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?"

Comments

IRC?

[Vaevictis666]

Provided you all agree on an IP to host the server at any rate :P

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.

Probably not Jabber-based

[mrpuffypants]

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.

irc, of course

[jleq]

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

Re:irc, of course

[cgranade]

I agree. IRC may not be fully P2P, but it is very reliable and complete. There's a client for every known OS, and its name is X-Chat. Only one big problem: seizure of the server can reveal who connected, which isn't good for sharing files. For chatting, though... it works wonders.

iTunes chat

[Dixie_Flatline]

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.

Re:iTunes chat

[VisorGuy]

...how geeks meet other geeks.

Searched - Eimp

[Cyberop5]

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.

Re:Searched - Eimp

[Cyberop5]

it only seems to support Rendezvous discovery. I can see my other system online, but I cannot chat with it. This is very buggy software. I can't remove persons on my contact list either, even if i create them. I can however, see their status. IOW, Eimp has a ways to go.

It's somewhat open

[eyeball]

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.

Re:Windows Messenger and/or Net Send

[gazoombo]

speaking of net send on school networks... be careful with the *. I sent 'Happy Mole Day!' to my entire school one day in the computer lab and not they have completely disabled net send. :(

iChat does borrow from Jabber...

[Wade Tregaskis]

...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).

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 :) - 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.

Oh Yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen to this guy... Linux is a cheaper way to abandon your social life!

Mods: I'm kidding. Please be gentle.

Vypress chat

[psergiu]

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.