Getting Pidgin and Microsoft Lync to work nicely (Part 2)

I last wrote about trying to get Pidgin working on a Windows environment by using the pidgin-sipe plugin and a few other things. (See the first post.)

Since then, I've changed work/company and decided I would go with TelRed's Wync Sky and even pay for the year's subscription. However, even with the license I still had a lot of issues. Also, since the group that I work with worked on Skype instead of Lync, I was using Skype for Linux and didn't bother trying to sort out my issues.

However, people need me to be available via Lync now. I decided to give Pidgin another go.

So, following what I knew from the first post, I edited the UserAgent and put in the rest of my information.

Well, it wouldn't work. The error I got was something related to the service not providing a token. I couldn't find any Pidgin logs, so I started it on the command line with the -d flag (for debugging.) and I noticed that it wouldn't accept the SSL certificate and would disconnect me.

Reading about this issue, it led me to enable the NSS Preferences plugin and then trying to figure out what Cypher the site I was trying to connect to was using. The logs didn't give much information with regards to that, so I tried Google Chrome. I couldn't find the information in Chrome by viewing the SSL Certificate itself, but going to into Developer Tools, and then the security at the bottom it showed that the site was using some old Cyphers and protocols. I enabled those in the NSS Preferences plugin and then my error changed!

Now, it was still failing, but it gave me a "Read" error. I googled for that and eventually came to an OLD Debian bug (649456) which showed that the workaround was to use NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0 and then start pidgin. So, I did that and voila!

I'm available on Lync now. I now noticed I can even do some other things that I couldn't before, but I haven't had the chance to try them.

Last thing: we are migrating to O365 soon, so I will probably have to write another part to this saga when that's completed. I believe there's going to be two steps to that since we're doing email first and moving the Lync instances to Skype 4 Business second.

Keep your eyes out for the next instalment.