Problems with punjab in a local network (solved)

Written by: daniel

September 12, 2009

I have been using punjab for a while as an interface for BOSH protocol between my browser Strophe applications and other xmpp clients. This worked perfectly until the (sad) day I had no internet connection. Suddenly I could not connect through punjab with a local ejabberd server and got very confusing “not authorized” error messages.

I double checked all configuration data and do a couple of tests and debugging until I found out what the problem was.

Apparently punjab tries to resolve any domain in your usernames using a dns server. That is unfortunately true even for “localhost”. Moreover, it totally ignores your /etc/hosts file (or at least I did not know how to make it use it), so until you are ready to deploy a local dns server, you cannot use it without an internet connection.

I was about to give up, when I found out that ejabberd had a native module for BOSH connections, (which btw I had know about and it had given me a lot of troubles when I had tried to use it months ago)

Fortunately, this time everything went very smoothly. All I did was uncommenting the line:

{mod_http_bind, []}

restarted ejabberd and when I accessed:

http://localhost:5280/http-bind

I could see the BOSH interface response. Boy! That was easy.

I had to change a little bit the apache proxy module configuration and it worked perfectly.

On the other hand, the native ejabberd http bind module is said to have better performance than punjab (which is not very surprising after all). Check out this post to find out more.

EDIT: September, 12th

I have checked the setup with punjab, having internet connection activated and it is still not working, so I guess I was wrong about this being a dns server issue. Or maybe it has some problem with “localhost” being the ejabberd domain? I will post here any news.

EDIT: September, 19th

I was wrong! Thanks to some helpful hints from Tofu the REAL problem could be identified as some bug in Strophe. I was using some old version (although it’s hard to trace as there seems to be no version number in the file) and when I changed it to the one I just downloaded - voilá! It worked! The lessons learned are:
- check if you use the latest version. bugs are fixed all the time.
- sometimes (especially with many components in the middle) error messages (and even initial tests) may be misleading and testing each component separately or in different configurations may help isolate the problem.

Posted in linux