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Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat?
Ars-Gonzo asks: "I was at a conference last week, and had a surprising number of people connected to a peer-to-peer wireless LAN during the lectures. I saw several Mac users typing away during the lectures, and I found out later that they were using iChat's Rendezvous-based local chat to talk to each other. iChat's local subnet chatting functionality is supposedly based on Jabber, but I can't get a Jabber client (on Windows or Linux) to connect to iChat, locally. Has anyone seen any iChat compatible LAN-chat apps for a platform other than Mac?"
Either that, or depending on how many people are involved, you could always use MSN or Yahoo IM and invite people into one big happy conversation.
that's news to me. I thought it just sent serialized Cocoa objects over the wire (Like Hydra^H^H^H^H^HSubEthaEdit).
I *wish* iChat supported Jabber natively. Why should all my conversations go through AOL??
What about the built in Windows Messenger service? All you have to do is hand out a list of computer names and you're good to go.
if that is not your style, then write a frontend for Net Send using VB and just "net send ' Response with your computer name" That's worked wonders for me on school networks in the past.
I'm going to argue that iChat's LAN chatting mechanism probably isn't based upon Jabber at all. Jabber is a server that clients all connect to, whereas Rendezvous is a true P2P technology, where everybody connects to everybody else.
And good luck on getting 3rd-party support for other protocols in iChat. Apple's got that bolted down to AIM and Local LAN chatting.
easy
winpopup
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
just set up an irc server, give out the IP address, and let the conversations begin! i've had some good experiences with bircd (http://www.xs4all.nl/~beware3/irc/), it's quite lightweight, and works well
phone over rj11, said like "forge-eleven"
about a year old, not much has changed...
Jchat
Doesn't Gaim support Jabber?
My sister got involved in this one day while she was sitting around in an office at her university.
She and her friend were both working on their laptops, and they both had iTunes opened. They were sharing their playlists, and came across a playlist with some good music (belonging to someone that I'll name GuybrushT). Clever person that she is, she changed the name of HER playlist to say 'GuybrushT is cool!'. He noticed, and she and her friend and GuybrushT had a conversation, all in their shared playlist names!
Your other alternative is, of course, to buy yourself an iBook and just give in to Apple and OS X. It's a pretty cheap way to buy an addition to your social life.
I searched the web for about an hour and I wasn't able to find much. The UPNP vulnerabilities in Windows XP seemed to have scared many people away.
I was able to find this http://eimp.sourceforge.net/, but rendezvous support isn't fully integrated. The feature status is at 50% now and the developer hasn't posted anything in 4 months. There are rendezvous libraries in the latest release.
I'm in the process of trying out Eimp. Its not a very robust program, but it does seem to offer rendezvous support. I'm testing it now, I'll reply with results.
There is also JXTA - a jabber/rendezvous/zeroconf chat protocal being developed by sun.
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
I'm no expert in rendezvous, but it uses open (although not too commonly used) protocols like multicast-DSN. See Apples FAQ on Rendezvous
As for iChat LAN (which I'm pretty sure is much different than AOL's protocol). Looks like these guys reverse engineered and built a LAN iChat plugin for Proteus (the multiprotocol IM client). They have the source available for download.
It would be possible to port the rendezvous+iChat protocol to a Jabber server plugin.
_______
2B1ASK1
The message format is exactly Jabber (just load up ethereal if you don't believe me), but the discovery mechanism is based on Rendezvous. The conversations themselves happen peer to peer (the ones I've seen are on port 5298, but since the port is specified through multicast dns that could probably be anything). Creating a client for linux would be easy, but the most difficult part would be setting up the multicast DNS. Mandrake 10.0 ships with a multicast DNS responder but afaik no other linux distros do.
...but nothing useful for your purposes, in this case. The local messaging uses a subset of the Jabber protocol (as opposed to the AIM protocol used for peer->server->peer messaging). I think the file transfer code is also based in part on Jabber, although I do know that some of the essential specifics are proprietary and undocumented (the original developer made the note a few weeks ago that he can't even remember how it works anymore).
:) - but a more reasonable idea is probably to look at Proteus, as someone mentioned, and think about some sort of Windows/Linux/your-poison port.
So while it does borrow from Jabber, it doesn't "use" Jabber. You can't connect to a Jabber server, nor communicate directly between Jabber & iChat.
There are some chat clients out there with similar functionality on Windows (and I believe Linux), but they're somewhat hit-and-miss affairs, from my experience. I like the suggestion to just get an iBook - I already have one
Don't listen to this guy... Linux is a cheaper way to abandon your social life!
Mods: I'm kidding. Please be gentle.
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I can't say I haven't used any of them except ntalk, but that's what I would have done first to find some choices. All of them appear to work fine for what you want to do... just make sure to get one that's java or has source code so you can build on OSX.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
http://vypress.com/products/chat/ ...
...
All windowsen
http://vypress.com/products/chat/unix/
All unixen
It broadcasts the messages on the local subnet, udp port 8167.
Protocol compatible with another 2 or 3 simmilar chat programs.
Used a lot in Romania in the residential networks.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Not iChat related, nor cross-platform, but... On my neighbourhood-LAN(includes coax, tp & wireless heh..) we use Cheezepopper. It's not fancy, it's not filled with dozens of cool features - but it does list all computers on the LAN and allow you to send messages either directly to said computers or to the domain/workgroup they're on.
;P
A potentially hazardous (to your own health) program for big LAN-parties where lots of people have neglected to turn off their Messenger-service in Windows before booting up Counter-Strike for the compo-finals, but generally a decent program which behaves most of the time, and a great replacement for Windows' built-in messenger service in any case.
-= Ho Eyo He Hum =-
Forget iChat, get Fire.
Check out http://www.lim.com.au/UnI - has preliminary Rendezvous Chat support on Windows.
.. and also supports MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, other stuff..
And has reasonably decent Rendezvous Chat support on Mac OSX.