Virtual hosting support

Openfire Openfire Support
1

Hi-

Im looking around, trying to find a new server to build service around.

I need to have a xmpp server that can work wiith virutal hosting (division1.company.com, division2.company.com etc).

I see that Jive Messenger does not support that, ive searched around a bit and have not seen much reference to this for future development.

will it handle virtual hosts? is it planned for later? is it a feature that is requested ever?

thanks much.

2

Duncan,

Can you provide a bit more information about what you’'re looking for? Do you just want to support sub-domains? Would each sub-domain have different user accounts, etc?

Regards,

Matt

3

hi-

yes, sub-domains. Each sub domain would have a unique set of users.

duncan

4

yes, sub-domains. Each sub domain would have a unique

set of users.

Heh, I guess that qualifies as a “bit” more information. Can you provide additional details? What feature set would you need in order to support virtual hosting? Breaking it down into required and “nice to have” features would be great.

Up to this point, great support for virtual hosting hasn’'t been high on the priority list. However, I can see how it would help to spread the use of XMPP a lot.

Thanks,

Matt

5

heh, sorry

well, is there a feature list that exists for JM now? i could go thru that and make comments based on that.

Without going that route, id need:

gotta have:

  1. on to one IM

  2. text conferencing

basically gotta have:

  1. message logging by sub domain

really nice to have:

  1. shared groups / rosters by domain

nice to have:

  1. Support for Flash clients using the XIFF library

really nice to have, but dont want to ask for too much:

  1. designate an admin per sub domain, and they can login and manage the user accounts / shared rosters for that domain.

hows that?

6

Duncan,

Thanks for the more detailed feedback. We’‘ll certainly keep virtual hosting in mind for future versions – it would definitely make it easier to host many domains on a single server. As somewhat of a workaround, you can configure multiple Messenger instances on one machine to listen to different domains (although this won’‘t scale terribly well due to the overhead of multiple JVM’'s).

As an aside, support for Flash is included in Messenger 2.1.

Regards,

Matt

7

ooh. thats very interesting. are there any docs on how to configure multiple messengers to listen to multiple sub domains? do you just run more than one instance?

do you need to run each different Messenger on different ports, or does it play nice and share the port somehow?

if you had a xeon box, with a couple gigs of ram, how much do you think you could run on it in terms of sub domains and users?

You are exactly right, i think an easy to setup and admin vhosting would help spread xmpp quite a bit… think if apache didnt have virtual hosting. eek!

thanks for your help,

duncan

8

Duncan,

ooh. thats very interesting. are there any docs on

how to configure multiple messengers to listen to

multiple sub domains? do you just run more than one

instance?

Hmm… it looks like we aren’‘t exposing controlling port settings with fine granularity in the admin console yet. I’'ll create an issue to address this for an upcoming release.

do you need to run each different Messenger on

different ports, or does it play nice and share the

port somehow?

You can bind to different networking interfaces. So, if each subdomain has its own IP address, they can all bind to the same port but on different IP’'s.

if you had a xeon box, with a couple gigs of ram, how

much do you think you could run on it in terms of sub

domains and users?

It depends on how large each implementation is, but I would estimate around 30 for 2 GB of RAM. This would need to be tested, of course.

Regards,

Matt

9

fantasic.

i think this is almost enough to encourage me to switch.

it sounds as if you are serious about considering these features.

Im going to take this info (its been most helpful, thank you very much) to our dev. team for some discussion.

thank you again, i appreciate it. this has prob. been the best forum discussion ive ever had!

10

Duncan,

i think this is almost enough to encourage me to

switch.

Cool, please let us know how the eval goes.

it sounds as if you are serious about considering

these features.

Yes, definitely. However, it will be at least several months before we’'ll be able to start thinking about real virtual host support. The 2.2 release is the next one planned and all of our time will be spent working on things like external components and server to server.

thank you again, i appreciate it. this has prob. been

the best forum discussion ive ever had!

Glad to hear it! We tend to take forums pretty seriously since one of our products is discussion forums.

Thanks,

Matt

P.S. – the issue for controlling ports in the admin console is JM-123.

11

As somewhat of a workaround, you can configure multiple Messenger instances on one machine to listen to different domains (although this won’‘t scale terribly well due to the overhead of multiple JVM’'s)

Was there a method of doing this?

What’'s the current process for doing this?

12

great questions… i’'d be curious to hear some pointers on how to set it up.

i have not implemented anything yet, so im def. interested to hear how it goes.

duncan

13

some good questions here… thought id open it for more discussion.

14

I’‘m not sure but I think what he meant by “configure multiple Messenger instances” is that you have to modify the source code. By default when you start an instance of messenger it listens automatically to ports 5222, 5223, and 9090 of the localhost(127.0.0.1). So I guess you’'d have to manually modify each one?