I recently switched to openfire from an older jabberd2 server and am very happy with it. I’m trying out the clustering feature but am not ready to put it into production yet - for now I’d like to maintain our old system of a standby server at a separate location that I could just move a DNS pointer to in case the primary goes down.
With the old server, I’d just dump and restore the entire DB nightly. Openfire’s a lot more complex - is there local system, maybe network information kept in the DB? Am I safe copying the entire DB or are there certain tables I should not touch?
you need to copy also the conf/openfire.xml file and the keystore to the other server. The database contains the xmpp.domain (eg: jabber.org) which one must not change. Using a nightly database backup is simple and works. There are no special tables in it.
Changing the IP in DNS may be not a good option as clients may cache the DNS records very long. If it’s possible you should use a unique IP address for your server and move this address to the hot standby server if ever needed.
Thanks, that was easy and works well. We’ve used the DNS method for some time, the two servers live in distinct locations/networks and sharing an IP is not practical. We set a short TTL for that record.