Installing PyMSNt on Snow Leopard Server 10.6

Question

OK, it's that time again, new OS X Server release and thus, new efforts to get PyMSNt running.
Firstly, make sure you have the latest Developer Tools (XCode) installed. Also, assume that all of these commands need to be run as root, so you can prefix each command with sudo, or you can switch to root using:
sudo su.
There are a couple required prerequisites in the form of Python modules. Unfortunately, Snow Leopard has made things quite a bit more challenging due to the inclusion of Python 2.5 and 2.6 and the transition from 32 bit to 64 bit.
I've had issues getting PyMSNt to run with the default version of 2.6. Due to what I assume is Apple's own dependencies on 2.6 (calendar/wiki server), I'm not comfortable switching the system default to 2.5.
2.5 seems to now have pycrypto built in, so the only dependency is pyOpenSSL. pyOpenSSL happens to be built in to Apple's Python 2.6, but we have to compile and install it for 2.5. You can get the latest pyOpenSSL 0.9 here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyopenssl/files/pyopenssl/0.9/pyOpenSSL-0.9.tar. gz/download
The download page is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyopenssl/files/
Now, the installation directions say to use the standard pair of commands: python setup.py build and then python setup.py install. Unfortunately, this will default to Python 2.6 and compile and install it as a 2.6 module, which is NOT what we want. So, modify these commands to be:
python2.5 setup.py build
python2.5 setup.py install
Now, if you want avatar support beyond PNG, you need to install Python Image Library. That's particularly hairy and not required, so I'm going to skip that now, and discuss it at the end.
Next, you need to prepare iChat server for PyMSNt. Edit /etc/jabberd/router-users.xml
You will notice an existing block like this:
<users>
<user>
<name>jabberd</name>
<secret>asdf!ghjk#</secret>
</user>
</users>
You need to add another user for your MSN transport. Let's assume your primary Jabber ID is example.com. You should add a block for a user named msn.example.com. This does not need to resolve via DNS. So when done, it should look like this:
<users>
<user>
<name>jabberd</name>
<secret>asdf!ghjk#</secret>
</user>
<user>
<name>msn.example.com</name>
<secret>asdf!ghjk#</secret>
</user>
</users>
I found that in the past, I was able to use a different secret for the MSN handshake, but I had issues with that this time, so make the msn.example.com secret match the existing one for jabberd. Also, note this secret down as you'll need it shortly.
The PyMSNt project has changed hands, but there are no files at the new location, so this tutorial expects you to download the latest 0.11.3 from http://delx.net.au/projects/pymsnt/tarballs/pymsnt-0.11.3.tar.gz (the download page is http://delx.net.au/projects/pymsnt/downloads.html)
Decompress this archive and for the sake of this tutorial, store it at /var/jabber/modules/pymsnt . You can store it anywhere else you want, but you'll need to adjust the commands and files below accordingly.
Once you have placed it there, make sure it is owned by the jabber user/group with:
chown -R jabber:jabber /var/jabber/modules/pymsnt
Let's cd to that directory for the next few commands:
cd /var/jabber/modules/pymsnt/
Now, you need to copy the config example and edit it:
cp -p config-example.xml config.xml
(the -p makes sure the resulting file is the same permissions, i.e. still owned by user jabber)
nano config.xml
(use any appropriate text editor you want. I like nano)
OK, so:
1. You need to set the Jabber ID (<jid>) to the name you defined in the router-users.xml file, e.g. msn.example.com
2. Set the <host> to your primary hostname (this must resolve!)
3. Commend out <background/>, making that line look like this:
<!-- <background/> -->
4. Make <secret> match the <secret> you specified in router-users.xml
Save your changes and exit. That should do it for the config file for now.
Also, thanks to Tim Harris, you need to make an edit to the source as described here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7865180&#7865180
Next, we want to configure launchd to launch PyMSNt. Initially, under previous versions of OSXS, I set this up to launch onDemand only if the jabber server was running. I accomplished this by using a launchd key called QueueDirectories, which only launches the job if files appear in a directory. I set it to watch the /var/run/jabber directory as Jabber server placed pid files in there at launch. Unfortunately, it seems that in 10.6 it doesn't clean these files up at quit, but I believe this is due to a change in Python's Twisted removal of the removePID function (something that affects PyMSNt as well), and I expect Apple to fix it in the future. So, this plist will work now, and also in the future once Apple fix this.
Also, you'll notice that you must invoke PyMSNt using python2.5, not python.
