Today was one of those days that feels insanely productive, even if you don’t actually spend much time producing things. Bigs wins; small effort. Installing Openfire, for example.
Openfire (formerly Wildfire) is a jabber server produced by Jive Software. It’s pretty slick, easy to install, has a web-based admin, and just plain works. It also has a lot of features I haven’t looked at yet, including LDAP integration. My task today was just to get it installed and up and running. That took about 10 whole minutes. Maybe 15, if you count the part where I forgot the admin password I’d supplied moments before I tried to log in. Here’s how it went down:
1. Installed the Java stuff.
This was your typical painless Ubuntu install: sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk. Then a quick java -version to make sure all was cool. It was.
2. Downloaded Openfire and uncompressed it.
This was also straight forward. Downloaded it to my home directory on our development box, uncompressed it, and then copied it to /opt/openfire which, they tell me, is where it likes to live.
3. Started Openfire.
A quick cd /opt/openfire/bin followed by ./openfire start and we were up and ready for the web-based setup.
4. Connected to server for setup.
Fired up Firefox and connected to the server on port 9090. From there, answered the questions. I’m hard pressed to remember the details at the moment, but they were all straight-forward. Used MySQL as the database. Didn’t connect to LDAP (yet). That’s pretty much it.
5. Poked around the admin interface.
There are a lot of options in there. For now, I only disabled anonymous logins. Users have to create an account.
6. Connected using Coccinella
The main reason I’m doing all this is my desire to have a local server we can use for Coccinella, a jabber-based IM client with whiteboard. We need a whiteboard for some of the services we offer students, and our old flash-based, in-house solution is showing its age. Coccinella is open-source, customizable, and has more features that we need, without being complex. Win, win, win.
In Coccinella, I selected new account from the Jabber menu. I supplied the domain (name) of our new jabber server, and then filled out the form to get a new account. Openfire dutifully created the account, and I connected to the server.
Now, for my next trick.
That’s it. Up and running in about 10 – 15 minutes. Got buddy Sean to connect as well, tested out the chatting, whiteboard, and VOIP. Everything just worked.
Next on my list is LDAP integration, which is a big win if we can pull it off.
Tags: 4 Comments
4 responses so far ↓
You say that you “Downloaded it to my home directory on our development box, uncompressed it, and then copied it to /opt/openfire” but you don’t say where you got an Ubuntu package for it. Since you didn’t say “compile” or “build”, I’m assuming you got it off of some non-standard repository?
Hi Cory,
I didn’t use an Ubuntu package. Rather I downloaded a tar.gz (openfire_3_3_2.tar.gz) from Jive at:
http://www.jivesoftware.com/downloads/
That’s why I had to move it after downloading and uncompressing it.
So the bad news is that it isn’t a package, so you can’t use package management to keep it up to date and the like, but the good news is that everything you need is just sitting in the one directory and you can move it around or delete it at will.
There is also an RPM version, if you want to use a RedHat package on your Ubuntu machine. I shied away from that option, given how easy the alternative was.
Either way, you’ll also need to create an account on the Jive site to get to the actual downloads from the link above.
I’m glad you asked, because I sort of glossed over the details. Thanks for the question, and being my first real comment from a stranger. If I had a budget, you’d win a t-shirt.
Howdy,
So, I’m trying out Openfire on Ubuntu feisty (v7.04, for those of us who prefer version numbers). Here’s what I did to get going:
* ’sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre’ and -jdk
(install a recent Sun JRE)
* ’sudo update-alternatives –config java’
(specify which JRE I want to use by default, since I already had a previous version installed)
* ’sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun’
(same goal as above)
(I got a bunch of success messages, with only a couple of errors related to the plugin, which I don’t think I need to care about)
* ’sudo echo JAVA_HOME=\”/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/\” >> /etc/environment’
(set “JAVA_HOME” – not sure if this is necessary)
* ’sudo adduser jive’
(The non-root user that the openfire server runs as)
* ’sudo vipw -s’ and set the ‘jive’ password to something impossible to decrypt (e.g. ‘!’)
(since it’s just used for launching/running openfire, and not logging in)
* ‘wget http://url-to-openfire/openfire_3_3_2.tar.gz‘
(basically)
* ‘cd /opt/’; ‘tar -zxvf /path/to/openfire_3_3_2.tar.gz’
(extract to local working directory)
* ’sudo chown -R jive:jive /opt/openfire’
(set ownership properly – I think? this may not be the optimal config for security’s sake. I may want to restrict the ‘jive’ user from modifying certain parts of openfire, but for now this works.)
* ’su – jive’; ‘cd /opt/openfire/bin’; ’sh ./openfire start’
http://test-server:9090
follow prompts
(use an unimportant password, since it’s being transmitted over plaintext)
click on ’security settings’, and click on the prompt to restart the web server
https://test-server:9091
(click OK past the warnings about the self-signed certificates)
reset the admin password now that you have an encrypted connection.
… and that’s where I am right now. :)
Graham
how to run openfire on startup?
I’m using feisty 7.04
Thanks