Sam Sargeant

When I got my parents setup with a new computer I took the chance to setup a new domain-name with some Google services. I’ve got my family running with their own email address and iChat using Google Talk accounts. We don’t really use the chat feature of gtalk, but it’s a great way to setup a screen sharing session, or a video call. Colin asked me for some more info, so I’m doing a quick brain-dump of the process here.

You will need the following:

• A domain name registered. Google do support registration of a domain through eNom, however I haven’t tried this myself.
• The ability to create records in your domain. Your registrar can help with this.
• A Jabber client such as iChat, Adium, or Pidgin.
• About an hour plus a coffee or two

With a domain name ready to go, you first need to signup to Google Apps. This entry-level service is free and allows you to setup email, chat, calendars, documents and websites for a workgroup. This does a good job of servicing a small company too and is much cheaper than Exchange or Zimbra.

On the Google signup page, select “Administrator” and enter your domain. Moving to the next step they ask you about your organisation and expected number of users. Nothing too complex yet. Finish this and step #3.

You now should be looking at the main control panel for your domain. I’ve used “crazy.geek.nz” in my example image.  Notice the part that says “To activate Google Apps services you must verify that you own your domain“. Click the “Verify domain ownership” link to do so.

I normally go about this by selecting “Change your CNAME record“. Google verifies you have control of your domain by asking you to add a fake record they can check. Something like google748fe89ab72097f.yourdomain. This won’t hurt anything else you are doing with your domain name and can be removed after this process is complete.

Your domain name registrar should offer a control-panel where you can add this record. Some registrars (like simplename) may help this process with a form tailored to the Google Apps setup. If you’re a DNS geek, here’s an example record for a BIND zone file:

google748fe89ab72097f     IN     CNAME     google.com.

Once you have this recorded added to your domain name, click the “Verify” button. The response says “We are checking domain ownership. This may take 48 hours to complete.”, however it has always been finished within minutes for me.

Now the domain should be verified by Google you can setup the chat service. Click “Activate chat” on the dashboard. While you’re waiting for this (up to 30 minutes!) go setup more users for your domain.

The tricky part of all this comes next. You need to setup some special DNS records for chat to work. In short, these records tell iChat which servers to connect to when you try and sign-in as sam@crazy.geek.nz to the Google Talk service. The records you need to add are:

_xmpp-server._tcp     IN     SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp     IN     SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp     IN     SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

If you’re using simplename, or some other registrar who has customised their process for Google Apps, you can ignore this step. Just login to simplename and enter your key (the google748fe89ab72097f bit from earlier) and they’ll setup all the right records.

Assuming all the records are working, you should now be able to fire up iChat (or some other Jabber client) and get things working.

Unfortunately there’s one big caveat lurking. I’ve seen some consumer routers that run a stub-resolver. These devices have no idea how to deal with SRV records in the DNS and will drop them without warning. What you’ll see is a failure to connect from your chat client. If this happens, you’ll need to find the advanced options in your Jabber client and supply ‘xmpp-server.l.google.com’ as an explicit server to connect to.

Good luck! Tell me how it goes.