Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat?

Posted by Cliff on Monday March 29, 2004 @01:11PM from the simple-communication dept.

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?"

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It's somewhat open by eyeball · 2004-03-29 16:02 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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