Ejabberd on Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie
---------------------------------------------

Last edited: $Date: 2015/12/06 17:09:31 $


## Jabber for really safe communication

There  are some  benefits on  using Jabber  as your  instant message
protocol:

 * Jabber is decentralised (everyone can run a Jabber server, there
   is no central authority that controls all Jabber communication).
 * Jabber can be used with [PGP or GnuPG for really safe encrypted
   messaging](http://box.matto.nl/gnupgjabber.html)
 * There are several open and free servers and several open and
   free clients available.


## Raspbian on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry  Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs) is a  very cheap
small board with a 700 MHz  Arm11 SoC. Buy only the B-model, because
this one has a network interface. The A-model comes without network,
which makes it much less fun and useable.

Raspbian (http://www.raspbian.org/) is an operating system based on
Debian that is optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware.

There are several Raspbian images available, see
https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

I choose the Raspbian Jessie Lite,  this is a minimal image based on
Debian Jessie.

After download and dd the image to a SD-card we can boot the system.

## Remove systemd

The first thing to do, is to remove systemd.

Systemd has no place on a Unix-like system.

You can follow the steps on the  without-systemd.org wiki:
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation


## Install ejabberd

First step is to apt-get install it:


   apt-get install ejabberd


This will result  in a list of quite some  packages to be installed,
just say yes and have a cup of coffee or tea.

In the  end you will  run is some chicken-or-egg  problem, ejabberd-
contrib will not finish its install before ejabberd is configured.

## ejabberd configuration

Previous versions  for Debian /  Raspbian came with  a ejabberd.cfg,
but Jessie comes with a ejabberd.yml in /etc/ejabberd.

You have  to set your  own hostname  (fqdn) and the  admin-user, but
most importantly you  have to change the configuration  from ipv6 to
ipv4.

You can  raise the  debug-level from  4 to  5 in  order to  get more
debug- information  in the logfile.  This debug-level is in  the top
part of the yml-file.


### ejabberd.yml and ipv4

Change every line that contains



   ip: "::"


into



   ip: "0.0.0.0"


To be sure, I also uncommented the lines:



   outgoing_s2s_families:
      - ipv4


## Setup hostname in ejabberd.yml

Change the lines:



   hosts:
     - "localhost"


into



   hosts:
     - "jabber.example.com"
     - "localhost"


where   jabber.example.com  is   your   own   sub-domain  for   your
jabber-server and your domainname.

Next, search  for the fqdn  line in a  comment block and  insert the
following line below it:


   fqdn: "jabber.example.com"


Open a second ssh-session and as root, do



   tail -f /var/log/ejabberd/ejabberd.log


After this, in the first ssh-session restart ejabberd with



   /etc/init.d/ejabberd restart


(Remember we removed systemd.)

In  the screen  with the  tail -f  command, you  can now  follow the
messages of  ejabberd. When everty  thing goes as expected,  you can
stop the tail -f with Ctrl-C.

Now, you have to add some users with


   ejabberdctl register myuser jabber.example.com mypassword


(Change  myuser  into the  required  username,  mypassword with  the
preferred password :)

After this, your Raspberry Pi works as a Jabber server :)


$Id: ejabberdjessie.txt,v 1.2 2015/12/06 17:09:31 matto Exp $

You are viewing proxied material from box.matto.nl. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.