Raspberry Pi chat server in the home

This morning’s diversion was setting up a chat server on the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a gadget that seems so full of possibilities, but hard to settle on one idea to run with.

I installed prosody on the Pi:

sudo apt-get install prosody

Then I edited the config file thus:

sudo nano /etc/prosody/prosody.cfg.lua

The things to change are :

• VirtualHost - I set it to raspberrypi to match the default hostname on Raspbian.
• admin - adding in parents as admins so only parents start multi user chatrooms
• enabling multi user chat (MUC) plus restricting room creation like this:

Component "conference.raspberrypi" "muc"
    restrict_room_creation = true

I think everything else was left as default.

Then restart prosody for these changes to take effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/prosody restart

Then I made some users:

sudo prosodycrl adduser *name*@raspberrypi

Then installed pidgin on the other computers and logged in using the Facebook(xmpp) setting and raspberrypi as the server.

Windows XP

One of our laptops runs Windows XP and this could not see the server at raspberrypi. Linux uses this avahi thing and Windows needs the Apple Bonjour Printer Driver.

Once this was installed it still wouldn’t work so I edited the Windows Hosts file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

Logging into the modem I was able to find and fix the raspberrypi ip address to 10.1.1.20.

Back to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts I added the line:

10.1.1.20    raspberrypi

and then finally the Windows XP machine was able to find the raspberrypi and everything was fine.

It can be handy to have a live chat thing when juggling several different students at different levels tackling different problems.