Jabber servers/DC

NOTICE: Jabber Server shut down

The OLPC Learning Club D.C. Jabber Server was dc.olpc.obscure.org. This server operated from 2008-2016, but was shut down to reduce the attack surface of the server it was running on as the software had not received any maintenance.

If there is a desire to revive this service, please contact Richard Bullington-McGuire.

Historical Information:

This server is for use by OLPC users in the greater Washington, D.C. area. If you are outside this geographic area, please look for a server in your own area.

To setup your XO, open the terminal activity and type:

sugar-control-panel -s jabber dc.olpc.obscure.org

Restart Sugar by pressing ctrl-alt-erase, or restart your XO, and you will connect to the Jabber server.

You will then see other OLPC Learning Club D.C. users who are online in the Neighborhood View.

Disconnecting from Jabber Servers

Since there is no user interface method of disconnecting, you should set the server back to a non-existent value:

sugar-control-panel -s jabber xyzzy

(The original value was ship2.jabber.laptop.org, but that is unlikely to ever point to a functioning server since the ship.2 software (builds 650-656) won't be compatible with the more scalable server solution under development.)

Background: XO-compatible Public Jabber Servers

Before G1G1 laptops arrived in December, the OLPC developers ran a single Jabber server for internal testing purposes. Folks who had the beta XO laptops could see the developers and people running the software emulators from around the world as icons in the Neighborhood view. Furthermore, from within Activities such as Chat, Write and Record, one could invite individuals in the Neighborhood view to share your local session. For example in Write, individuals invited from the Neighborhood view to your instance of Write can insert a cursor into your document and edit simultaneously. In Record, shared sessions cause photos you take to appear in others' instances of the Record Activity and vice versa.

Because the single instance of the developers' Jabber server could not handle the load of potentially hundreds of connections from G1G1 recipients, the address of the server was changed, and a non-functioning address was coded into the control panel of the shipping laptops.

Tom Hoffman graciously donated server hosting and set up a Jabber instance on December 20, 2007 for the G1G1 community. The server soon became extremely busy as word spread about how to access the server. Many new XO owners enjoyed the sense of real-time virtual community that could be had on XOchat and because no other network chat options available without hacking in the command line of the Terminal Activity. By February 2008, the XOchat.org Jabber server became unstable due to the load and had to be shut down. Since then, other groups have enabled Jabber servers.

Here are instructions on how to share an Activity with XO laptops physically nearby or over the Internet through the properly configured Jabber server.
http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/sharing.shtml

Tom Hoffman's original announcement about XOchat.org
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2007/12/xochatorg-up.html

OLPC News wrote an article about XOchat.org
http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/olpc_help_g1g_xo_chat.html

Generation YES Blog post about the experience with XOchat.org
http://blog.genyes.com/index.php/2007/12/31/xo-laptop-and-extended-networks/

About the OLPC Learning Club D.C. Jabber Server

The OLPC Learning Club D.C. Jabber server is a project of The Obscure Organization, installed by Richard Bullington-McGuire in April 2008. It is currently running ejabberd on Fedora Core 7, hosted on a dedicated virtual machine.

This Wiki page has been adapted from the OLPC Chicago Jabber Server page, created by Harper Reed.