Some notes on getting MultiUserJingle / Mingle working

A Tech article with View Comments posted 24 December 2008.
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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.

Migrating from Dreamhost email to Google Apps

A Tech article with View Comments posted 18 March 2007.
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Moving 7000+ messages to GMail

After moving my church to Google Apps, I have decided that I like the GMail interface so much that I want to use it for my own personal email address. I want to move my copious existing email archives to Google, and that’s where the complications kick in:

First, my mail archives are in a Dreamhost IMAP account, and GMail can only retrieve POP3 mail.

Second, if I change my DNS, I may not be able to tell Google where to find my mail at all.

After pondering it for a bit, here are some informal, probably incomplete notes about what I did (in brief):

  1. Download a local backup copy of the Dreamhost IMAP mail. You can never be too careful.
  2. Copy all mail from all folders into your Inbox. This includes your Sent Mail, so copy that into your Inbox as well. GMail will handle the threading (mostly) correctly when it downloads your mail.
  3. Change the MX records in your Dreamhost panel to point to Google. Check the box for Dreamhost to keep accepting mail for your domain.
  4. Tell your GMail account to check mail for your Dreamhost account using POP3. Point it at mail.YOURDOMAIN.com, which isn’t affected by the MX record change (because you told them to keep accepting mail) and tell it not to delete mail off the server.
  5. Wait for GMail to grab all of your mail. It’ll take a while. (It took about 24 hours to move 7000 messages. You can check the progress in Settings:Accounts)
  6. If you copied your sent mail to your Inbox (recommended), you’ll notice a lot of conversations that only have mail from you. Just archive these in GMail and they will end up in Sent Mail where they belong.
  7. After Google has retrieved all of your POP3 mail, check your Dreamhost account one last time to pick up any mail that got delivered there while the MX record was changing.
  8. Log back into Dreamhost and tell them to stop accepting mail for your domain (and just use the custom MX entry).
  9. Viola! Now you use GMail!

I’m pretty happy with the results – all of my mail moved over, properly threaded, easily accessible. Life is good! Of course there are some things that aren’t so good. Right now I am afflicted / bothered / annoyed by these issues:

  1. The Google Apps personalized home page is not as fully featured or good looking as the one that comes with a normal Google Account. For example, you can’t add the shiny widgets (like Google Reader).
  2. If you already were signed up for a Google Account with the email address you are now using with Google Apps, some things are going to break. For example, Google Calendar won’t accept invitations to use new calendars until you disambiguate which account uses that email address. You can only do that by changing the email address associated with the Google Account.
  3. Nothing will get pulled across from your regular Google Account. For example, you start fresh with a new Calendar.

As of now I’ve moved my calendar and mail over, and I have a separate Google Account for using Google Reader, and it’s working pretty well for me. By the way, I’ve added a link to my Google Reader Shared Items in the sidebar on my homepage.