Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat?

Ars-Gonzo asks: "I was at a conference last week, and had a surprising number of people connected to a peer-to-peer wireless LAN during the lectures. I saw several Mac users typing away during the lectures, and I found out later that they were using iChat's Rendezvous-based local chat to talk to each other. iChat's local subnet chatting functionality is supposedly based on Jabber, but I can't get a Jabber client (on Windows or Linux) to connect to iChat, locally. Has anyone seen any iChat compatible LAN-chat apps for a platform other than Mac?"

It's somewhat open

[eyeball]

I'm no expert in rendezvous, but it uses open (although not too commonly used) protocols like multicast-DSN. See Apples FAQ on Rendezvous [apple.com]

As for iChat LAN (which I'm pretty sure is much different than AOL's protocol). Looks like these guys reverse engineered and built a LAN iChat plugin [wiretapped.net] for Proteus (the multiprotocol IM client). They have the source available for download.

It would be possible to port the rendezvous+iChat protocol to a Jabber server plugin.