Connecting to openfire from spark outside of internal network

I am new as you can see to the openfire / spark community. I have installed openfire and have it up and running on my server and installed spark to a few local clients to try it out. Works great. I want to be able to use the spark interface from outside of our network and need to know what i need to do to ensure that the client will port properly through my sonicwall firewall.

Any assistance in this area would be very helpful. Thank you in advance.

You should open 5222 port in your firewall and forward it to your Openfire machine. That’s the minimum information, because everything depends on your network setup, etc.

i guess that’s the confusing part because i had already done that. forwarded that port and a few others and used the external IP address from a machine outside the network to try and connect. Never connected using spark. Should i be using a different program other than spark to connect over the internet?

Can you resolve your xmpp.domain (eg: igniterealtime.org) in the internet?

The most simple test is “telnet xmpp.igniterealtime.org 5222” (replace the xmpp.domain). This should work and open a connection. After sending some data you should get a stream error.

To use a short xmpp.domain you may want to use DNS SRV records.

Simply put when you install openfire that is meant to be accessed by remote sites the server name given during the config must be a FQDN that can be looked up via the remote site. For example if you have a real world domain of www.somecompany.com your may make the openfire server openfire.somecompany.com and then add dns entries for the server accordingly. Then open port 5222 to the server.