Experience with eJabberd

I spent a couple hours today trying to install a jabber server called ‘ejabberd‘. The latest release was version 1.1.3, so of course I downloaded and installed that. The program came as a Linux binary installation, so I just ran that and it seemed to install okay. The program even started up just fine, and it looked like everything was working. I had a little snag when trying to login to the web interface the first time. The installation program asked for an admin password, but evidently didn’t set it. I had to set the password on my own, but then was able to log in to the admin web interface okay. Then I created a user account to log in as, and it went downhill from there

ejabberd is written in a high level language called Erlang. Evidently there is some problem in the version of Erlang that the binary installation includes. It has some problems with the cryptography functions. I spent a couple hours searching the ejabberd forums, and the posts that they referenced on the erlang development forums. After much wasted time, and serveral attempts at compiling erlang separately I was about to give up.

Then, I noticed a link for previous versions of ejabberd on their downloads page and decided to give version 1.0.0 a shot. I downloaded, installed, and had it running in under ten minutes. I guess sometimes older is better.