"Unable to contact search service" when binding to AD using LDAP

Openfire Openfire Support
1

Hi everyone.

I have successfully managed to install Openfire binding to my AD using LDAP and the embedded DB, it sees all my users tree as well as the groups which is perfect.

However there was no way for me to make the Spark user search work, I would always get the Unable to contact search service popup.

I don’t have this issue when I don’t bind to my AD, I mean by that that it’s not that I have forgotten to install the search plugin for instance.

Nothing was quite relevant in the logs either (on both sides, Openfire and Spark). I have seen, at some point, an error concerning vCards but my user profiles are very simple (it’s just a logon and a first and last name basically), and yet again the issue doesn’t arise when I configure Openfire without the LDAP binding to my AD.

However I can’t seem to reproduce that error anyway after several reinstallations.

I have found out that there is out there a ‘LDAP search plugin’, is that the trick? And if yes, could anyone point me to the latest release of it?

Any guidance as to how to troubleshoot that one would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

2

I ran into this problem initially and it turns out I didn’t have a dns A record for search.openfirefqdn.net. So I just added the dns record and search began working. You also need a dns record for conference.openfirefqdn.net as well.

3

Hi everyone again.

First of all thanks RanmaKei for you answer.

However I don’t think that my issue is a DNS issue: I realised that everything worked when installing Openfire with LDAP binding on another one of our Windows DCs.

What I don’t get is that it didn’t quite install itself exactly the same way (although I used the same 3.7.1 installer in both cases on Windows Server 2008.)

The difference between the two installs was that, on the faulty one, under Users/Groups in the left menu, the Advanced User Search item was missing.

Obviously this is related to the issue I was seeing from the Spark client (“Unable to contact search service”), both were symptoms of the same issue.

Anyway it went away by itself and I’m not sure exactly when exactly. I used DFS-R to replicate Openfire installations, and I replicated the working one onto the faulty one.