Open Fire with Pandion (History & Name)

I’m using Open Fire with Pandion for four users at my home. It is configured to also relay AIM chat (which is amazingly useful and just what I wanted). I’m a little confused, though, on a few issues:

  1. Can the chat history be stored on the server? Pandion stores it but it appears to be stored on the local computer. The goal here is to get “everything” on the server so switching computers makes basically no difference. I have all our computers setup with the same server-based Firefox profile, music database, my documents, desktop, etc…I like it all on the server so we can use any computer in the house without being unable to access something because it’s on another computer.

  2. Why doesn’t the “Name” field get displayed instead of the username@domain.com? I want the name field to show up and don’t want to have to configure it on every account if I don’t have to. Is this a Pandion issue? Anyone have any other suggestions for better chat clients? I want the best one I can get.

  3. Can I have multiple computers logged on using the same logon? It seems like the best option would be to allow the same user to logon in multiple places and then just forward communications in both directions to the different parties.

  1. http://maven.reucon.com/projects/public/archive/

This will enable you to store messages archive on server, but you should have XEP-0136 supporting client to be able to retrieve them. Not aware of such. And i dont know any other options to do server side history saving.

  1. Probably it’s Pandion’s issue. Though as lon as i remember it was showing Names, not nicknames in roster, when i was testing Pandion with Openfire last time. I have created users in Administration Console and specified Names there.

  2. You can. Just every logon should have different resource, e.g. john@server/home, john@server/work. Usually clients have an option to specify different resource. But only one resource can receive messages at a time. You can send messsage either to particular resource, address would be john@server/home, or you can set priority in client, so server will send message to a resource with higher priority if address would be just john@server. If priorities are the same, then server is doing some calculations to determine to which resource message should be send. But i dont know much about this. Maybe it sends to a last active resource or longer logged in. You can test this.

Anyone have any other suggestions for better chat clients? I want the best one I can get.

You can try Spark, Exodus, Psi.