Ars Technica’s XMPP server setup video
The folks over at Ars Technica have published a video tutorial on setting up your own XMPP server (using Prosody of course!). If you have been putting off setting up your own server then it’s worth watching, the whole process from installation to configuring your client is explained in under 10 minutes.
After watching the tutorial, you might want to read more about some of the topics it touched upon:
Prosody version: Depending on the version of your Debian/Ubuntu server, you may find that it does not yet contain the latest releases of Prosody, but you can always find the latest release in our package repository. Newer releases have improvements in many areas, including performance, usability and security features.
DNS: DNS is usually straightforward, but if you want to learn more about SRV records and their potential uses, you may find our DNS in XMPP article helpful.
Security: To learn more about the various aspects of running a secure XMPP server, see our Security page. Also xmpp.net is a useful service to test the communication security of XMPP servers. Note that your server must be accessible from the internet (i.e. it won’t work for LAN-only servers).
Password hashing: The choice between plaintext or hashed storage for passwords can be confusing. The short answer is that if your TLS is well secured, or if you have a modern client that supports the “SCRAM-SHA-1” authentication mechanism, definitely enable hashed credentials. The longer answer can be found in our article, “Plain or hashed password storage?”.
About
Prosody is a lightweight and flexible XMPP server designed with ease-of-use and extensibility in mind.