Between recovering from the plague, some server issues on the old server, and setting up an XMPP server I didn’t have time to get posts up.
Setting up XMPP is interesting. The first task is finding a server of which there are surprisingly few good ones to choose from. Originally I was going to use ejabberd as I’ve used it long ago. But I saw the developers have split it into “community” and “business” editions with the former lacking a lot of features (such as compatibility with other instant messenger services). My second choice was Openfire, which I settled on. The downside of Openfire is that it’s written in Java and I’m not of fan of installing Java on systems anymore (because I hate Oracle). Java aside, Openfire is pretty solid. The initial setup is a bit of a pain because it’s not available in any CentOS repositories and you have to do a little manual setup for the MariaDB database. After that you gain access to a web interface that makes everything else simple.
Because the universe likes to make my life stressful the virtual machine I initially setup became corrupted when VMWare fucked up a snapshot operation. So I had to redo all of the work mentioned above again.
Right now I’m doing a beta test with friends. Once I’m satisfied it’s solid I might make it available for others.