/gempesaw/writing

Using SIPE through Bitlbee in Emacs on OS X Mavericks

· bitlbee sipe os x mavericks emacs circe.el irc lync alternative jabber work chat ugh

I like using Emacs as often as possible. Our work server was previously jabber, so I was using the excellent jabber.el to chat with my coworkers. We're switching over to Microsft Lync, so it appears my best option is to use Bitlbee and an Emacs IRC client (like Circe!). Bitlbee is a server that you can run on your computer that acts as a gateway to different chat protocols. It handily exposes your IM interactions to you through an IRC server. One of the protocols it supports is SIPE, which is what Microsoft Lync uses. It was slightly involved to get all the pieces working together; here are the steps I followed.

1. get pidgin and bitlbee

$ brew update
$ brew install bitlbee --with-pidgin

--with-pidgin specifies the pidgin package as a dependency, which I believe we'll need to manually compile pidgin-sipe, since it's not available on homebrew. In case brew link bitlbee doesn't put bitlbee in your path, you can just

$ ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/bitlbee/3.2.2/sbin/bitlbee /usr/local/bin/bitlbee

2. get pidgin-sipe

pidgin-sipe will teach bitlbee how to speak SIPE! Download the latest tarball from the sipe project on SourceForge. At time of writing, the direct download link to 1.18.4 is here. Compiling it requires gettext, and it may not be linked by default, so link it if necessary:

$ brew link --force gettext

Unzip the pidgin-sipe.tar.gz tarball, get in that folder, and get to work compiling it:

$ ./configure --disable-quality-check --prefix=/usr/local/
$ make
$ sudo make install

The -prefix option apparently is used to tell pidgin-sipe where to find the libpurple files that we installed as part of pidgin during the earlier bitlbee --with-pidgin step.

3. tell bitlbee what's up!

Once you've got pidgin, pidgin-sipe, and bitlbee all installed, you should be able to get started playing around with bitlbee (finally!). You'll want to run it in ForkDaemon mode via -F, as it suggests as a consequence of compiling --with-pidgin.

$ bitlbee -F

Fire up your IRC client of choice and connect to localhost:6667 and join the control channel "&bitlbee"[1]. Say help purple in the &bitlbee channel to see your potential protocols, and hopefully sipe (Office Communicator) will show up in the list! If it's missing, you'll need to go back and verify your dependencies. Forging bravely on, add an account with the sipe protocol - although the Bitlbee wiki says to include DOMAIN\LOGIN for the account add sipe command, I left it blank and had no troubles logging in. YMMV.

account add sipe EMAIL@ADDRESS.COM PASSWORD
account sipe set authentication tls-dsk
account sipe set useragent "UCCAPI/15.0.4481.1000 OC/15.0.4481.1000 (Microsoft Lync)"
account 0 on

There were a final few things to tweak: we needed to set the authentication scheme (TLS-DSK) and masquerade as an actual lync client by setting our user agent[2], but after that, we get the golden output:

<root> sipe - Logging in: Connecting
<root> sipe - Logging in: Logged in

Use blist all to see your verbose buddy list, and chat away! Ta-da!

  1. Honestly, I'm not very good at IRC so it might bring up that channel automatically, or something - I'm autojoined to it in Circe, at least. You can optionally register an admin account to persist your settings via bitlbee's register, and subsequently identify, commands. ↩︎

  2. And perhaps we need to set an environment variable? I didn't need to, but obviously some people did: http://blog.mattwoodward.com/2012/08/pidgin-sipe-and-read-error-on-ubutnu.html ↩︎