Chat Systems

ALPHA project viewer overview

We are investigating the use of XMPP as a replacement for our current chat infrastructure. This project viewer replaces limited group chat functionality to help us exercise XMPP and learn more about how it scales, integrates with third party clients, other chat software, and ways to transition from legacy chat. We want your help to test it out and make sure its a viable replacement for our current chat protocol.

This project intends to address the following chat issues:

• Messages are not necessarily delivered in order, so conversations can easily become garbled.
• Delivery is not reliable, so parts of conversations can go missing.
• Delays between sending and receiving messages can span tens of seconds.
• When a resident logs in, they are automatically subscribed to chats for all of their groups, and must drop out of every active chat with traffic that does not interest them.

Logistics

• The XMPP chat enabled viewer is presently only supported on the Aditi test grid.
• As the project progresses we will set up a public JIRA project to share internal development work and track bugs entered by Lindens and residents. This will provide a place to see future work planned, provide feedback and enter/track defects. When this is set up, further guidance will be provided.

Project Viewer Release 2.5.1.223974

Known Issues

• duplicate roster entries will sometimes be present, one each for legacy and for xmpp.
• group chat rosters entries are not removed when XMPP participants exit the chat.
  • on rejoining the chat there will be a new instance of the name in the roster, leading to two or more XMPP roster entries.
• messages from previous chat sessions are presented again. You may see a large number of messages from previous group chats stream past when you log in.
• right clicking group chat participants in the roster crashes the viewer.
• there may be a delay (chat lag) when a new person joins a group chat.

How to Configure an XMPP Client

If you desire to use a non viewer XMPP chat client, Adium, Pidgen, Empathy, etc., Configure your client with the following parameters.

Please note that our support for these chat clients is still very experimental.

XMPP client configuration

Parameter	Value	Notes
chat server:	chat.aditi.lindenlab.com	this is the chat server for users logged into the Aditi grid.
username:	firstname.lastname@chat.aditi.lindenlab.com	some clients will accept the user name and domain this way, others provide you with separate user name and domain fields.
password:	your SL password	yep, the same password you use to log in to Second Life with.
Reqire TLS:	[on]	be sure to turn encryption on.
Alias or nic:	firstname.lastname	the 'alias' or 'nick' must match your SL name, not your display name - else connection will fail.