tech notes

I had some problems with my jabber server. It was just a plain jabberd+mysql installation from ports. For some reason it didn’t want to authenticate with SASL using digest-md5 mechanism. The only working option was plaintext without SASL, which wasn’t really perfect…

After searching in google it turned out to be a problem with GSASL library, which is the default SASL library used by jabberd.

It looks like jabberd also works with other SASL libraries, cyrus-sasl for example. Even that it’s marked as being experimental it seems to be working better than the default GSASL library.

Here’s how to install jabberd with cyrus-sasl:

1. Install cyrus-sasl (/usr/ports/security/cyrus-sasl2)

2. edit jabberd’s Makefile

 --- Makefile.orig       2008-02-19 22:11:37.000000000 +0000
+++ Makefile    2008-02-19 22:11:39.000000000 +0000
@@ -15,7 +15,6 @@
 COMMENT=       Online presence and instant messaging server

 LIB_DEPENDS=   expat.6:${PORTSDIR}/textproc/expat2 \
-               gsasl.11:${PORTSDIR}/security/gsasl \
                idn.16:${PORTSDIR}/dns/libidn

 OPTIONS=       MYSQL "Support MySQL (storage/auth/reg)" on \
@@ -37,7 +36,7 @@
 USE_LDCONFIG=  ${PREFIX}/lib/jabberd
 CONFIGURE_ARGS+=       --localstatedir=/var \
                --sysconfdir=${PREFIX}/etc/jabberd \
-               --enable-ssl --enable-mio=poll --enable-sasl=gsasl \
+               --enable-ssl --enable-mio=poll --enable-sasl=cyrus \
                --with-extra-include-path="${LOCALBASE}/include ${EIP}" \
                --with-extra-library-path="${LOCALBASE}/lib ${ELP}"

3. do make patch, and edit work/jabberd-2.1.21/sx/sasl_cyrus.c

--- sasl_cyrus.c.orig   2008-02-19 22:13:53.000000000 +0000
+++ sasl_cyrus.c        2008-02-19 22:14:05.000000000 +0000
@@ -20,7 +20,6 @@

 /* SASL authentication handler */

-#error Cyrus SASL implementation is not supported! It is included here only for the brave ones,\
 that do know what they are doing. You need to remove this line to compile it.

 #include "sx.h"
 #include "sasl.h"

4. continue with make install

I’ve recently added these key mappings to my .vimrc file:

map <C-t> :!php -l %<CR>

this checks php syntax of the currently edited file after hitting CTRL-t.

map <F9> :!php ./%<CR>

press F9 to run your php script.

map <C-s> :!d=`pwd`; until [ -f symfony ] ; do if [ `pwd` = "/" ] ;\
then exit ; fi ; cd ../; done; symfony cc; cd $d<CR>

this may be useful when working with symfony projects. After making some changes in your symfony project you have to clear cache if you want to preview them in your browser. This maps CTRL-s with “symfony cc” command. You can run it from any subdirectory of your symfony project.