As we’re preparing the upcoming Openfire 5.1.0 release, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at parts of the codebase that have been around for a long time.
Some of them date back to assumptions that were perfectly reasonable when Java 5 was current, IPv6 was still considered “future tech”, Docker didn’t exist yet, and “cloud-native” wasn’t a phrase anyone but meteorologists used.
Yet somehow, Openfire deployments that started in those days are still running today.
That got me wondering:
What’s the oldest Openfire deployment that you still run?
Not necessarily the oldest version (although I’d love to hear that too), but the oldest continuously running installation, the oldest surviving user database, or perhaps the weirdest setup that somehow still works despite years of upgrades, migrations and changing infrastructure.
I suspect there are Openfire instances out there that have survived datacenter migrations, moved from physical hardware to virtual machines to containers, switched databases more than once, and outlived several generations of administrators. Some probably still contain configuration decisions that nobody fully understands anymore. Is anyone still running Wildfire? Jive Messenger?
Honestly, I love those stories from the trenches. The odd workarounds, the “temporary” fixes that became permanent infrastructure, the upgrade that everyone expected to fail but somehow didn’t, or the deployment that quietly kept running for a decade without anyone thinking much about it.
One of the things I appreciate most about infrastructure software is that success often becomes invisible. If a messaging server quietly keeps working for ten years, nobody talks about it. But that kind of stability is actually a huge achievement (both for the software and for the people operating it). I think that’s something we, as a community, can be genuinely proud of.
For Openfire 5.1.0, we’ve been modernizing quite a few internals:
- support for Java 25
- upgrades to Netty 4.2 and various database drivers
- improvements around reverse proxies and DNS handling
- clustering improvements
- security hardening
- performance fixes for larger deployments.
While doing that work, we constantly try to balance modernization with compatibility for long-running installations. That balancing act becomes much easier when we understand how people actually deploy and operate Openfire in the real world, which, apart from simply wanting to hear your stories, is another reason for me to ask this question.
So: I’d love to hear your stories! How old is your deployment? What version did you start with? What infrastructure changes has it survived over the years? Are there plugins or integrations you absolutely depend on? What operational lessons have you learned?
And perhaps most importantly: what surprised you most about running Openfire long-term?
I’m hoping this thread becomes a collection of deployment stories, operational lessons, and perhaps a bit of Openfire history.
Looking forward to hearing your stories!
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And it also helped me build a lot of IT skills i am still using to this day.