Some notes on getting MultiUserJingle / Mingle working

A Tech article with View Comments posted 24 December 2008.
Tags: dns, dnsmasq, dreamhost, google apps, openwrt, srv

I’ve been very excited about video conferencing on Linux for the past few days. Currently the gold standard is, in my opinion, the Jingle protocol, which runs over XMPP (aka Jabber). This is the technology that the video conferencing on the Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets is based on. Jingle is a point-to-point protocol, but a new standard that they’re calling Mingle (MultiUserJingle) is looking to make multi-point video conferencing on Linux a reality.

I haven’t gotten it completely working yet, but I wanted to add a few notes for the benefit of weary Intertubers who may be struggling with the same setup as I have.

• First, I have Google Apps, but my domain is hosted on Dreamhost. I needed to add more SRV records then Dreamhost tells you to. I added:

  _jabber._tcp.tedcarnahan.com IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-server._tcp.tedcarnahan.com IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
  _xmpp-client._tcp.tedcarnahan.com IN SRV 5 0 5222 talk.l.google.com.
  

  I also added the four priority 20 records that go with each line, but I’m too lazy to write them here. The last line is key – without it, your Jabber client will do a SRV request, get nothing back, and then revert to a blind stab at an A request (in my case) for tedcarnahan.com, which goes you nothing but an unsympathetic webserver at Dreamhost.

• Secondly, my router at home runs the OpenWRT firmware. Did you know that OpenWRT doesn’t serve SRV records by default? To change this, comment out the filterwin2k line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf.

I don’t have it all working yet, but hopefully this is helpful to someone.