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This may seem like a simple question, but our office IT guy is stumped.
We have Cyberoam to monitor and block unwanted internet usage for everyone at our workplace. However, we all like to use Google Talk for IM. The google talk application on windows and the Google Chat extension on Chrome seems to work.
But there are a lot of us programmers who work on Ubuntu and other Linux distros and we would love to use Google Talk on clients like Pidgin and Empathy.
Our IT admin has unblocked talk.google.com and completely unblocked ports 5222 and 5223. 443 is unblocked as it is for SSL, but Pidgin and Empathy still refuse to work.
This applies to both Gmail and Google Apps addresses, and we have confirmed that they work on the same configuration on other unrestricted internet connections.

Any ideas?

Munim
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  • Why not have your IT staff ask the question directly, as he/she actually have the tools to troubleshoot and mitigate this. – EEAA May 09 '13 at 13:25
  • @EEAA The "staff" is actually one guy. He is actually not bad, but he has tried his best, and he can't seem to figure what's wrong. I just found out that Empathy and Pidgin are affected by a bug in Ubuntu. Applying a short patch seems to fix it. Posting my own answer – Munim May 09 '13 at 16:31

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As it turns out, it was a bug in the online accounts system in Ubuntu. The google-im.services file is badly formatted.
The bug explanation and the fix are available here

Munim
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