Programming Jabber

Configuring the Jabber Server

The nature and behavior of a Jabber server is controlled by the contents of a configuration file (with a default name of jabber.xml), which you will find in the jabber-1.4.1 directory. As you can probably guess from the filename’s extension, the configuration is formatted in XML, which offers a very powerful way of expressing the nature and features of your Jabber server and associated services and components.

Details on how to navigate, interpret, and edit this configuration file are given in Chapter 4; here we will just look at the basic settings that can be modified before you start up the Jabber server.

For an experimental Jabber server (such as for the purposes of this book), there isn’t actually anything you need to change in the configuration. The out-of-the-box configuration settings are pretty much what we need in order to experiment with our recipes later in the book; nevertheless, let’s look at some of the settings you may wish to change right now:

Server hostname

The <host/> parameter specifies the Jabber server’s hostname. As delivered, the jabber.xml configuration has this set to localhost:

<host><jabberd:cmdline flag="h">localhost</jabberd:cmdline></host>

You can change this to the name of your server hostname; in the case of our examples, this would be yak.

The localhost setting occurs elsewhere in the configuration too—as a literal in the welcome message that is sent to users after a successful registration with the server. ...