Want to set up iChat with an MSN Messenger account you already use? Here’s How!
Copied from this Blog (TooneTown Blog: 10 steps to a multi-protocol iChat.) because I’m afraid it might disappear someday and I keep having to refer back to it from time to time…
Upgrading to Snow Leopard broke things a bit but from other people’s comments I’ve updated the blog entry below. My changes are noted. With the modifications it works like a charm again. Happy, Happy!
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I know that setting up iChat to communicate with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and other users has been discussed in many other places. There are a couple of issues, however, that I have with this process:
Up until now, my solution on Mac has been to use Adium for chat. It is an excellent program – and I love everything about it. However, there are a couple of things that I think iChat does a bit better. Since it’s integrated with the OS, it has a more consistent look-and-feel across all the other applications. I also like the way that it integrates with Mail.app (you can see who is online from within your mail messages). It’s just a more “polished” solution, in my opinion.
I’ve always thought that the way to go would be to run a jabber server locally, and connect to it with my own transports. This would solve all my issues (Security, Stability, and Consistency), and at the same time, allow me to access all my contacts via iChat (giving me the nice integration). However, up until now, I have not had time, and setting up a jabber server is not the easiest thing to do.
Enter Openfire. I don’t know where this program has been – it’s by far the easiest jabber server to set up – and it has excellent Mac OS Integration (It uses LaunchDaemons and has a PreferencePane). Below, I list instructions on how I got my iChat to communicate multi-protocol, using Openfire.
These instructions are taken from my installation process on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5.1 (Leopard). It should work for previous versions – but the prompts may be somewhat different.
Download Openfire for Mac from here. Mount the disk image and run the installer. It’s really that easy!
Open your System Preferences and choose the Openfire preference pane. (the Preferences Pane will probably have to close and reopen itself) Make sure that Openfire’s status is listed as “Running”. Check the box to “Start Openfire When System Turns On”. Then click the button to “Open Admin Console”.
The Admin Console for Openfire is web-based – it is very easy to use, and very powerful. The first time you open the console, it will ask you some initial setup questions.
Setup is now finished – you can go ahead and log in to the admin console (the username is “admin” – the password is the one you just set up).
(I ended up with a problem here after installing Snow Leopard. OpenFire wouldn’t accept the password I supplied. Looks like it happened to others too. The following fixed it.
1. (in System Preferences) Stop OpenFire
2. (in Terminal) sudo su -
3. (in Terminal) cd /usr/local
4. (in Terminal) chgrp -R wheel openfire
5. (in System Preferences) Start OpenFire and check the box that says start OpenFire at login
Now restart your Mac
Now you should be able to log in.
We don’t want to let other people connect to our jabber server – just those who are on the computer we are setting this up on. That is one of the reasons (security) that we wanted to run our own jabber server.
Under “Registration & Login” set “Inband Account Registration” and “Anonymous Login” to “Disabled”. Then click “Save Settings”
You now need to create a user for your jabber server. This is the user that you will use to log in to the jabber server. I suggest you create an account for every account that exists on your Mac. Do the following:
Click on the “Users/Groups” tab at the top of the management console. Choose “Create New User” on the left. Enter in a username and a password (Name and Email are optional). It is called your “JID” (Jabber ID), and is the username and password you will use in iChat. I use the same username as my Mac user name. Then Click “Create User”
In order to communicate with other services, we need to install the “IM Gateway Plugin”. Do the following:
Click on the “Plugins” tab at the top of the management console. Choose “Available Plugins” on the left. Click on the “plus” sign under “Install” for the “IM Gateway”. You can ignore the other plugins – they are more useful for a “real” jabber server. We are only using our server for the transports.
Scratch that, like me you’ll discover that this is no longer available. So, instead, go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/kraken-gateway/files/ and download the jar file. Then upload that file into the Plugins section and use it instead. Everything else below works with the kraken plugin.
We want to secure the services for our IM Gateway plugin. For each of the third-party services you want to connect to (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, etc.), you need to do the following:
Click on the “Server” tab at the top of the management console. Choose “Settings” under the “Gateways” section on the left. Check the services you wish to use. For each one of them, you can choose “Options” and uncheck mail notifications if you like. Mail notifications BOTHER ME! Under the “Permissions” for each of the services, select “Manual registration only”. This will simplify the registration process (and eliminates the need to download or use Psi, as other tutorials have you do. Remember to click “Save Permissions” after each one you change. You can also test your connection to the services, if you want.
We now need to enter in your login information for the various multi-protocol services. This information is stored locally on your computer, so it’s somewhat secure, but you should be aware that anyone who has physical access to your computer and enough know-how can still find out your login information if they dig enough. This is, however, not any less secure than storing your passwords in your keychain for iChat or Adium anyway. Do the following for each service:
Click on the “Server” tab at the top of the management console. Choose “Registrations” under the “Gateways” section on the left. Click on “Add a new registration”. Enter in your “user (JID)” that you use to connect to jabber, the gateway you want to use (MSN/AIM/Yahoo/etc), the username and password that you use to log on to that service, and an optional nickname. Click on “Add”. NOTE:On my system, clicking “Add” says that the registration was added, but it doesn’t show up in the list until I refresh the web page. I found, however, that you can add all your registrations at once (even if they aren’t showing up in the list) and then hit “refresh” at the end to verify that they are all there. After logging in to iChat (below), you can come back here and verify that the “Last Login” reflects that you have correctly logged in to the service.
Now we have all the information that we need. You can now set up iChat to connect to your jabber server. Do the following:
Open iChat and set up a new jabber account. For “Account Type” choose “Jabber Account”, “Account Name” should be jid@localhost – where jid is your jabber ID that you set up above. The password is the password for your jabber id.
The first time you connect to your jabber server, you will get a certificate error – this is because the certificate that Openfire uses is a self-signed certificate. You will probably want to click “Show Certificate” and choose to “Always trust localhost when connection to localhost” so you won’t get that warning every time you connect.
OK – so this really isn’t a step – but I thought that “10 steps” is better – and it’s a bit odd how you need to add contacts. When you want to add a contact to iChat, you need to format it in a way that jabber will know what service to add that chat with. Add your contacts in the form serviceusername@service.localhost – where serviceusername is your contact’s name, and service is one of “aim”, “gadugadu”, “icq”, “irc”, “msn”, “yahoo”, “gtalk”, “sip”, or “xmpp”. If your contact’s name contains an @ sign (as do MSN and GTalk accounts), you need to replace the “@” in the username with “\40″ – so, user@hotmail.com on the msn account would be added as user\40hotmail.com@msn.localhost.
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If you have to get rid of it all for some reason, it’s a not a straightforward drag and trash though. Run terminal and run the following code lines.
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/openfire
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/Openfire.prefPane
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.jivesoftware.openfire.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/Openfire.pkg
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