process sitting on port 5222. There's also one minor and peculiar setup glitch: After setting the OpenFire admin account's password in the Web setup interface, you can't actually log in as the admin until you stop and restart openfire ... twice. (Why twice, I don't know. Once would be perfectly understandable. Twice is ... odd. But that's what's documented on the OpenFire support forum.) Once I figured that out, it all Just Worked. It'll happily talk to and accept XMPP connections from pretty much any valid XMPP account except LJTalk; it appears that although the LJTalk server is XMPP-based, LiveJournal did something funky on it that prevents LJTalk XMPP accounts from connecting to any XMPP server except LJTalk.
So ... now we have a house jabberd, and a new Caer chat, and an interim-at-least place for the Barflies. And lo, my fu increaseth.
Even though I don't actually need erlang any more, I'm keeping it around anyway. Because ... well, you never know what I might want to do with it. It looks to be a very powerful language for mathematical applications, for one thing.