We’ve had iChat set up on our macs for a while, making use of Bonjour to provide a zero- configuration way for teachers to communicate around the school. We now have a second site and teachers wanted to be able to iChat between sites but it wasn’t working as Bonjour doesn’t easily work across two different subnets (especially if LGfL are involved!). So instead I set up iChat Sever on our Lion Server.
It was mainly straightforward, once I had figured out how…
- Turn on iChat server on the Lion server. Involves switching it to on. It sets up a Jabber messaging server.
- Set up the login details using Workgroup Manager. There is a manifest called ‘iChat.Jabber’ which gives you a managed client settings already set up.
- When a user logs onto the Mac, their credentials are used to log onto the iChat server. This requires an AD or OD setup, which meant a few issues when it came to the experimental ditched directory Macs. I had to set these machines up manually using the user’s network logins.
- Initially, the iChat window doesn’t show any ‘buddies’, which renders the service useless at school because teachers wouldn’t know each other’s iChat accounts. Lion server promises the ability to add all users as buddies automatically, but this only seems to work if you’ve got an Open Directory setup (i.e. all user accounts are on the Mac server rather than elsewhere). Instead I had to log each user into iChat and then run the command ‘sudo jabber_autobuddy -m’ in Terminal on the Lion server. This adds everyone who has ever logged into the iChat server onto everyone’s buddy list.
It seems to be working fine, with the teachers across two sites particularly finding it helpful.
Primary ICT 