[OTR-users] Managing multiple signins

Daniel Perelman dap56 at cornell.edu
Fri May 21 14:35:52 EDT 2010


There was a post a few months ago about a new version of the protocol
which, among other things, would fix that problem (it is even worse
with AIM because AIM doesn't have an equivalent of resources or
tracking which computers are part of a conversation). I am not sure
what happened to that. I assume the devs have been busy with other
things and it will materialize eventually.

A quick work around is to say "hi" and get the other person to say
"hi" back (i.e. both people say something indicating they are there
which has no real content so it does not need to be encrypted). On
XMPP (including GTalk) this lets the server know which two computers
the conversation is between and it will not send the messages to the
other computers the participants are logged in from. Note that that
gets reset when you go from available to away, so you might have to
re-initiate the OTR conversation if one person goes away but continues
to be in the conversation.

Also, I think you can just tell Pidgin to send an IM to
user at gmail.com/Work, but note that GTalk puts the random hex string in
the resources so you would have to check what the actual resource was.

  - Daniel

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 14:28, Paul <otr-users at bobpaul.org> wrote:
> I have a contact who remains signed into his GMail chat account in multiple
> locations. I've gotten him to configure the "Resource" value so I can easily
> tell which signin is work, him home, his phone, etc.
> The problem I'm experiencing is if he's been idle for a long time and I try
> to message him, OTR attempts to start a private conversation with first his
> desktop and then his laptop. When he responds from his work location, I can
> stop the private conversation, restart it and it will successfully connect
> to his work machine.
> I only ever IM him at work. Is there a way to force my OTR to attempt
> "USER at gmail.com/Work" first? Or maybe a way to manually select which I want
> to try?
> Or what is the recommended way to deal with this sort of situation? I'm
> pretty sure he gets garbage on his work IM whenever I initiate a
> conversation, since OTR secures with one of his other computers until I stop
> and re-start it.
> --Paul
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