Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Hosted.IM XMPP service

This morning I migrated from my old personal ejabberd XMPP server to the Hosted.IM service by Process One.

tl.dr; The migration went smoothly and I'm very happy with the service. I still have two things I need to do (SSL certificate and migrate my XEP-0114 external components), but for personal reasons I won't have the time to finish the migration until next month. So expect a small update when I finish those two.

For now, I'll just describe the service and my migration process, the good parts, the could-be-improved parts and other tidbits.

The Hosted.IM service provides a hosted XMPP service powered by a carrier-grade ejabberd XMPP server. The service was created and is maintained by Process One, the main driving force behind ejabberd development over the past years. I had the pleasure of working with Process One and Mickael in particular when we migrated the SAPO XMPP server.

The basic service is free (5 user accounts, a single domain).

The main roadblock preventing my migration was the couple of custom-made external components I wrote to interact with some web and TCP-based services that I currently host, so I needed proper XEP-0114 support. I asked Mickael for it and less than two weeks later, they delivered. The XEP-0114 support was officially announced yesterday on all non-free plans.

With this final roadblock lifted, I was ready to migrate my domain.

I've registered a new account, and added my domain, simplicidade.org. The first thing they ask you to do is to add a DNS TXT record to validate that you own the domain. I don't understand why they need this TXT records. The XMPP service requires you to add or update a couple of SRV records to point to the Hosted.IM XMPP servers. If you aren't the owner of the domain, you won't be able to update those records, so why ask for an extra DNS record? I hope they clear this process and remove this particular requirement. Or, if this is really something that they really need, add a FAQ explaining why its needed.

I also immediately updated my SRV records to point to them, using the provided examples. This turned out to be a mistake that you should avoid.

If you are migrating an existing domain, I strongly recommend that you don't update the DNS SRV records at first. You should first create the accounts on the new service, migrate the current users rosters and vcards, and only then switch the DNS records. This should be pretty obvious stuff, but I was eager to move and failed here.

The Process One support personal will accept a SQL dump of your rosters and vcards and load them up on the service at Hosted.IM. I was lucky because I was already using ejabberd with the SQL backend, so I only had to cleanup old accounts, dump the SQL database and send them the file.

This data migration process is unfortunately not documented yet. New users don't even know the possibility exists. I had to ask for it on Twitter to discover the possibility. I also don't know what other formats or other servers export files they support. So check with support before you decide to switch to figure out how you'll migrate the roster information.

As I said, I didn't prepare that part, so I had to scramble to dump the rosters and send them the SQL, so that my users didn't end up with a empty roster. Fortunately the support staff was awesome and I quickly had my SQL dump loaded onto the service.

After this was done, I closed the firewall for my old server C2S ports, and started up my XMPP client. I connected without any problems to the new service.

From start to finish, and even with all the discovery and learning the layout of the administration interface, it took me less than 2 hours to have my service migrated. Pretty good.

I then selected the cheapest plan, at €8/month. The payment system is not clearly explained at the site. It works as a prepaid system: you load your account with €nnn and they remove the amount you owe every month. You also get some bonuses if you load your account with large amounts. After spending 10 minutes wondering where the payment interface was (after you change plans, the interface appears in the account section; while on the free plan, it's not visible - this is suboptimal, a link in the Plans & Pricing tab, or near the costs values in the domain administration tab would be more helpful), I loaded my account with €100 and I got a €8 bonus.

Some services cost extra. For example, using your own SSL certificate is a €2/month, and connectivity to other IM networks costs €4/month. Unfortunately, these extra costs are not described in the service homepage. You have to register for the trial account, and then check the Plans and pricing tab inside your domain management admin page.

Aside: on the service homepage, if you select Plans & Pricing in the navigation toolbar at the top, the javascript scrolls down to the #pricing section but fails to update the page location, which makes sharing the direct link harder.

And this is were we stand right now: accounts, rosters and vcards were migrated successfully, and I was able to load my account with enough money to last me for a bit less than a year (I was not counting on the extra €2/month for the certificate).

The next step is creating my own certificate. This part of the process could be improved a lot. For technical reasons, you have to upload the certificate private key. But if that is a requirement (and it is, I understand that part pretty well), then they could save a lot of work to their clients if they just took care of all that: add the option to generate the key on their servers, and send me the Certificate Request file so that I can request a certificate from a CA that supports XMPP certificates (which are slightly different from HTTPS certificates, they require an extra extension). It would be helpful if they recommended a couple of CAs providing the service, but they do not.

In the past, the XMPP Software Foundation provided a free service of XMPP Certificates, but it was shutdown sometime ago. According to their page above, you can buy a XMPP certificate from StartSSL CA, but I'm still figuring out how to do this. It should be straightforward, the same process as a HTTPS server, and I'll update this article after I've successfully done it, but the StartSSL site lacks XMPP-specific information.

After I have that part done, I'll move my external components. Some of them are sub-domains of my main simplicidade.org domain and those should be straightforward.

Others use a completely different domain name. This is an unusual setup. I basically used my own ejabberd server as a XMPP router for some domains. I connected those domains as external components, and pointed the S2S DNS records to the ejabberd server.

The Hosted.IM does not yet support this mode of operation, but I again asked Mickael about it, and this unorthodox configuration should be supported very soon. Awesome.

All in all, a pretty smooth ride.