[TriLUG] gaim/ircd help

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

At home my son can't get his windows instant message client 
to connect to someplace he's setup an account with (he's 
immediately disconnected). So I thought I'd set up a linux 
irc server and linux client at home to find out what was 
wrong. I have no idea what I'm doing except to find a 
server/client pair and see if I can get them working.

For the server I'm using ircd-hybrid-7.2.2. It's up and (at 
least according to netstat) listening on port 6667.
I set the IP, port, name string of server and a few other
obvious things (including allowing users *@192.168.2.0/24 
- my network) in ircd.conf

On the server (or another linux machine on the network) I do

#telnet server_IP 6667

telnet feeds me some reasonable looking prompts (which I 
don't know how to reply to) and about a minute later the 
server closes with "Registration timed out". netstat shows 
the telnet client connecting.

Next I compiled up gaim-1.5.0 and ran gaim. I get a welcome 
screen and am asked for protocol, username and passwd. Here 
I'm getting into trouble. Does the server have the username 
and passwd? The gaim documentation says to get an account 
with the people running the server. If so I can't see any 
place in ircd.conf for username passwd (other than the 
users=*@192.168.2.0/24 in ircd.conf). So at the gaim end I 
make up a user name joe at server_name and give myself a passwd 
(joe).

I find that I can only set the server for the protocol 
"Jabber" - presumably the servers are fixed for the other 
protocols. I find a ~/.gaim/accounts.xml file with the wrong 
port which I change to 6667.

I try to connect to the ircd server with gaim, to find I'm 
immediately disconnected, with a notice about a xml parse 
error in the GUI. netstat on the server shows no sign of a 
connection (eg FIN_WAIT). Presumably I haven't got as far as 
making a connection from the client box. I then run `gaim 
--debug` to find that gaim can't open pounces.xml and 
status.xml (there is no pounces.xml or status.xml in the 
gaim build tree). There are no xml parse errors shown in the 
debug output. However the gaim client seems to be getting 
messages back from the server - the same prompts I got with 
the telnet client.

I'm stuck.

The gaim documention isn't helpful here.

Any pointers from here?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!