Programming Jabber

Installing the Server

Once you have downloaded the Jabber server tarball, you need to unpack it, configure the build environment, and compile the server. The general idea is that the Jabber server will be compiled and run from wherever you decide to unpack it; that is, there is no separate “install” step.

For this reason, and because it’s also often useful to be able to install and start up a different version of the Jabber server for testing and comparisons, create a generic jabber directory somewhere central but local, for example in /usr/local/:

yak:/usr/local# mkdir jabber

The Jabber server does not need to be and should not be run as root; so create a new user jabber (group jabber) to be used as the Jabber server administrator and make that user the owner of the generic Jabber server directory:

yak:/usr/local# groupadd jabber
yak:/usr/local# useradd -g jabber -d /usr/local/jabber jabber
yak:/usr/local# passwd jabber
Changing password for jabber
Enter the new password (minimum of 5, maximum of 127 characters)
Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers.
New password: ********
Re-enter new password: ********
Password changed.
yak:/usr/local# chown jabber:jabber jabber
yak:/usr/local#

Once you’ve created the generic Jabber server directory, switch to the new Jabber server administration user jabber, unpack the tarball you downloaded, and enter the resulting directory:

yak:/usr/local# su - jabber
yak:~$ tar xzf jabber-1.4.1.tar.gz
yak:~$ cd jabber-1.4.1/ ...