Place these contents in /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.cjb.delx.pymsnt.plist :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>net.cjb.delx.pymsnt</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<true/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/bin/python2.5</string>
<string>./PyMSNt.py</string>
</array>
<key>QueueDirectories</key>
<array>
<string>/var/run/jabberd</string>
</array>
<key>UserName</key>
<string>_jabber</string>
<key>WorkingDirectory</key>
<string>/var/jabberd/modules/pymsnt</string>
<key>StandardOutPath</key>
<string>/var/log/pymsnt.log</string>
<key>StandardErrorPath</key>
<string>/var/log/pymsnt.log</string>
</dict>
</plist>
You can leave out the StandardOutPath and StandardErrorPath path if you don't care about logging, but they're helpful at least for getting this up and running. However, the log file needs to be owned by Jabber, so create it and change the owner if you're going to keep those keys in:
touch /var/log/pymsnt.log
chown jabber /var/log/pymsnt.log
Last, but not least, load the launchd plist with:
launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.cjb.delx.pymsnt.plist
Make sure iChat server is running and login.
*KNOWN ISSUES*
*You must register!*
You still need to use an application like PSI to register for the transport. That's beyond the scope of this tutorial. Note that you need to use an older version, discussed here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2159145&tstart=0
Snow Leopard might have improved the jabber servers authentication methods to not require the old version, but I didn't bother looking in to that yet as the solution in the aforementioned topic worked fine.
*Calendar Server Clash*
The default port for unencrypted calendar server communications is port 8008. It seems that when launched, it creates two additional listeners on the next 2 highest adjacent ports, being 8009 and 8010 in the default configuration. Unfortunately, naughty Apple has trounced on xmpp's reserved port usage of 8010. Bad Apple! Also, there is little documentation about what 8010 is used for. Initially, I tried shifting the unencrypted Calendar server port to something else. As I only use the encrypted port for communication, I didn't really care. However, most annoyingly, the wiki server calendar client looks for the calendar server at 8008, and I don't know how to change that.
What can you do?
Believe it or now, if you launch PyMSNt first, and Calendar Server after, everything is dandy. Unfortunately, that's not how the startup sequence works, so you'll find the need to do this shuffle after restart. I believe there are dependencies one can put in launchd plist files, but I haven't experimented with that yet.
What else can you do?
You can make PyMSNt listen for file transfers at a different port. In config.xml, the directive to change is <ftJabberPort>8010</ftJabberPort> and pick a different number. I've tried changing this to something quite different, like 18010 and then doing port mapping on my router to map the public 8010 to 18010 since the calendar server doesn't need public access to 8010, only via localhost. I haven't been able to test this thoroughly yet. Also, this is of no use to someone not using port mapping. It would be great if I could bind PyMSNt to NOT use localhost to avoid the conflict, but that's beyond my knowledge.
*Python Image Library*
This is a topic worthy of its own post, but I'll stick it in here. Python Image Library or PIL has two optional dependencies, libjpeg and freetype. You need libjpeg to view non-PNG MSN avatars.
Many instructions on the internet will direct you to jpegsrcv6b. I could not get that to work. Instead, I did succeed with jpegsrc7:
http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v7.tar.gz (download page: http://www.ijg.org/)
But here's the problem. Python 2.5 runs in 32 bit mode. The compilers try to compile libjpeg in 64 bit mode. If you've been following info about the way Snow Leopard works, 32 bit processes won't load 64 big libraries/plugins and vice versa. SO, you have to compile libjpeg for 32-bit. To do that, I used:
CC="gcc -arch i386" ./configure --enable-shared --enable-static
make
make install
Freetype-2.3.9 installed normally without a hitch.
And then finally, I could install PIL, making sure to specify python2.5 as necessary:
python2.5 setup.py build_ext -i
After running that, TEST it with:
python2.5 selftest.py
This MUST pass. If it doesn't something is wrong.
Finally:
python2.5 setup.py install
Uggh. So after all of that, I got PIL happily installed and working. But guess what, avatars still don't work, or to be more descriptive, when using iChat, every MSN contact show my avatar as theirs.
I see an avatar related exception in /var/log/pymsnt.log, but I don't really know what to do with it.

Answer 1

I finally got avatar support working as well thanks to this post here:
http://groups.google.com/group/py-transports/msg/f3cdd998a5c7a97a
For me, that was line 2553 of src/legacy/msn/msn.py and changing:
DATA = 0x20
to
DATA = 0x1000020
After doing that, avatars work!!!