I have been using Debian’s [[ejabberd

http://www.ejabberd.im/]] for quite some time now. Originally, I chose it because it could do Http Poll, which I don’t think any other could. And then using something written in not-C, and that calls itself fault-tolerant and distributed, sounded cool.

Well, today I replaced it for the more standard [[jabberd 1.4

http://jabberd.org/]]. For all it’s fault tolerance, after our server’s last reboot, ejabberd just didn’t start up.

I already had problems with ejabberd not starting, getting confused whether it had started or not, and leaving various processes behind itself. I also once had a problem which turned out to be hard to fix because of totally inadequate error logging (hint to developpers: programmers don’t need logs. Logs are used by admins when things go wrong. They need to be useful to someone who doesn’t know Erlang, nor what’s happening at line 264 of file foobar.c).

This time, ejabberd’s processes start up, but nothing happens. I mean, //nothing//. No ports open, not a single line in any of the logs.

So after too long of tinkering and googling, I replaced the server in about 20 minutes with a good ol’ plain C server. I am a bit disappointed.

So if you see some subscription requests and things coming from me, that’s why.