Buddy list

[David Neufeld]

Etan thanks a lot for the reply I have added some comments inline below.


> We are using Openfire that connects to our MS AD for user
authentication
> and vcard information but when employee's leave and are removed from
AD
> the users are not removed from pidgin. They are permanently shown as
> offline.
>
> >From the OpenFire documentation it says that the server sends out a
> request to alert the user that the buddy has been removed and should
> prompt the user to delete the old contact. Pidgin never displays this
> server message and the contact is never removed.

Do you have a link to where the OpenFire documentation says this? My
guess
is what happens is that OpenFire sends a remove request to everyone who
happens to be online at the moment the person is removed but doesn't for
people who are offline, which means that the people who are offline will
just fail to get that buddy sent to them when they sign back on, a
condition which pidgin doesn't assume means that the buddy was deleted.

On the other hand it is entirely possible that since you are using an
external data storage system that OpenFire never knows the person is
deleted (unless you specifically delete them from OpenFire somehow) and
as
such they never get removed from anyone's roster. Are you seeing them
removed from the roster in other clients?


-- Sorry can't find the doc that outlines this any longer, I originally
found it on the Openfire Community page. I did however find this
http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/27374 that shows others
are having the same issue and towards the bottom mtstravel alludes to
the remove not being sent correctly. 

To give you some extra info, we are running OpenFire 3.3.2 on Centos4.5
which connects to our Active Directory to pull user information and
authentication. Specifically when a user is added to a AD group they
become active in OpenFire and the user can be seen in the Admin Console.
The group is also shared in Openfire and all members are automatically
added to everybody's roster. When I am online using Pidgin if I add a
user to the AD group it is automatically added as a user to OpenFire and
my buddy list is updated. When I remove a user from the AD group (or
delete the account) the user is removed from the Openfire server but
still shows in Pidgin as being offline. No removal request is displayed
to the user. If I am using the spark client the user is automatically
removed, no removal request is seen. 

> Is this a bug or is there a setting I am missing?
>
> If there is no way to enable this functionality where is the buddies
> list stored on Windows XP clients? Would it be possible to remove the
> old contact from the buddies list / cache using a script?

The buddy list is stored in the blist.xml file, the location of this
file
for Windows is listed in the FAQ. You could manually remove the person
from the file but pidgin would need to not be running when it was edited
for it to work correctly. Personally, I have never really understood
needing to ensure that someone disappear from other people's buddy lists
and would just leave it alone and if people who seem them sticking
around
want to remove it they can.


-- I'm still having a problem finding blist.xml, I ran a full search of
my computer with hidden files and folders enabled and nothing was
returned. I also looked at the pidgin FAQ and couldn't find anything
related to blist.xml. Any chance this was moved to the registry? I'm
running Pidgin 2.1.1. 

Since this is a companywide roster containing more than 100 people and
we employee many contractors who only stay around for 2-3 months at a
time we have roughly on average of 3 people leaving a month. So after a
year we will have around 36 people in the roster that are no longer with
the company. It would just be nice house keeping to have these old
orphaned IM accounts removed from the shared buddy list and besides my
manager wants them gone...

Thanks again for your help.


> Thanks in advance for you help.
>
> Regards,
> David Neufeld
> Sr. Systems Administrator

	-Etan 
 
Notice - The information in this e-mail is confidential and may be legally privileged.  It is intended solely for the recipient(s) named above.  If you have received this message in error, or are not a named recipient, please notify the sender immediately at + 1 (604) 685-7619 and please delete this e-mail message from your computer.  Thank you.