Messenger Federation DNS SRV record

Posted on April 30th, 2008 by wilson

I was a bit stumped when I wanted to ‘Federate’ one of my domains to the Windows Live Messenger service. One of the things I needed to do to make this possible was to create an SRV record in our domain DNS.

Why ‘Federate’ in the first place? Well, users who use an instant messaging client (Yahoo etc) other than Windows Live Messenger can communicate with users in your domain that are logged on to Windows Live Messenger.

The problem lies with the cryptic Admin SRV instruction on Microsoft’s page:

DNS Record Type: SRV
Host: _sipfederationtls._tcp.xxx.xxx.com
Value: 10 2 5061 federation.messenger.msn.com

I consulted http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record And this is what they have to say:

An SRV record has the form:

_Service._Proto.Name TTL Class SRV Priority Weight Port Target
  • Service: the symbolic name of the desired service.
  • Proto: the protocol of the desired service; this is usually either TCP or UDP.
  • Name: the domain name for which this record is valid.
  • TTL: standard DNS time to live field.
  • Class: standard DNS class field (this is always IN).
  • Priority: the priority of the target host, lower value means more preferred.
  • Weight: A relative weight for records with the same priority.
  • Port: the TCP or UDP port on which the service is to be found.
  • Target: the canonical hostname of the machine providing the service.

An example SRV record might look like this:

_sip._tcp.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 5 5060 sipserver.example.com.

So I worked it out to mean this:

Service=_sipfederationls

protocol=_tcp

priority=10

weight=2

port=5061

host=federation.messenger.msn.com

 

In your Microsoft DNS Server, you right click on your domain, choose ‘Other Record" and then enter as follows:

federationDNS_srv

To test it out, I logged into Yahoo.com and added the test@xxx.com user to it. ON the windows live , I got an invite message from MSN live for the invite I made on yahoo.com

After I ‘allowed’ both the yahoo.com account and the MSN account to each other, I could then send messages back and forth between the two IM services!

Hope that helps you out there. If so, kindly drop a comment or two okay?

Filed under: Computing

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