I made a very bad mistake by not naming the service jabber.psg.com originally. Now that I want to move the service off of psg.com I will be creating hell for the users. I never liked putting service names in domain names; but users should not have to pay for my prejudices. My apology.

I installed a new server in the Westin rack, work0.psg.com. I am trying to migrate the network services from various boxes to work0 so as to free up the other systems to do their jobs. I have moved rancid, mrtg, etc., and am in the process of moving jabberd, asterisk, etc.

Jabber is a very serious pain to move. One might think it can usefully use SRV RRs; ha ha. If you are not near a meal, look at this page on the subject. And, as smb pointed out,

"I don't think it helps srv-enabled clients -- they'll see a different service name. And the service name is part of the jid that other users know them by. That is, I use psi, which supports srv (according to that web page), so my client can log in as smb@psg.com and end up on jabber.psg.com. But if, say, jis (who uses a jabber server at mit.edu) wants to talk to me, his server will go to psg.com instead of jabber.psg.com."

So, it's gonna be slow and painful. I intend to let the two servers run in parallel for a year or so. During that time, you will have to

• Start a new account on jabber.psg.com.
• Please fill out the user form well enough that we get your email address so we can send you notes in case of problems.
• Re-register with each of your existing buddies. There are some problems here if you want to maintain your psg.com account at the same time, as your client may not be great at recognizing from which of your identities you are requesting a relationship.
• When you are through with your old psg.com account, please tell me so I can delete and track.

Note that conference.psg.com has moved to work0. But that should be transparent.

Please excuse the pain.

If you get any clues that would be useful to others, please email me, randy@psg.com, so I can add it to this page. Thanks.

For example, the people's hero, Bill Fenner, points to a migration script you can use. Bill's instructions are as follows:

It needs to be run several times. It logs on to both accounts, adds any contacts that are in the old account to the new one, and removes any contacts from the old account that have a bidirectional subscription in the new. It's then supposed to hang around and keep removing contacts from the old one when they subscribe to the new, but it doesn't - it must be violating the protocol in some way that makes the server close the connection. However, it's safe to run it over and over, so that's what I've been doing - run it every couple of days to clean up the old account and re-invite people who haven't yet responded.

2004.11.01