Getting Adium 1.4b18 Connecting to AIM via SSL
This morning I was trying to get AIM working with Adium 1.4b18 with SSL via the guest wireless access in The Shop. It's not a major deal, but I've had it set up this way for quite a while, and when I realized that it wasn't working yesterday using SSL, but was working without it, I thought I'd spend a few minutes trying to figure out why.
Well, it turns out that when libpurple, used in Adium, connects to AIM, via SSL, it tries the provided machine and port: login.oscar.aol.com:5190, but if it's SSL it falls back (or promotes?) to using slogin.oscar.aol.com:443. Now a typical technique within places that need to log all chat activity is to have the local DNS redirect the requests to such machines to local proxies and there, all inbound and outbound communication is logged for legal purposes.
Makes sense for the trusted network at The Shop, as well. But this is the 'guest' network, and I'd like to get to AIM with SSL. The trick is pretty easy: add the following lines to your /etc/hosts file and then you're in business!
64.12.202.116 login.oscar.aol.com 64.12.202.117 slogin.oscar.aol.com slogin.gslogin.oscar.aol.com
The first is the real address of the Oscar AIM login server, and the second is the name of the secure (SSL) login server. It actually has two names, so it's necessary to put both in the line to make sure that whatever libpurple is asking for, it gets.
With this, I was able to get to AIM with SSL no problem. Nice.