Hi
just starting out on my XMPP/Openfire research, to see if Openfire/XMPP can be used as the solution for my problem.
I want to have the following scenario:
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multiple, geographically distributed computer clubs
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hosted in premises over which, frequently, you have no network control (i.e. cannot control routers or firewalls)
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they do have (restricted) access to the internet, generally.
I would like to host an Openfire server in the open internet.
I would also like to run a node in each computer club (possibly also Openfire)
I would like it if:
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clients in the club LAN can chat to each other, presence detection etc, on the LAN itself
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clients in each club LAN can discover the other node(s) in other locations which are online or were online
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clients in each club LAN can discover the clients connected to those other nodes(s), if those other clients have allowed themselves to be discoverable
Obviously (1) is trivially possible with a local Openfire server.
I know that there is a good change that BOSH and a bit of Apache magic should allow XMPP clients even in a restricted LAN to talk to my internet Openfire server, so they could all be clients of a central server.
But that is not exactly what I want: I want them to be clients of a local server, and that local server to be part of a distributed network of servers, and those servers be able to talk to each other: but without being able to control port forwarding and NAT on the local networks.
After a bit of research, it is not clear to me if I can have multiple Openfire servers, each behind a NAT/firewall which for the sake of argument let’s assume only allows ports 80 and 443, communicate with each other.
Possible?