Openfire + Openfire Meetings

Didn’t take a screencap, but I now have XMPP and video chat functionality using Openfire with the Openfire Meetings plugin.

A few things I discovered..  During installation, you do need to create the database (MariaDB in my case) using:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE openfire CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Simply ‘create database openfire;’ was not sufficient.  It was obvious that the application could connect to the database, but it couldn’t finish the rest of it’s business setting things up.

Also, read the stuff that it says during the setup wizard.  The last step has you create an administrative user.  The fields are ‘Email’, ‘Password’, and ‘Confirm Password’ (or something like that).  Then it takes you to the login screen for the first time.  The username is ‘admin’ and the password is whatever you supplied in that previous step.  I had trouble logging in because I thought that the username was my email.  It isn’t.  It’s ‘admin’.  Of course, you’re free to create other administrative users once you’re logged in.

The other bump I ran into had to do with SSL.  I’m a fan of free and letsencrypt works very well.  I put the key in like I was supposed to, put the full chain in for the cert (didn’t put anything in for ‘Password’ since the key was created without one), and whacked save.  But when I clicked on the cert I just added to view information about it (like you can do with the two existing self-signed certs) it threw up a bunch of Java errors.  systemctl restart openfire solved that problem.

Still need to do a bit more research into certs though.  When I installed the letsencrypt cert, there were three listed (letsencrypt + 2 self-signed).  I’m not sure exactly how to tell openfire which cert to use.  My low-tech solution was to (make a backup of the keystore beforehand and do a test restoration) remove the two self-signed certificates so that only my letsencrypt cert remained.  systemctl restart openfire, and the letsencrypt cert was the cert that was used for everything that used a cert, including the administrative web interface, and xmpp (I checked the cert provided in pidgin and it was using the same letsencrypt cert the browser was using).  I’m sure there’s a way to tell Openfire, “Of the certificates you have in your store, use X cert for Y service,” I’m just not sure where that is in the control panel.

UPDATE:  confirmed Openfire Meetings can be used to transmit hand farts over the internet


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