Shared Roster - JID by IP works, JID by DNS name does not

I had ejabberd running on an old RedHat 9 box, accessible only from our LAN, providing instant messaging service for about 75-80 employees. This server recently died. I replaced it with a new box running FreeBSD 8.0. I installed ejabberd from the ports system and am currently running 2.0.5.

I thankfully had some warning that the server was dying, so I had time to install and configure a new box to replace it. It now provides DNS service, and I have it set up to resolve a bogus domain name for my store; since it's not accessible from outside our LAN, it shouldn't pose a problem. If I ping location1.store, I get a response from the IP of the server, w.x.y.z. All of the clients use GAIM 1.5, either on Windoze or Linux, and are set up to have User_Name@w.x.y.z as the user name of their jabber ID. I thought it would be nice to have people set up so that you have User_Name@location1.store instead of the IP address. I was able to get ejabberd to recognize registrations (done via the command line - in band registration is disabled due to my co-workers having the maturity of junior high school kids) to location1.store and w.x.y.z by adding another host to the hosts line in the ejabberd.cfg file: {hosts, [ "location1.store", "w.x.y.z" ]}.

However, there is a problem. (Of course - why else would I be posting this message if I didn't have a problem? ;) )

I had everybody set up in a shared roster for their specific department - all sales people were in one group, all administrative people were in another, all managers in another, etc. All the groups were allowed to see all the other groups, which effectively made the shared roster an index of the people online at my location and it worked well. To get things working last night when replacing the server, I used the @all@ trick (added well after the old server was set up) to create a single shared roster with everybody in it - no groups at all.

When I register User_Name@location1.store with ejabberd and log on with a PC with an 'everybody' shared roster, there are no users shown online, whether they are on or not. If you send a person who is shown as offline a message, they get it immediately, indicating to me that it's a presence notification problem. However, if I set up the box to have only w.x.y.z as the host and log on with the corresponding accounts, the shared roster works perfectly albeit without the groups I had before. (I may play with the groups if I can get this figured out; might not be worth the administrative hassle every time somebody is hired or leaves.)

I know that the problem has got to be something relatively simple in my configuration and I'm just not understanding. Ideally, I'd like to have a single shared roster with User_Name@location1.store with presence notification going out to anybody who is online. If a message is sent to User_Name@w.x.y.z, it's dumped to User_Name@location1.store and vice versa (since they're the same User_Name on the same box), at least until the store is migrated to using location1.store for everybody's jabber IDs.

In the future, I'll probably add User_Name@location2.store to designate people working at other locations (with location2.store resolving via DNS to the same IP of location1.store) and I'd like to have the online presence of all people in the shared roster be reported correctly in everybody's buddy list. This is definitely for the future though.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Jim

PS - I did discover a possibly untended behavior in ejabberd while in this process. If you do not have mod_roster enabled and do have mod_shared_roster, you can see the shared roster, but everybody appears as being offline. Enable mod_roster and the status of everybody in your shared roster is then reported accurately.