Programming Jabber

If Your Server Doesn’t Start

A number of likely candidates might have prevented your server from starting.

Bad XML configuration

It is not difficult to make errors (typographical or otherwise) in the server configuration. The first line of defense is to be careful when editing your jabber.xml file. After that, the Jabber server isn’t going to be too forthcoming with information if you have broken the well-formedness of the XML:

yak:~/jabber-1.4.1$ ./jabberd/jabberd -h yak
Configuration parsing using jabber.xml failed

Help is at hand in the shape of Perl and the XML::Parser module, which is a wrapper around the XML parser, expat.

Providing you have Perl and the XML::Parser module installed, you can get expat to give you a clue where the XML is broken:

yak:~/jabber-1.4.1$ perl -MXML::Parser 
      -e 'XML::Parser->new->parsefile("jabber.xml", ErrorContext => 3)'

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 47, column 35, byte 1750:
    be on one line, the server doesn't like it otherwise! :)
    -->

    <host><jabberd:cmdline flag="h"yak</jabberd:cmdline></host>
==================================^

    <!--
    This is the custom configuration section for the
 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/i586-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 185
yak:~/jabber-1.4.1$

This shows us exactly where the problem is.^[4] In this case, the close-tag symbol (>) had been inadvertently removed when replacing localhost with yak.

No XML Is Bad XML!

If you don’t use the -c switch to specify which configuration file to use, the standard ...