UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am wanting to know if you have ever found an extremely secure
chat program for UNIX (Solaris 7), such that I could control which
users can chat with which users, ie John (teacher)
can talk to Suzy (student) or Sam (student) and they
can talk back to their teacher BUT there is absolutely
no way that Suzy can chat with Sam or vice versa. Preferably
it would be text-based (not gui although that would be OK)
and the systems will have NO access to the internet
(a totally standalone network). The hardware is thin-clients
(Sun-rays).

ixeye
bccarey@kci.net

I set up a similar system using Jabber and Sun-Rays. However, I never fully completed the system because we had yet to migrate to LDAP. So the first thing is, migrate to LDAP. Then you can (relatively) easily setup a secure Jabber server to use LDAP for all user information. I believe each user will have their own profile of friends, and that file can be generated or stored on the server, via LDAP.

Let us know how far you get, and which Jabber server you decide on. Then I may be of further assistance.