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I have Google Apps on my .us domain. I use Google Talk (via Pidgin or Empathy) all the time from my account. However, often my connection will flake out and I'll be disconnected, even though my network connection remains fine. This has happened in a variety of locations on a variety of computers.

However, far more troubling is that nobody can send me messages while I'm offline—instead of Google queuing them up for later, people just get XMPP errors. Not sure if the two are related. This seems to be a property of my Google Apps setup, and that scares me a little. What did I do wrong?

I haven't been able to find anything that might explain what's happening in either case. Is there any way I can debug what's going on here, especially for the offline messages generating XMPP errors issue? Both issues happen regardless of where I am or what client I'm using, so it seems that something in the cloud might be at fault. I don't know where to begin.

EDIT: The most troubling issue here is that I can't receive offline messages. I've edited for clarity.

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I don't use Google Apps/Talk, but I know that Google Mail provides a setting which users have to activate to be able to receive offline messages. Maybe this is the case for Google Apps, too? I don't know the exact setting, but I think it has something to do with storing history. – unor Feb 3 at 19:46

1 Answer

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For starters, strive for the simplest solution, try to check if it's not a problem in your pc:

  • Upgrade your OS to the latest version or set of packages
  • Do the same tests on another machine on the same network and if it's possible, another OS to discard OS or library problems.

The next thing I'll usually do is fire Wireshark and inspect the network traffic, but since Google Talk uses HTTPS, this is not possible (and MITM the HTTPS with a spoofed cert is not a good option). So the next best thing is to check the debug using the Empathy logs and look for errors when the disconnection event happens.

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As I said I've seen the disconnection happen on multiple clients. I guess I didn't mention that I've seen it from multiple locations on multiple computers running different clients. It's not a problem in my computer. I suppose looking at the empathy debug logs might help for the disconnection issue, but what about the no-messages-when-offline problem? That's far more worrisome. I need something that's not a client on my machine for that. – chazomaticus May 4 '12 at 19:12
I've edited the question for clarity. Thanks for your answer -- checking the empathy logs is a good place to start -- but I'm fairly certain I need something beyond the scope of my client. – chazomaticus May 4 '12 at 19:29

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