I have downloaded and installed openfire on two servers and I’m really happy with the way things are going. I can start chats between users on the separate servers and everything is working great. Separate servers are for graphical reasons and most users will chat on their “home” server. Servers will be maintained and populated by different administrators.
My question is in regards to Groups. I would like Groups (and its users) created on either server to populate on both my servers.
From reading differnet posts - it looks like clustering is what I need to do but I wanted to make sure that’s the correct path for me to take?
Is there a better(correct) way to push users to both servers? LDAP?
What’s the value in having two servers?
You can either do clustering, where both systems are identical - Basically if you need HA or more capacity than just one system, or you can keep doing S2S like you are doing when the two boxes.
AFAIK, there is no way to automatically populate rosters when using S2S. Perhaps it would be better to simply your configuration to a single Openfire instance and not mess around with multiple instances.
One of the servers is in a network that I have little/no control over routing. I can get the remote group to change some routing (enough to get the servers to communicate) but not enough to get all the users on the distant network to see my server. I agree, one server would be better, if I could get all the remote nodes to see the one server address?
HA is not needed but will be a pleasant side effect.
There is a such thing as the OpenFire Connection Manager. It can be hosted off-site, on a different network, in a separate security zone, etc. and relays connections to the main OpenFire server on behalf of clients. It requires minimal configuration and resources to run depending on your usage.
I read about that in the documentation but gave up on it. One more question and maybe I’ll leave you alone…but thank you for the help.
If I implement the Connection Manager, can the Administrator at the remote site create, update, delete - users and groups???
Now that I’ve typed that, I’m pretty sure it’s a stupid question. I can just grant that person access to my main server, which is a better way to handle users.
If the main server crashes, will the Connection Manager server continue to transmit conversations independently?
I’ll quit asking questions and go read more on the Connection Manager.
Thanks
Calhoun,
No, the Connection Manager requires that the OpenFire server be running, or, it will disconnect clients. I will stress, however, that, in my use of Spark, it reconnects nearly instantly if the OpenFire server becomes unavailable and then available again; clients won’t likely notice anything but an automatic reconnect timeout and then a reconnection to the service.
That said, if you need that level of redundancy, you would need to look into using the cluster service on your OpenFire server and running multiple Connection Managers. I doubt Connection Managers can be clustered using the Connection Manager service itself, so, you would need to use an IP/DNS-based clustering configuration to make multiple Connection Managers appear as one host. This is fairly simple to do using Linux, and, I believe Webmin (which I use on all our Linux servers) has some built-in tools for assisting in that process.