I have had two different needs come up for using Lync as my instant messaging tool. First, the company that I work for subscribed to Microsoft’s online service called Office365. Then, I started working for a client that hosted it’s own internal server.
These are my notes for getting connected so that I could chat on both networks using Pidgin.
Installing
I simply installed the pidgin-sipe package from the Software Center:
When I tried to launch Pidgin from the command-line, it wouldn’t work:
skp@pecan:~$ pidgin /usr/bin/pidgin: line 10: /usr/bin/pidgin.orig: No such file or directory
So, Pidgin itself has to be installed separately. I went ahead and installed the Plugin Pack as well.
When pidgin first started up, I accepted it’s offer to create a new account:
I selected…
Office365 Configuration
My company uses Office365 for their email and Lync server. So, I attempted to configure it, and it seems to work fine. On the Basic tab, I filled out these settings:
- Username: <my company email address>
- Login: <my company email address>
- Password: <password I use in Sharepoint or to access the online Microsoft portal>
- Local alias: <my first name>
On the Advanced Tab, I filled out these settings:
- Server: sipdir.online.lync.com:443
- Connection type: Auto
- User Agent: UCCAPI/4.0.7577.0 OC/4.0.7577.0 (Microsoft Lync 2010)
- Authentication scheme: TLS-DSK
Connecting to Client’s Internal Server
My next challenge was connecting to the client’s internal server. I think I finally got all of the settings right. On the basic tab, I used these settings:
- Username: <company email address>
- Login: <domain>\<Windows login username>
- Password: <Windows password>
- Local Alias: <First name>
On the Advanced tab, I used the following settings:
- Server: <server name from DNS>
- Connection Type: Auto
- User Agent: UCCAPI/4.0.7577.0 OC/4.0.7577.0 (Microsoft Lync 2010)
- Authentication scheme: NTLM
- Use Single Sign-On: Unchecked
- Don’t publish my calendar information: Checked
For the server name, I learned that I could read that from DNS using nslookup. At the nslookup, I ran “set type=srv”. Then, I ran “_sipinternaltls._tcp.<domain name>”. The domain name is the same domain name on my company email address (everything after the @).
I tried to remove all of the actual values from the screenshot, but this is something what the output looked like:
The value that I was looking to put in the pidgin Server setting was <svr hostname>:<port> (underneath priority and weight).
Troubleshooting
You can see the output messages by going to Help > Debug Window. That gave plenty of error message information to help figure out what was going on.
I got this message because I did not enter an email address format for the user name.
(21:55:03) connection: Connection error on 0x7fa6ad595c60 (reason: 1 description: User name should be a valid SIP URI
Example: user@company.com)
The next message I saw was this message:
(21:57:19) connection: Connection error on 0x7fa6ad5931c0 (reason: 2 description: Certificate request to https://<server name>/CertProv/CertProvisioningService.svc/WebTicket_Proof_SHA1 failed)
This page indicated that maybe this was because I was using the wrong Authentication Scheme. When I changed it from TLS-DSK to NTLM, it fixed the problem and worked!!
Environment Variable
One post that I read mentioned setting the NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV environment variable. I set this variable, and it didn’t seem to make a difference. I had some other things wrong. I never did go back and remove it, so I am not sure if it was needed or not.
I updated /etc/profile by adding this file /etc/profile.d/lync.sh:
# http://linuxsagas.digitaleagle.net/2013/11/04/using-microsof…nc-with-ubuntu/ export NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0
You can download a Lync client for Ubuntu and other Linux distros at fisil.com
I have a Linux Lync client.
More features than Pidgin
fisil.com
Try it