MacCentric Solutions is an Apple-certified Macintosh consultancy & systems integrator serving the San Francisco Bay Area.
If you’ve ever set up iChat (Jabber) Server on Mac OS X Server, you’ve probably been frustrated with the fact that users’ Buddy lists always start out empty! If you’re the admin in a large organization, this can be particularly annoying as tens or hundreds of users start asking you how they can get all their colleagues to auto-appear in that list.
Based on an article at AFP548.com, MacCentric Solutions consultant Cory Logan drew up the following workflow. This will have make all Jabber users appear in each others’ Buddy lists. Note that you must run most of these steps every time you make changes to the user list.
First, you have to enable auto-add:
sudo serveradmin settings jabber:enableAutoBuddy = yes
Then restart iChat server service. Then you can go to town adding users.
Next, after creating a directory user, have that user log in. Once they’ve logged in, it’s time to update the user directory database by using the autobuddy feature (this feature is not officially supported.
Any time you want to update the directory it must be done first on the server using the command:
sudo /usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -mThe following unix command will run an applescript to relaunch iChat, which will update the local list of available users. The reason I’ve included these is because they can be run in bulk using ARD.
osascript -e ‘tell app “iChat” to quit’
osascript -e ‘tell app “iChat” to open’To remove a user from the directory:
sudo /usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -d Jabber_ID_Here
(I have not yet tested this one, it may or may not need the @yourdomain.com on the end)
2 Comments
Brady J. Frey
10.29.08 at 8:32 amGood to know, thanks for the tip:)
Side note, the open source Jabber 2 has some graphical/web interfaces that allow for this capability… installing them on OS X’s crippled implementation maybe difficult. For those who want an easier way, you can use the open source or commercial version of Openfire; has gui to have instant groups like the above, you can log users out on the fly, index everything, have plugins to work with aim, lots of goodies.
James
01.22.09 at 3:28 pmThank you!
/usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -d needs the user@yourdomain format.
you can also use
/usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy -i to initializer the user in the database instead of restarting ichat server