Introduction

OpenFire is currently the most functional Jabber server available. It offers very interesting features, though some are paid.

It’s still very integratable with technologies such as LDAP, Oracle, or MySQL.

Download

To install it, it’s really not difficult. We download it from the official website:

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wget 'http://www.igniterealtime.org/downloadServlet?filename=openfire/openfire_3_3_0.tar.gz'

Then we need to download Java Linux (self-extracting file):

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wget 'http://javadl.sun.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=11187'

Installation

Next we extract Java:

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sh jre-6u1-linux-i586.bin

We’ll do the same with OpenFire:

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tar -xzvf openfire_3_3_0.tar.gz

Put everything in /usr/share/openfire for example and install it all:

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mkdir /usr/share/openfire
mv jre1.6.0_01 openfire /usr/share/openfire

Configuration

MySQL

We need to create a database where data will be stored, then create the necessary components:

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mysql -uroot -p
create database openfire;
quit;
mysql -uroot -p openfire < /usr/share/openfire/openfire/resources/database/openfire_mysql.sql

I recommend doing at least minimal security measures. That means at least a dedicated user and restricted rights to the database. Using everything as root is far from secure!

Environment

All that’s left is to add this to the ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc or other configuration file for the user who will run OpenFire:

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export INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME=/usr/share/openfire/jre

Then, restart the session and launch it:

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cd /usr/share/openfire/openfire/bin && openfire start &

Automatic Startup at Boot

To launch it at boot, it’s easy as usual, just add the line above to /etc/rc.local.

Alternatively, in the extras directory (/usr/share/openfire/openfire/bin/extras), you’ll find a ready-made script to start it as a service.

FAQ

Managing Memory Usage

If you’re using OpenFire for personal needs, there’s too much RAM allocated by default. If you need more, this FAQ is also good for you ;-).

For those with limited Java knowledge, I’ll explain a bit how it works. We have 2 limits:

  • Xms: RAM will be directly allocated for the program, even if it uses less
  • Xmx: Maximum memory the program can use before using the garbage collector (attempting to recover unused RAM).

Edit the bin/openfire file in your OpenFire folder and find the variable INSTALL4J_ADD_VM_PARAM. Then adjust to your needs:

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INSTALL4J_ADD_VM_PARAMS="-Xms16m -Xmx32m"

Resources

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Last updated 12 Nov 2007, 15:03 +0200. history