Federation with jabberd2 and mu-conference

[Unix Ronin]

OK, so. i have jabberd2 and mu-conference set up on one of my servers, and have had it so for several years. Prior to that I had it running on a Solaris 10 box. Either way, remote users could connect to mu-conference chats set up on our jabberd ... as long as they used an account also set up on our local jabberd. I know that XMPP is SUPPOSED to allow federated connections; as I understand it, anyone with any jabber account anywhere (GTalk for example) should be able to connect to my mu-conference chats provided they have the right address and the password for the chat. But I can't seem to make that actually work.

Can anyone tell me what it is I'm most likely doing wrong or not doing? Any firewall ports that need to be opened that I don't know about? Any kind of peering i need to set up, and how? Etc? I've obviously missed (or misunderstood) something, but if I knew what it was, I wouldn't have to be asking.

[Ant P.]

Do you have correct DNS SRV records for _xmpp-server._tcp.(hostname) and _xmpp-server._tcp.(MUC hostname)? Is your SSL (required) properly configured?

[Mad Merlin]

Are you trying to federate to Google (Gtalk)? They don't support encryption for XMPP federation at all.

Basically every other XMPP server requires encryption for federation (there was a flag day on this topic a couple years ago), so the situation is rather unfortunate given the sizable count of Google users.
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