So it turns out that my hosting provider offers the ability to run your own Jabber server. Here’s what I did to get this working.
Obviously this is somewhat specific to my hosting provider ( Dreamhost), but it may be of interest to others, too.
- Log onto the control panel and go to the Jabber IM section.
- Add a Jabber user. Some Jabber client software will let you attempt to register a new account, but I don’t think that works with this server.
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Wait until the user is activated. This seems to take around 5 minutes - you’ll need to refresh the page manually to see if it is ready.
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Once the account is setup and activated, you can log in using your Jabber client. Here I use Pandion, but anything should work.
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Once you are logged in, you can add a Gmail/GTalk username as a contact.
- In Gmail/GTalk the user will need to accept you as a contact. Once that’s done you can chat away.
(If you’ve read this far, and are interested in trying this out cheaply then I have some discount codes anyone can use.)