[Pkg-telepathy-maintainers] Bug#632277: Bug#632277: empathy: Cannot see or connect to VPN neighbours

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 01 Jul 2011 at 08:16:30 +0200, Axel Stammler wrote:
> I don't want to use a server but point-to-point communication. Unfortunately the list of
> local users only includes Ethernet (eth) and wifi (wlan) but no virtual private network
> (tun) connections.

Link-local XMPP requires link-local multicast to work on your network;
without multicast, it can't discover the other users.

Which VPN software are you using? Does link-local multicast work on your
VPN? (Can multicast ever work on tun connections, or are they restricted 
to unicast?)

If your VPN is able to switch from tun (virtual IP routing) to tap (virtual
Ethernet bridging), that might make multicast work.

If link-local multicast works in general, but Empathy doesn't see other
users on the VPN, that would probably indicate a bug in either telepathy-salut
or avahi, rather than in Empathy itself.

Please try using avahi-discover to browse for other machines on the VPN
(if you haven't specifically disabled it, each machine should be advertising a
"Workstation" record named after its hostname and MAC address). If that
doesn't work, there's no way telepathy-salut will work either.

Regards,
    S