Group Chats broken after update to 4.7.4

I did a version update to openfire 4.7.4 from 4.2.3. Person to person chatting continued to work fine, we are using spark, but any group chats were completely kicking users out of spark and showing “reconnecting” whenever they posted in a group. We were having to kill spark and repoen to get around it. I have reverted now, but I would like to get up to date so I’m wondering what could cause this. I’ve read that some outdated plugins could be to blame. Has anyone else had this experience?

Hi Daniel,

Although I can’t find the reference, I vaguely recall that this can occur when running with an outdated Monitoring Service plugin. If you can easily switch back-and-forth, can you try updating that to the latest release?

It is likely that when the problem occurs, errors will be logged in Openfire’s log files. Those would be a great help to determine what’s going wrong. Can you send those log files?

Hi. Unfortunately, I do not have any logs as I used a VM snapshot to roll back my update. Another interesting note is that the monitoring service shows up to date in my plugins, but there is definitely a new version. My plan so far is to update all the plugins before applying the openfire version update and see if I have better results with that. Just so i’m clear though, is updating plugins really as simple as replacing the .jar file in the plugins folder? Thanks for the reply by the way.

I don’t think that this approach will completely work. Some plugins, like the Monitoring Service plugin, define minimum Openfire versions that they’re compatible with. This is likely why you are not being prompted for an upgrade. I guess you’re at version 1.6.2 of the Monitoring Service plugin. The next version of the plugin requires Openfire 4.3.0 or later. The latest version of the plugin requires Openfire 4.7.0.

You can, indeed, replace the jar file of a plugin in the plugins directory of Openfire. After a few moments, Openfire will detect the new file, and will install or update the plugin. It’s often easier to upgrade through the admin console, but both approaches will work.

That makes sense. So check for an update on that plugin specifically after doing the version update. Should I be doing incremental updates rather than trying to do such a big version jump? Thanks

There’s no need for incremental updates.

Thanks for the advice on this. I was able to update successfully. What I did was update plugins I could prior to the version update, then I updated the monitoring service plugin post update, which resolved the issue. Oddly the UI did not show any updates available for that plugin, but there is a new version. Thanks again for the help!

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Good to hear that this resolves your issue! The UI will only show the updates for plugins that are compatible with your current version of Openfire, and then caches that information for … I think two days. Unless you manually forced a new update check, that UI could have been based on cached information. In that case, the updates would become visible in the UI after 2 days).