Multiple servers

I am trying to see what the best possible approach to my situation is. My company just within the last few months implemented Openfire 3.8 as our internal chat server with Pandion and Audium as our chat clients. At this point we would like to use openfire to set up a web based chat support option for our clients. Would we be able to use a connection manager or any other plug in to allow the internal and external chat servers to communicate with each other so that when a client uses the web based chat they can communicate with our internal support reps?

Hello Robert ,

you need to use live static ip for this

Right i know i need a public IP for the external server, however i need some sort of solution to get the internal server and the external server to communicate with each other.

You can either:

  1. Run Connection Manager in your DMZ and open that up to the Internet, assuming you are doing XMPP only.

  2. Setup NAT/ACLs so an external IP/port combination is routed to your inside network.

How does the web app work? Does the server-side connect to Openfire, or the client directly? That probably drastically changes how you build this. Also, does it use XMPP or http-bind?

I am using XMPP for the internal server with the LDAP/AD database integration for my users. I would like to use XMPP for the external as well just to help keep it uniform. Im not quite sure what you are meaning by “Does the server-side connect to Openfire, or the client directly?” Internally my users have to connect via pandion using @ and their network password to log in. I virtually did not have to do any configurations on the pandion clients.

Thanks for the help it is much appreciated.

Connection manager can provide a XMPP services in a DMZ or outside network and proxy traffic back to your inside OF instance.

You said you wanted to use a web app for this, so I was asking how your web app works.

Ok so after discussing with our web developer, this is how its going to work.

  1. clients click chat now button which will pull their information from the sites mongodb and suto populate their information such as name and email

  2. our in house support reps need to receive a notification that there is a chat request to initiate chat support (this can be either in a group chat room, or some sort of priority method to send said request to the first available rep)

things to note, external db is mongo and internal db is LDAP/AD

will the connection manager and/or any other plugins aid in this setup?

Connection manager is only for proxying XMPP - It’s not clear to me how you plan on getting your web application to connect to Openfire.

I’m not sure of a mechanism to use mongo’s db, although your web app could register users in Openfire instead - There is some examples floating around of using AD and OF local users at the same time. Google can probably help you find it.

Ok so as far as getting the web chat working with openfire, we are using the fastpath openfire plugins. I have come to the conclusion that for the web chat support our internal users will need to use Spark vs Pandion which is fine by me and my IT staff. I am currently playing around with the fastpath configurations to get a good foundation on how to configure it so that is covered. where I stand now is setting up the external openfire instance and the connection manager. Would i need to continue to use the LDAP/AD integration on the external server in order to have fastpath route the traffic correctly to my internal agents?