Beware: trying to move your Jabber (XMPP) server from one host to another may result in your users not being able to reliably talk to users using Google Talk or Gmail chat. It looks like one way or the other Google caches the SRV records of your Jabber server and do not consult the DNS anymore afterwards.
It has been several weeks since I moved the ejabberd XMPP server for rfc1149.net on a new host which kept the same name as the old one. However, connections with gmail.com users are randomly working, while all the other domains my users interact with seem to have no problems at all. I have found several server administrators who experienced the same issue, and even read a suggestion to send an e-mail to the address xmpp@google.com which could supposedly solve the problem. The result? No answer, no working connection with gmail.com users.
What is needed to get Google to reread the new DNS information?
Edit: I received an answer from Jonas, a software engineer at Google. It looks like they are having troubles linking with Jabber servers located on the OVH network (as is mine, and as Ploum also wrote in comments), and they have contacted OVH. In the meantime, I may try to add another port to my Jabber server, update the SRV record, and see if it brings me more luck.
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Same issue, just mailed to that address in order to have an explanation
Are you on OVH ?
I’ve exactly the same problem ( http://fritalk.com/tag/gmail ) and I contacted both OVH and Google. After 3 weeks of discussion/investigation, people at Google have found that a lot of OVH servers are affected. The strange stuff is that, from a gmail server, they can connect to my server on port 80 but not 5269 ! They will try to solve that with OVH directly.
I’ve also heard that OVH had problem with EuroDNS with could possibly be related.
If you have any information, please mail me on zeploum on gmail.com
Yes we are on OVH, where we have two servers and they are both affected. At the beginning I thought it was due to bad dns caching since we moved the domain, then when I setup new domains on the second server I realized that it is due to some network problem and contacted the google team. So far I just know that they already know the issue, I hope they can fix it asap
I have updated the post title to include OVH as Google may not be the culprit here, it would not fair to let them take the blame.
Hi,
I contacted Octave (CTO of OVH) yesterday, and he said he hasn’t been contacted by Google so far. I pinged Jonas about this again, so I’ll see what the result will be.