Send Administrative Message disconnects all users immediately

Openfire Openfire Support
1

Openfire 4.9.2, Spark 3.0.1

as the title says, all active sessions are disconnected and re-connected within 15 seconds

I have found one other thread that resembles my issue, and I have checked the installed plugins. The only one I have is Search.

The server logs do not show anything, same with the Spark logs

any ideas?

Thanks

2

Thatā€™s curious. I have never experienced this (and am using administrative messages and Spark regularly).

Iā€™m assuming that with ā€˜administrative messagesā€™ you are referring to the broadcasts that you can send via the Admin Console, as shown in this screenshot:

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For good measure, Iā€™ve tried it again just now (using development builds Openfire 5.1.0 and Spark 3.0.3), but I cannot reproduce this issue.

Questions that could help narrow it down:

  • Does this happen only when sending a broadcast message, or randomly throughout the day?
  • Are all clients affected simultaneously, or only some?
  • Are clients other than Spark affected?
  • Does this happen with later versions of Openfire?
  • Have you tried enable debug/trace logging in Openfire? Iā€™m curious if that reports the cause of the disconnects.
3

Thank you!

Other than what I reported here, I havenā€™t noticed any random disconnections but at the same time, this is a lightly-utilized server so I am only 99% sure :slight_smile:

All at the same time.

TransVerse is affected as well.

Havenā€™t tested with other versions of OF.

I did enable it but I was only searching for the broadcast message string. I will go back and see what else happens at the same time.

4

wrote a Powershell script to go through all event logs at the time when this happened, no events except a few from Security log showing Iā€™m using Edge (which is what iā€™m using to manage Openfire)

the openfire event log shows some events and errors like ā€œpeer not authenticatedā€ and I see a gap of 10 seconds which is how long i stay disconnected and then i re-connect

my session goes through a web proxy, does that matter? Trellix SkyHigh

5

Iā€™m sorry, none of this makes me think of a possible cause. Iā€™m not sure how to diagnose this.

Perhaps the proxy is of relevance. Can you connect a client without the proxy, to see if thatā€™s affected? Does the proxy generate logs of its own?

6

THank you for your suggestion. I did just that and the client that was connected directly to the server did NOT get disconnected.

I have forwarded my question to our internal networking team for review

Cheers,

1 Like
7

Oh, wow - thatā€™s interesting. I wonder how thatā€™s even possible.

For now, Iā€™m thinking that Openfire isnā€™t directly causing this issue. Let me know what you find!

8

how many users do you have connected and do you know what your using as a proxy? Assuming a reverse proxy?

9

yes, i believe this is a reverse proxy. itā€™s there to: examine chat and traffic, like block certain type of files, log all traffic and to forward the traffic to the appropriate server

Itā€™s Trellix Web proxy (formerly Mcafee)

itā€™s a lab environment so at the time I was testing there were only 3 users

10

There you have it! lol
Iā€™m sure the boardcast is triggering a policy violation and dropping the traffic. you should see something in the proxy/trellix logs if that is the case.