[Adium-devl] XMPP Troubles

[Eric Richie]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at stpeter.im>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:40:48PM -0400, Eric Richie wrote:
> > Hey guys,
> >
> > It's come to my attention that we could have some serious xmpp issues
> > on our hands.  I've heard several reports of certain large companies
> > having their internal jabber servers knocked out by some client
> > issues.  I talked to a few of you who have been hearing similar things
> > from other sources.  In all of the reports I've heard about they were
> > using libpurple clients (hence why I'm cc'ing the pidgin list) but
> > mainly using Adium.  I realize that there are arguments to be made
> > about the quality of their servers and such, but I'm not looking to
> > get into any of that.  I'm finding the reports somewhat troubling and
> > think this needs to be looked into.  That being said I'd like to get a
> > task force of sorts together to possibly work on hunting down the
> > issue this weekend.
> >
> > Our tickets are:
> > http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/8834
> > http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/10231 (Seems to be the more serious of
> > the two)
> >
> > Pidgin:
> > http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5484
> > http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/6188 (dupe of #5484, filed against
> > Adium #8834)
>
> Thanks for the active approach.
>
> A few notes and questions from the XMPP protocol perspective:
>


(Answers based on information from one of my contacts)


> 1. Does this happen only with jabberd2?


Not entirely sure. The only reports we have are from people using jabberd2,
so possibly. But it doesn't seem likely given the nature of the bug?


>
> 2. Regarding group name changes, is the server sending a roster push to
> all connected Adium/Pidgin instances? If so, does the client process
> that roster push? XML debug from the XMPP session would help here.



Given that we've had reports of this bringing down servers not completely
running Adium clients, I assume that it's being pushed to every client, not
just Adium/Pidgin clients. I would hope that we process roster changes from
the server, as should any client, right? Do you want client-side or
server-side XMPP information or both?


>
>
> 3. Does this happen only if a contact is in more than one group, or more
> generally if the user changes which group a contact is in? (XMPP allows
> you to put a contact in more than one group -- roster groups are like
> "tags", not exclusive "buckets").



Adium doesn't support this feature of XMPP. A contact can only exist in one
group or another. Reports from the server-side contacts we have seem to
agree that it begins when a group is changed.


>
>
> 4. The vCard update issue seems to be somewhat different (for one thing,
> the XMPP vCard extension does not support a push-on-update model, as
> rosters do), but I see less detail about that in the ticket.


I'll attempt to get in contact with the person that filed this ticket and
get some more information as to why this could be happening. They seem to
have a good amount of evidence to support their case. Not sure what's
happening here.


-Eric
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