We are finally ready to replace the old Fellowship jabber/XMPP server with a new one! This will imply a short downtime, so the jabber service will be unavailable starting from Sunday 18 October at 10:00 CET, for about 30 minutes.

After that, to use the new server, you will only have to change the password setting in your jabber client, replacing the old jabber-specific password with your usual Fellowship password (the one used to access all other Fellowship services).

You can learn more about the jabber service at http://wiki.fsfe.org/Jabber, and stay informed about the status of the Fellowship services following the Fellowship News blog.

Dear Fellows, as some of you may know, we are about to replace the current Fellowship jabber server with a new one, that should improve the quality of our jabber service.

Before switching from the old server, we set up a test instance for the new server, so all Fellows are invited to test it and report any problems and suggestions.

To try the new Fellowship test server, you have to create another profile in your jabber client, using these values:

• username: your Fellowship username (this is the same username currently used for the Fellowship jabber account).
• domain: jabbertest.fsfe.org (so your complete jabber account on the test
  server will be: YOURUSERNAME@jabbertest.fsfe.org)
• password: your current Fellowship password, that is: the one used to access all other Fellowship services (please note that this is different from the password currently used for the Fellowship jabber server)
• jabber server: jabbertest.fsfe.org
• port: you can use the standard jabber port 5222, or the (deprecated) port 5223; the server will enforce a secure SSL connection in both cases

When you connect to the server, you may get a warning about the SSL certificate (we are re-using the same SSL certificate that we use on the old jabber server), please ignore this at the moment and accept the certificate.

Once connected to the new server, you can find your usual contacts (all have been automatically converted to @jabbertest.fsfe.org), search for other jabber users using the jabber user directory: vjud.jabbertest.fsfe.org, enter the fellowship chatroom, and do the usual things you do in jabber; feel free to mess up with the data on this test server, as they won’t be used in the new official Fellowship server.

Please report your feedback, and especially any problems you may encounter, to fellowship-hackers@fsfeurope.org

As soon as we make sure that everything works fine, we will announce at https://blogs.fsfe.org the timeline and instructions for switching to the new server.

Thanks for your support!

The SSL certificate for jabber.fsfe.org expired some days ago, so we just got a brand new certificate from CAcert.org.

When you connect to the jabber server, just accept the new certificate and your jabber client won’t complain anymore about an expired certificate.

Here you are the MD5 and SHA1 fingerprints of the new certificate:


MD5 Fingerprint=2A:69:EA:67:6C:F1:F3:E5:9D:80:BD:40:C0:F4:30:15
SHA1 Fingerprint=58:42:8D:EB:61:8D:E4:29:9F:21:CE:CE:26:2B:F2:87:75:CF:B8:BD


In case you have problems, please write to fellowship (at) fsfeurope (dot) org

Happy messaging!

Work on the new Fellowship technological infrastructure continues, and today we can announce the new blogging platform available at blogs.fsfe.org, and the related blog aggregator at planet.fsfe.org.

Existing blogs on www.fsfe.org have been automatically migrated to the new platform, and since the old platform will be discontinued soon, we invite you to read carefully the instructions at http://wiki.fsfe.org/Blogs (whether you currently have a blog on www.fsfe.org, or you want to start your blog now).

If you have any questions or suggestions, just write to fellowship(at)fsfeurope(dot)org and if you want to help us improving the new Fellowship platform, you are welcome! Please have a look at http://wiki.fsfe.org/FellowshipHacks/.

Thank you for support, and happy blogging!

The Fellowship-Hackers team