Good Afternoon,
We are looking to migrate and upgrade our spark embedded database on Openfire v3.8 to a new server on a different IP address using Openfire v4.3.4. We wish to preserve all our users’ data AND the chat histories. We wish this process to be as easy as possible. I’m hoping someone here will be of help to us. If there’s a not a way to do it directly, what would be the next painless solution?
Thank you
There is no such version 4.3.4. When upgrading from such an old version you may run into problems. But that will only show up when upgrading. You can setup a test server from the backup copy of your current server and try upgrading it first. You can also just try upgrading your current production server. But of course, make backups first, so you could revert back. Ideally Openfire should update database scheme to the current one, but it may fail when it will have to do this dozens of time (for every new version released since 3.8.0). If that fails, you may try downloading intermittent versions and upgrading one by one. https://github.com/igniterealtime/Openfire/releases
Embedded database should stay intact after the successful upgrade. Not sure what you mean by different IP. IP shouldn’t matter with a proper network/DNS setup. Or are you logging in using IP address in Spark? Then it might be problematic. Though, if you use older Spark version, maybe it will be ok. Chat history is usually saved on the client side, so server update won’t mess with that. Unless you have Monitoring Service plugin, which is collecting all the chats. This is stored in the database, so it should also be preserved. But of course, anything can happen. Also you will have to switch to newer plugin’s version which might work differently or have some issues. Anyway, after upgrading you should check all the important areas and if something is not right for you, revert to backup.
Sorry, I should’ve bee more clear. We are upgrading our Openfire server from 3.8 to 4.3.x so we can make use of spark v1.8 rather than 1.7.
When I said a different IP, I mean that we currently have the Openfire server installed on a Server 2003 environment and are moving it to a different internal server completely.
So you would say copy the entire old openfire folder to our new server and then do the update?
I get what you are talking about, but… The latest Openfire version is 4.1.6. Spark versions are 2.7 and 2.8.
In your case i would install 3.8 on the new server, won’t run it. Copy whole Openfire folder from your old server on top of the new installation. Try to run it, see if it works. Of course, you won’t be able to login with Spark to it right away while your old server is running and your network is not adjusted to server change (DNS, etc.). Also, keep in mind that in 2008+ there is an UAC protection, which will interfere with Openfire if you are not running its launcher via Run as admin. Of course, if you use service, there is no problem with UAC. Then i would try to upgrade to 4.1.6 with the installer.
P.S. i’m not aware of any issues that could make Spark 2.8 not to run with older versions of Openfire. Unless you need some specific feature like Client Control plugin. So, it may be that you will still have problems with Spark 2.8 after the upgrade as they may not be related to Openfire version. What exact problems do you get?