Inconsistent connectivity

I’ve had a very rough time with the stability of the Openfire server I’ve set up recently. I’ve installed it on two different Ubuntu (7.04) machines and both have very similar issues. The first time a client tries to connect, they get either the invalid username/password error message or the server unreachable message. Usually about two minutes later, the client is able to connect. This wouldn’t be so bad, but it seems to happen repeatedly even after the first login, but it’s more random thereafter.

Could this be an Ubuntu compatibility issue? I don’t think it’s a configuration issue or even an openfire one simply because I’ve used other jabber server software and I experience the same problems.

It’s really hard to reproduce the problem after the first login, but it happens enough to not use this in production.

Thank you for your help!

I’m sure this isn’t an incompatibility as it works perfectly on a different network with the same setup.

I’ve noticed that the first time a windows client attempts to log in, they get a read error and I believe this is causing the connection to go idle…a minute after, they can log in because my server settings kill idle connections after a minute.

Now to figure out why it’s blocking the first login…that’s where I’m at.

My suggestion is to get as much visibility into what happening as possible. Things to try:

  1. Open the debug/network traffic window of your client and see what XML is being passed back and forth.

  2. Enable debugging in Openfire and try to pinpoint where the problem is happening.

  3. If you are using LDAP, consider enabling LDAP debugging in Openfire as well (it’s a separate system property).

If you can’t make sense of the debug logs, post some of the relevent sections here, and we’ll try to help out.

After countless hours spent for nearly a week, I decided to install openfire on a Fedora Core machine and am happy to say it worked perfectly. There is something in a windows network (possibly active directory) that Ubuntu could not play nice with. Fedora has answered the call and is running our chat server perfectly…Thanks again for everyone’s help!