Clouded in mist

On a normal day, I work with two computers: my primary PC and my laptop beside me. This allows for a whole much of handy multitasking, such as running an IM application while playing a game or watching a movie fullscreen, or maybe the roles would be reversed and I’m harvesting in EQ2 and watching the movie on my laptop instead. Either way, the need for copying chunks of text across to the other machine, such a URL or a code snippet is a scenario that often arises.

Previously, I had a text file on a folder shared across the network where I would paste the snippets of text to, but that wasn’t the most elegant solution. Then, I made a second MSN, or Windows Live Messenger as you would call it now, account and IMed myself on my other machine. It was a neat solution, but still, I didn’t like the idea that my message would have to endure a 300ms delay, traveling halfway across the world first to the MSN servers, and then bouncing all the way back.

My solution to that was an internal (available only within my LAN) IM system. After a bit of research, it seems that Jabber / XMPP was the way the go. XMPP is an open source IM protocol. I settled on Openfire as the server, and deployed Pandion to the rest my computers, which was to my messaging client of choice (much like Windows Live Messenger). After a simple 10 minute setup, which involved nothing more than running the respective installers and adding users to the friendly web interface of Openfire, I was up and running. Finally, an elegant internal messaging system. I couldn’t get the file transfer working thus far, but that’s not important, although I’ll want to try and solve just so the whole system would be error free.