Tech Goes Boom

Make iChat Reconnect to Server

iChat doesn't automatically reconnect to the aim server when it has been disconnected, and there's no option to make it do so. Being behind an HTTP firewall, this can be a big pain in the butt with disconnects every few minutes. Having to reconnect manually every time is not my idea of fun. So it was time to break out cron and applescript to make things better.

* 9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 * * 1,2,3,4,5 osascript -e 'tell application “iChat” to log in'

Adding this line to your crontab will try and make ichat log in to the aim server every minute of the day between 9AM and 5PM on workdays. iChat is very graceful in its handling of this command. If you're already logged in, it won't do anything. If there is an error dialog up complaining about not being able to hit the server, it will simply dismiss the error and try to connect again.

For the short term, this will do fine for me, but I may write this up as a startup service that checks to make sure ichat is running and if so, passes the login command, then goes to sleep for 20 seconds. I know there has to be at least a couple of people out there experiencing the pain of this.

Hopefully in iChat 3 there will be an option to automatically rejoin the server when there is a disconnect. Otherwise I will write the startup item to include Tiger as well.