Raspberry Pi support and some questions

#1

Hello everybody. :slight_smile:
First of all, I want to say that you are doing a great job. IMO kontalk seems to be the xmpp messenger with the best user experience. And sorry for my english. Like we say in germany, it is not the yellow from the egg. :smiley:

So I am hosting an ejabberd server on my raspberry pi for me and my friends and we are currently using conversations. Its not that bad but it seems to be hard for my friends to use a jabber-ID instead of a phone number and they are currently forgetting their passwords, so they always find it too complicated.

When I migrate to the kontalk-Server (I guess tigase?), can I use the docker-image on my ARM powered pi?

And when my friends are using this server and not the official kontalk server, can they find users from other servers and can they be found by external users? How is this exactly working?

Do I have to open the server for registrations? I am asking this because my raspberry pi would be overwhelmed with more users.

And one question about the client: Is it possible to add someone by JID from the kontalk client or will this be possible in the future? Some friends from other servers will still use conversations or gajim and I need to chat with them.

Thank you for the help and for the great job you are doing :slight_smile:

#2

Hello and welcome to the Kontalk community!

I’d be glad to help you setting this up, especially since it’s the first time somebody tries it :slight_smile:

As far as I can tell, it should work on any architecture supported by Java and Docker/Docker Compose. You can follow the documentation in the repository and come back here if anything wrong occurs.

This depends if you want to link to the Kontalk Public Network. The main issue is that a given phone number can be registered only once in the network, so if any of your friends already registered to Kontalk via the default server (our server), he/she would have to register again with yours. But yes, you can integrate with the rest of the world “natively” and access phone number account lookup for example, which is still beta in a multiserver environment and it would be great to do some more deep tests.
If you’d like to link with us, we’ll have this conversation on a private channel after you configured your server instance.

The condition to link with us is that you accept registrations from the general public. The Android app will randomly choose a server from the registered ones when registering a new account.

Technically it is possible, but the Android app can’t do that (yet). It will be possible in the future - actually we are looking for help on this, if you or anyone you know can send a patch it would be great!

#3

Hi, thanks for your answer. Im thinking about this. Is there a way to limit the users to for example 100? My “server” is just a raspberry pi at my home appartment at my private internet connection. In the last 6 month there were only a downtime of 10 hours (so its more stable than whatsapp :stuck_out_tongue:) but I am not sure how many users it can handle. Also sometimes my internet connection is very slow.

#4

A few weeks ago I was working on something called “cooperative load balancing”. Despite the misterious and fancy name, it’s a very simple thing: the servers work cooperatively to even the load of users among them. This might be a nice opportunity to test this out and complete the development of this feature which is especially helpful in small servers like the RPi.

In this case, your server will be very small (I’m guessing you have a Raspberry Pi 3 model B) so I would say, from our experience with our server, you could host without problems (if you dedicate the entire hardware to Kontalk) approximately 500-600 users. I could design the server software to stop sending registration to your server when you’ve reached a number you decide. Registration attempts in general (before reaching the top users limit) will be distributed using some kind of algorithm, e.g. round robin.