As of a few months ago, there were no DNS SRV records for XMPP server-to-server connections to the gmail.com domain. Then there was one pointing to TCP port 5269 on talk.google.com. Unfortunately, that port was unreachable. Then, a few weeks ago (I think) SRV records were added for 2 more servers, but all three were still unreachable. Yesterday I checked again, and all three servers were still unreachable. Today, I decided to write a little perl script to more easily check the status of server-to-server reachability for JID domains. Naturally, the first one I wanted to check was gmail.com. I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that all three servers were reachable on port 5269! It turns out that you get an immediate disconnect when you do try to connect, but there is definitely something listening today that wasn't there yesterday.
What this means is that Google Talk users are one step closer to being reachable by people using other jabber servers out on the greater Internet. Goole Talkers will no longer be trapped in their current walled garden. Instant Messaging for the masses is getting closer and closer to the EMail model, where it doesn't matter who your provider is - you can still communicate with everybody else.
You can bet that I'll be checking this at least daily to see when they go live with server-to-server connectivity. I'll also be watching the IM Federation's networks page to see when Google Talk gets out of the "Pending" column.
This is going to be fun!
UPDATE: As of around 10:30 AM EST (UTC -05:00) on 17 Jan, all 3 of the servers advertised in gmail.com's SRV records are (apparently) running web servers that send out "302" messages re-directing you to http://www.google.com/talk/ when you connect to port 5269. However, it's actually not just a web server running there. Whatever is running there does seem to understand XML streams. It just doesn't currently support urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-streams stanzas, so messages and presence information don't currently make it from my jabber server into theirs. However, the initial server-to-server connection does appear to come up. It looks like we're one step closer!
UPDATE: As everybody knows by now from this post and this post (and this post ;-) ), Google Talk users can now "jabber" with the rest of the world. Note that this update is mostly a shameless act of self-promotion, wherein I'm attempting to show that I was there, trying to make it work, just before it went live.
Technorati Tags: Google Talk, Jabber, XMPP
No comments:
Post a Comment