Openfire Administration: A practical step-by-step guide to rolling out a secure Instant Messaging service over your network

233 Pages·2008·4.28 MB·English

by  Mayank Sharma

Openfire Administration
A practical step-by-step guide to rolling out a secure
Instant Messaging service over your network
Mayank Sharma
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Openfire Administration
Copyright © 2008 Packt Publishing
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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2008
Production Reference: 1180808
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847195-26-5
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar ([email protected])
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Credits
Author Project Manager
Mayank Sharma Abhijeet Deobhakta
Reviewer Project Coordinator
Stefan Reuter Lata Basantani
Senior Acquisition Editor Indexer
David Barnes Monica Ajmera
Development Editor Proofreader
Ved Prakash Jha Dirk Manuel
Technical Editors Production Coordinator
Usha Iyer Shantanu Zagade
Gagandeep Singh
Cover Work
Copy Editor Shantanu Zagade
Sumathi Sridhar
Editorial Team Leader
Akshara Aware
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About the Author
Mayank Sharma is a contributing editor at SourceForge, Inc's Linux.com. He
also writes a monthly column for Packt Publishing. Mayank has contributed several
technical articles to IBM developerWorks where he hosts a Linux Security blog.
When not writing, he occasionally teaches courses on Open Source topics at the
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, as Industry Expert.
In memory of my grandfather H. C. Sharma and grandmother
Shyma Sharma.

Thanks to my mom Shashi and dad Rakesh for laying down
tough standards, and younger brother Shashank for his valuable
suggestions and technical support.

Gratitude to Ved Prakash Jha for his guidance and advice, to Lata
Basantani for managing and scheduling the book, to Usha Iyer
and Gagandeep Singh for editing, to Stefan Reuter for his technical
insights, and to the wonderful developers and community members
of Openfire for developing and supporting such a wonderful project
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About the Reviewer
Stefan Reuter is a key contributor to the igniterealtime community, the home of
Spark and Openfire. He is also the lead developer of the Asterisk-Java library and
the Asterisk-IM plugin for Openfire. After several years in the enterprise architecture
group of a major European bank Stefan is now working as an independent
consultant on Java and VoIP projects for various international customers.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Introduction 7
IM In The Enterprise? 8
But Will IM Work for "Me"? 8
Why Roll Your Own IM Server? 10
What To Look for In An IM Server? 11
Is Openfire The Right IM Server for Me? 12
Summary 15
Chapter 2: Installing and Using Openfire 17
Preparing Your System 17
Linux Users Get Your Cuppa! 18
Meet The Protagonists 18
The Actual Install-Bit 19
Running Openfire on Linux/Unix 20
Installing and Running under Windows 21
Openfire as a Windows Service 22
Fuse Life into Openfire 22
Using The Server 25
Installing The Spark Client 25
Tuning In With Spark 26
Configuring Other IM Clients 28
MirandaIM 28
Kopete 30
Pidgin 31
Summary 32
Chapter 3: Fine-Tuning Openfire 35
Get To Know Your Server 35
Vital Statistics 36
Server Cache and Properties 39
Table of Contents
Policing and Tuning The Server 42
Curb Indiscriminate Registration 42
Resolving Resource Conflicts 44
Handling Offline Users 45
Nurturing The Server 46
Talk to Users 47
Extending with Plugins 48
Message of The Day 49
Summary 49
Chapter 4: Organizing Users 51
Adding Users 51
Editing And Deleting Users 52
Temporarily Suspend Users 53
Organizing Users into Groups 54
Editing and Deleting Groups 55
Pre-populating Rosters 57
Scenario #1: See The Members of Your Department 58
Scenario #2: Accounting Reports to The Board 59
Scenario #3: Everyone Wants IT on Their List 60
Scenario #4: Everyone on Everyone's List...Automatically 60
Summary 61
Chapter 5: Hooking up With a Directory Service 63
Adding Users Via OpenLDAP 64
Adding Users via Active Directory 69
Editing the config File 71
Summary 74
Chapter 6: Effectively Managing Users 75
Searching for Users with the Search Plugin 76
Searching for Users from Within The Admin Interface 78
Get Email Alerts via IM 79
Broadcasting Messages 81
Setting up the Plugin 82
Using The Plugin 83
Managing User Clients 84
Private Data Storage 89
Importing/Exporting Users 90
Using The Plugin 91
askstatus 94
recvstatus 94
substatus 95
Summary 95
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Table of Contents
Chapter 7: Connecting to Other Services 97
Why Connect via Openfire? 98
The Openfire Gateway 98
Controlling Access 100
Scenario #1: Enabling Yahoo! Messenger for All Users 101
Scenario #2: Enabling IRC for IT and Devs 103
Scenario #3: Enabling Experimental Google Talk for Some Users 105
Using A Gateway 106
Keeping An Eye on The Gateway 108
Connecting to VoIP 109
Summary 112
Chapter 8: Playing Big Brother 113
Monitoring and Filtering Content 114
Auditing Messages 116
Setting up a Message Audit Policy 117
Reading Raw Audit Logs 118
Advanced Archiving Settings 120
Searching Archives 122
Light-Weight Third-Party Archiving Apps 124
Using Open Archive 124
Summary 126
Chapter 9: Large-scale Openfire 127
Enabling Database Support in Openfire 127
Setting up MySQL 128
Setting up PostgreSQL 130
Troubleshooting Database Errors 130
Monitoring the Database 131
Scaling Openfire 135
Setting up Clustering 135
Of Caches and Clustering 137
Tips for Optimizing the Cluster 138
Scaling with Connection Managers 139
Deploying Connection Managers 139
Step 1: Configure the Openfire Server 140
Step 2: Configure the Connection Manager 140
Step 3: Run The Connection Manager 141
Summary 142
Chapter 10: Communication Across Multiple Locations 143
Linking Two Branches 144
Why Use DynDNS 144
Setting up Server-to-Server Communications 145
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