Contacts missing in corporate environment

My office uses Jabber for inter and intraoffice communication. We are allowed to use whatever client we want, and I prefer Spark. However, when I use Spark I only see about 90% of the groups and 75% of the contacts that I see in all of my other clients. I can Add Contact and as soon as I type in a missing person’s username their full name appears in the next field, so I know the information is “out there” and available to Spark. I’m a bit out of my league when it comes to figuring out all the XMPP details here, but I’d be happy to follow any troubleshooting steps suggested. This problem appears in 2.5.8 and 2.6.0rc1, and I am running Spark on Ubuntu 10.10

Do you know what xmpp server is in use? Also how many (approximately) groups and contacts do you have (or should have) in your list?

I am not sure which server is in use, but I will ask, or is there some way I can get Spark to tell me how the server identifies itself?

There should be approximately 30 groups and 200 contacts.

Also, I can receive messages from the missing contacts.

Well, we have 16 groups with ~200 users and i don’t see such problem. I can try creating 30+ groups on my test server later, though.

If you press Ctrl-F in roster and type the name of missing contact, does it show up? Also are those missing groups from the bottom of the list (alphabetically)? And those missing contacts are only from the missing groups or some contacts can be missing from a visible group?

The missing contacts are not findable with ctrl-f in the roster or in a chat window.

The missing groups are all small groups with nothing else in common, which could be random or not.

The missing contacts are mostly from large groups, but again that could just be random. They are from both visible and not-visible groups.

Maybe those groups have some special characters in their names (and missing users)? Also are they always the same groups missing or is it random every time you login? Is it possible to post a few group names here? Because i can create lots of groups and they are all visible to me. Also, in Spark, you have enabled showing of empty groups? And i suppose there is at least one user in every missing group?

The groups do not seem to have anything in common, and don’t have special characters. It is always the same groups missing, and the same users (until I manually add them one at a time). I have enabled the display of empty groups, and can see some empty groups. I am not certain if all of the missing groups have members, but some of them do.

Well, i’m currently out of ideas…

Another bit of the puzzle… When I ‘Add a contact’ and add one of the missing people, they get automatically put into the appropriate groups.

It looks like Spark is getting those contacts and groups, just not displaying them. Maybe some memory issue or you are hitting some limitation in Spark, but it is hard to reproduce. Wonder, when you add some missing contact, maybe some other contact is pushed away.

I ran into a similar problem and it turned out to be my Active Directory configuration. Basically we use contact cards for a certain group of people, these contact cards were named the same as their user accounts, this was confusing Spark. Once I renamed the user accounts to a different format (first initial last name) Spark / OpenFire was able to see these particular users.