It seems that if I manage different aspects of the users, for instance MUC Membership, directly in the MySQL db, I have to reboot the openfire server before the changes take effect. Logging in/out of the client does not work. Is there a way to update settings directly to the MySQL database without requiring a server restart?
PS - I am using Openfire, MySQL on Ubuntu
It is not recommended to make database changes while Openfire is running. Openfire is using caches a lot for better performance and only flushes changes at intervals. You can even lose some information while doing manual updates. To make it faster you can make caches smaller, but then you can hit slower performance. http://community.igniterealtime.org/docs/DOC-1673
We were able to work around this by not manipulating the database directly, but instead using this php script as a guide:
http://community.igniterealtime.org/docs/DOC-1706
to create scripts to send the necessary info to the openfire admin console directly via curl.