News about jabberd14

New mailing list available

There is now a development mailing list for jabberd14 available at http://lists.xmppd.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dev.

jabberd14 1.6.1 now available

The version 1.6.1 of jabberd14 is now available.

1.6.1 has no real new features. The difference to 1.6.0 is that I have replaced the encryption layer of the server. Instead of using OpenSSL, jabberd14 is now using GnuTLS. This has been necessary to change the license to GPL-only.

An exception are the new features in the TLS layer, caused by functionality available now in GnuTLS or functionality that would have been possible with OpenSSL, but that has not been used by the former encryption layer of jabberd14. This includes two different stream compression algorithms (DEFLATE and LZO), support for TLS version 1.1 and 1.2, support for OpenPGP keys as certificates, and other functionality.

To better support the new TLS implementation, the configuration format of the TLS functionality has changed, but the old format is still mostly supported. So there is normally no need to reconfigure your server, but you should use the new format for new installations.

jabberd14 1.6.0 has been released

I am proud to announce, that version 1.6.0 of the jabberd14 Jabber server implementation has been released on 2006-12-24 after more than one and a half year of development.

The new version of jabberd14 for the first time officially has the 14 in its name. This is to distinguish it from the jabberd2 implementation, that shares the same name, but is a completely different implementation.

New features of version 1.6.0 include:

• jabberd14 used with the jadc2s client connection manager now fully supports the XMPP RFCs 3920 and 3921.
• Support for Privacy Lists
• jabberd14 can send its messages to users in different languages. Already supported are Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian and Italian. Other languages can be added by installing additional language files.
• SASL authentication is possible on client links as well as on inter-server links. (For client links you have to use the jadc2s connection manager to use SASL.) (At least the following mechanisms should be supported for client authentication: CRAM-MD5, PLAIN, GSSAPI, DIGEST-MD5, NTLM, SRP, OTP, KERBEROS_V4 - on inter-server links EXTERNAL using certificate based authentication is supported.)
• Support for Flexible Offline Message Retrieval (XEP-0013).
• Support for XMPP Ping (XEP-0199)
• Full namespace support.
• Support for the xml:lang.
• Passing full subscription request stanza to a user, even when the subscription request has to be stored offline. Allowing the requestor to pass additional data together with the request.
• Fix in handling presences with negative priority. Messages that are stored offline, are now delivered if a session changes from negative to non-negative priority.
• Easy integration of jabberd14 into web projects by having additional data available in the database (e.g. presence information can now be read by a web page with a single SQL SELECT statement.)
• New base habdler base_dir, that can periodically check a directory for *.stanza files. These files are read, parsed, the content is processed as a stanza, and the file is deleted afterwards. This can be useful to inject messages (or other stanzas) to the server, e.g. to send Jabber messages using scripts on a web page. The server can also deliver messages (or other stanzas) back to this directory.
• Passwords are no longer cached in memroy by the server. They can just be changed in the SQL database and get active instantly. New users can also be created, by just adding a new password to the database.
• It is now possible to block account names from being registered and to enforce minimum and maximum lengths of the username on registration of new accounts.
• After an account has been deleted by the user, the JabberID is blocked against reregistration for a configurable amount of time (defaults to half a year).
• It is easily possible to migrate from old filespools (xdb_file, i.e. one XML file per user to store settings) to newer storage handlers by reconfiguring the server and then importing the old data (using the -I command line option).
• All components of the server including the session manager, but the client connection manager, can now be restarted without user's sessions being dropped. This allows reconfiguration and software upgrades while the server has online users.
• The session manager now understands the internal session protocol of jabberd2 as well. This allows development and usage of components acting as client manager, for both server implementations at the same time.
• Inter-server communication can now be authenticated using SASL EXTERNAL and X.509 certificates (SSL certificates).
• The inter-server communications can now be configured to require encryption or strong authentication using X.509 certificates.
• xdb_sql can be configured to execute an SQL query just after a connection to the database server has been established or reestablished. This is usefule for example if you are using MySQL 4.1+ and want to set your used charset (SET NAMESd i UTF8).
• jabberd14now uses libpopt for command line parsing.
• Stale pidfiles are now detected and ignored.
• The list of online users has to be fetched using service discovery now (instead of the older browsing protocol).
• Removed support for the jabber:iq:admin namespace, which probably has not been used anymore at all.
• Disabled support for the jabber:iq:agent and jabber:iq:agents protocols in the default configuration file. (Can be re-enabled if needed.)
• Removed support for the jabber:iq:filter namespace (which had already been disabled in the default configuration file of version 1.4.4.
• Removed the mod_groups module.
• The list of supported features returned on a service discovery request need not be configured anymore, as it is now generated automatically.