So I'm checking out the latest version of Jabberd right now, 2.0s3. We are currently running version 1.4.2 at my company. We have about 80 concurrent users distributed throughout the world (I can say that with a straight face now that we have a London office). This version works fine, however this past week the daemon has died twice in the middle of the day. Oddly, I was logged into the server at the precise moment it died. There was nothing logged and as soon as I restarted it all the clients (which are mostly Exodus) automatically reconnected and I bet half my users didn't even notice.

Anyway, when it happened that first time I just thought it was a fluke...the daemon had been running like a top for over a year so I can't really complain. When it happened again the very next day, I went and downloaded the 2.x version of jabberd and started installing it on one of our utility servers in the data center. I need to move jabberd off of our current utility server which is a four year old PowerEdge 1300 single proc P3-733 MHz with *cough* 128MB of memory. I'd like to bump it up to a gig of memory and slap another processor in it, but our strict IT procurement policy forces us to let our 1+ year old hardware collect dust while we purchase a half dozen 2-way 2650's with 4GB of RAM. Who am I to argue?

So I installed the 2.x version of jabberd on this dual proc Xeon 2.4 GHz box with a gig of RAM that's also hosting our intranet site. Overkill you scoff? Balderdash! Hey, at least we can scale up when we take over the world. Speaking of scaling, jabberd 2.x was rewritten and has several cool new features that my current version is lacking.

• Has support for Server-to-Client, Server-to-Server (Native), and Server-to-Server (Foreign) communications
  
• The jabberd "server" is now distributed across five separate components
  
  
  
  1. Router
     
  2. Server to Server
     
  3. Resolver
     
  4. Session Manager
     
  5. Client to Server
     
  
  
• Can use a relational database for storage of Jabber Data Objects (defaults to MySQL support)
  
• Installer script seems less "kludgy"
  
• All the communications between the above components can be encrypted using SSL
  

I have a handful of beta-testers right now, and so far it is very stable, and seems like it will be able to handle 100 times more traffic than our little company will ever be able to generate. Stay tuned for an update on my migration strategy. (I'm going to connect the old 1.4 server to the new 2.0 server and slowly migrate users onto the new one while (hopefully) keeping all their buddy lists and groups)

So my company has increased its I.T. spending the past few months. This is good news for many reasons, but the two that pop into my mind is (1) I get to play with new technology, (2) it may mean the I.T. industry as a whole is picking up. The sales rep at Dell said that this month has been really good there, and it's only the second week. I know things won't be like the good ol' dotcom days that to this day seem like a dream, but I'm looking forward to being able to get my hands on some big iron again...building Frankenstein-style boxes is ok, but as a company gets larger it becomes downright unmanageable when you don't have standardization.


So we just purchased a PowerEdge 2650 which is kind of middle-of-the-road hardware, but really nice to work on. Dell is really slashing prices nowadays, probably because they're getting ready for some next gen 64-bit servers, and also because they need to compete with IBM and Sun. We also purchased a couple of new Latitude 500's. I'm on a circa 2000 Latitude now and let me tell you, the difference is night and day. The new Latitudes are pretty sweet. It's got nice style, it's pretty thin and light, and is chock full of features. This Latitude I'm on now is fairing quite well now that I put Red Hat 8 on it. The biggest (and possibly only) gripe I have about this laptop is the freakin keyboard. Sometimes the shift key doesn't work, sometimes I hit a key once and it enters the character twice, and it has a really poor feel to it (man I wish I had a ThinkPad keyboard on this). But it works, and it's better than nothing right?