Ejabberd

ejabberd is an XMPP server, which is also called Jabber. Jabber is an instant messaging protocol which can be used by many clients on many platforms.

Jabber Server
We use the Erlang Jabber server, ejabberd. It has several nice features:


 * It's built for stability
 * It can use different mechanisms for authentication -- not necessarily just a custom Jabber database
 * We ought to discuss the merits of this approach
 * It can be distributed -- that is to say, more than one server can serve the same users
 * This makes it fault-tolerant -- one server can go down without the users noticing

Package
ejabberd is available, on Debian, in the ejabberd package.

Configuration
The ejabberd server has a weird config file, in Erlang form.