xmpp based nagios notifications

[David Nalley]

On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 5:42 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 16:39 -0600, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:17 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > And now I get nagios notices as popups in my jabber client(s).
>>
>> On a side note, would it make sense to have a Fedora XMPP server?
>> That would allow people to use <fas id>@fedoraproject.org as a XMPP
>> ID.  There are a number of good XMPP servers already packaged for
>> Fedora and/or EPEL, the hard part would be choosing one and figuring
>> out how to get authentication against FAS working.
>
> I don't think it would make sense for us to have our own xmpp server for
> users. But it may make sense for us to have our own for services.
>
> there are lots of good, public, free jabber/xmpp servers and there's no
> good reason for us to get into that business or the support headaches it
> creates.
>
> But for our services it could make sense for us to run one for service
> accounts.
>
> What do you think?
>
> -sv


So I have started looking at this - and currently only jabberd (really
jabberd2) and ejabberd are packaged in Fedora and EPEL, which
simplifies things a bit.

jabberd2 is written in C, and appears to have been abandoned 6-7 years
ago, though it seemingly was picked up and is currently maintained by
a single developer. Sadly documentation has not kept pace with
development, and the current documentation is 6-7 years old.

ejabberd is written in erlang, and appears to be one of the better
supported xmpp server implementations. Aside from being written in
erlang, another downside is that it requires either postgres or mysql,
which seems like a bit of overkill for nagios messaging. (jabberd2
supports Berkley and SQLite, which strikes me as lighterweight, but
perhaps it really doesn't matter).

Oddly enough I find myself leaning towards ejabberd, simply because it
appears to be more robustly maintained. I have, in the past, used the
1.x version of jabberd (which is completely different) and ejabberd,
as well as some others that aren't in Fedora atm.

Perhaps we can get this setup rapidly on a testing instance once we
make a server choice.