So, I’ve had it up to here (^^^) with the family using WhatsApp, etc and I’m heading off into the land of XMPP to find a better solution.

I’ve got a Pi3 hanging off my pfSense firewall acting as a kinda DMZ box, so thought I could setup an XMPP server on it (Prosody?)

Any advice? Will the Pi crumble (see what I did there) under the pressure of 4 people using it?

Issues with proxying outside with a Lets Encrypt cert on the pfSense box, but maybe not inside the network?

“Better” server software?

Thanks

  • SolidGrueEnglish
    4•10 months ago

    I ran an ejabberd node on an old x86 for years for family and some close friends. Works great.

    Then I got tired of maintaining devices after long days at work doing IT things. We talked. Signal is easier. We moved over to that, in the end.

    A Pi3 1GB will easily scale to 4 people.and beyond. XMPP is really lightweight for text and images. Consider a Pi4 for voice or video though.

    • poVoqEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      Currently xmpp voice and video calls are not going through the server at all, so it will work just fine on a RPi3.

      • SolidGrueEnglish
        3•10 months ago

        News to me! Good to know, though.

        I think realtime media routed through the node back when I was running one, but that was quite a while ago now. It wasn’t bad for my crew, but load scales exponentially in those sort of applications as you take on endpoints.

      • SayCyberOnceMoreOPEnglish
        2•10 months ago

        Ah, right. I wasn’t sure about that part.

        So, the XMPP server just helps to initiate the connextion between clients then they communicate directly?

        Will that work if someone’s at home (inside the network) and talking to someone outside (via the pfSense proxy)?

        • poVoqEnglish
          1•10 months ago

          For a/v calls yes. You might need to configure a STUN server to help clients find each other if they are behind a NAT.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•10 months ago

      Yep, had ejabberd running on a Pi 3 with all the XEPs supported by Conversations enabled and various transports. 4 or 5 people at times. No problems at all - with chat and memes, that is. Never tried video or voice calls, but I don’t think they require much work from the Pi itself.

      However, similar to @[email protected], in a bout of simplifying my life I decided to nix the setup as all people involved also had one or more of Threema, Signal or Telegram anyways.

  • poVoqEnglish
    3•10 months ago

    No problem at all. Both Prosody and Ejabberd will work, but Prosody probably a bit better. Maybe see if https://snikket.org (Prosody based) has the right Docker images for that arch, but I think it does support ARM64.