debian.org RTC: announcing XMPP, SIP presence and more

[news 28]

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Dear Developers,

 

The Debian Project now has an XMPP service available to all Debian

Developers. Your Debian.org email identity can be used as your XMPP

address.

 

The SIP service has also been upgraded and now supports presence. SIP

and XMPP presence, rosters and messaging are not currently integrated.

 

The Lumicall app has been improved to enable rapid setup[1] for

Debian.org SIP users.

 

This announcement concludes the maintenance window on the RTC

services. All services are now running on jessie (using packages from

jessie-backports).

 

XMPP and SIP enable a whole new world of real-time multimedia

communications possibilities: video/webcam, VoIP, chat messaging,

desktop sharing and distributed, federated communication are the most

common use cases.

 

Details about how to get started and get support are explained in the

User Guide[2] in the Debian wiki. As it is a wiki, you are completely

welcome to help it evolve.

 

Several of the people involved in the RTC team[3] are at the Cambridge

mini-DebConf[4] this weekend (7-8 November) and would be delighted to

discuss this project with other developers in person and understand

the first experiences people have using it.

 

The password for all these real time communication services can be set

via the https://db.debian.org web control panel. Please note that this

password needs to be different to any of your other existing debian.org

passwords. Please use a strong password and please keep it secure.

 

Some of the infrastructure, like the TURN server, is shared by clients

of both SIP and XMPP. Please configure your client to use the TURN

server for audio or video streaming to work most reliably through NAT.

 

A key feature of both our XMPP and SIP services is that they support

federated inter-connectivity with other domains. Please try it. The

FedRTC[5] service for Fedora developers is one example of another SIP

service that supports federation. For details of how it works and how

we establish trust between domains, please see RTC Quick Start

Guide[6]. Please reach out to other communities you are involved with

and help them consider enabling SIP and XMPP federation of their own

communities/domains: as Metcalfe's law[7] suggests, each extra person

or community that embraces open standards like SIP and XMPP has far

more than just an incremental impact on the value of these standards

and makes them more pervasive.

 

If you are keen to support and collaborate on the wider use of Free