We’ve just installed the OpenFire server and Spark in the IT department (for testing) and hope to roll out to the rest of our divisions very soon. One of the deciding factors for using a new IM solution for our company was the ability to archive messages for later review. The “Monitoring Service” is an outstanding plugin and works flawlessly! However, I have a few questions: How far back will it hold messages? Is there a need to “clean it out” at some point? Our old IM software would let you archive “7 days” or “14 days” worth of messages (any number of days)… then it would clean them off the back end (oldest).
I’m using a local database (installed OpenFire on Windows 2003 and used the local database option). I’m just concerned about the size of this message archive once we have nearly 200 users. I am not real familiar with poking around in databases (if that’s where I’d need to clean this stuff). Some friendly direction would be greatly appreciated.
Nobody else is replying so i will try, but i dont know much about it. I think Monitoring plugin doesnt have any cleaing features, it was designed just to store. So your database will grow until you hit the disk space limits. Probably with the standalone databases like MySQL you can have some exporting options and then deleting older stuff. So i recommend not to use embedded-db if you plan to store such info.
I would have setup a seperate database but at the time it seemed easier just to use the “embedded” option. Isn’t there a way to clean out the embedded database?
Embedded-DB is stored in a text file in a form of INSERTS and database is created from this file on the fly when you launch Openfire. Of course you can stop Openfire, open this file and delete some lines, but it won’t be very convenient. I’m not a DB guy, but i think standalone databases has more convenient ways of cleaning. I agree that embedded-db is the easiest way to start, i’m using it myself, but we are just storing our userbase.
Okay, I’m going to switch over to an external database (MySQL). Do I need to reinstall OpenFire with that option or is there a way to just change it over?
You can just rerun the setup. Stop the Openfire. Open /conf/openfire.xml and change tag value to false, save it and start the Openfire again. Then connect to the Admin Console and repeat setup steps. Of course you will have to create your users again with the new database.
I finally got it taken care of. I just reinstalled. I exported my user list with the import/export plugin (wish it handled the groups also, oh well). Anyway, thanks for all of your help! This issue is now resolved for me. Until there is something added in to handle “how long to archive”, I’ll just query the db and vacuum it once in a while.