hi,
is it possible to run a kind of cluster of jabber servers, such that the user can discover and log into the nearest server ?
the data of the user can be stored in some kind of a common database and can be accessed by all the servers – the current one just pulls the info from the database.
can the resource field of the JID be used to implement something of this sort ? any other suggestions are welcome too.
The resource field would not generally be used for what you are talking about. You could, however set up a number of jabber servers (Jive, for instance) each with a different domain (e.g. server1.domain.org, server2.domain.org), which all used the same database. The roster information would be pulled, but it would have specific JIDs in it for whatever server the contact was connected to at the time, so you would have to write some type of extension to strip the JID and determine where the user is connected currently…
On second thought, this probably wouldn’‘t work well without fully implementing some type of clustering for JM. There is a project to enhance Jive Messenger with the ability to scale to an arbitrary number of servers, but I think it’'s still in the planning stages right now… See the “Project Pampero” forum for more info on that.