Install Wildfire IM Server on Centos 4.4 or SME Server

Preliminary Notes

The Wildfire Instant Messaging Server is one of the best IM servers around. It is written in cross-platform Java and is quite easy to install. It is easily extended to the enterprise version with features needed by some by just installing a (commercial) plugin.

This will install Wildfire, the open source version, configure the startup scripts and start the server.

Resources

Installation

On a fresh SME 7, Centos 4.4 or Redhat Enterprise Linux installation:

Make sure the networking and hostname are configured and that the /etc/hosts file contains the hostname:

Setup networking if necessary (not needed for SME 7):

setup

Configure the hostname if necessary (not needed for SME 7):

vi /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=appserv.somedomain.com

and (again, not needed for SME 7)

vi /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.0.1 appserv.somedomain.com appserv

Install Wildfire (start here for SME 7):

First, determine the URL of the latest Wildfire .rpm file (see resources link above).

rpm -Uvh http://www.jivesoftware.org/builds/wildfire/wildfire_3_1_1.rpm
cd /opt/wildfire
sh bin/extra/redhat-postinstall.sh

Startup Scripts

On SME 7, modify the startup scripts with this command:

ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/wildfired /etc/rc.d/rc7.d/S99wildfired

Centos 4.4 startup scripts may not work correctly. If you have problems with getting Wildfire to start automatically at boot time, you can always start it the old fashioned way:

vi /etc/rc.local

and add:

# Start Wildfire IM Server
su -c "/opt/wildfire/bin/wildfire start" jive

Start the Wildfire Server Service

service wildfired start

Configuration

Once the server is running, you can access the Setup pages with a browser:

http://ip.of.wildfire.server:9090

choose Embedded Database for small projects
use a separate database server for max performance
use defaults for simplicity
read the documentation (see link above)

If your IM server is to be behind a firewall, open or forward the following (default) ports:

5269 - Server to Server (s2s) Communications
5222 - XMPP Protocol (c2s)
5223 - XMPP over SSL (c2s)
7777 - File Transfer Proxy
9090 UDP - Remote Admin (untested) (not normally needed)

Troubleshooting

The default ports may conflict with SlimServer music server, if you have it installed.

You can check various log files like this:

tail /opt/wildfire/logs/info.log

MySQL

Untested:

To use MySQL, you must first configure SME to listen for local connections, this can be done by issuing the following:

config setprop mysqld LocalNetworkingOnly no
expand-template /etc/my.cnf
/etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld restart

Automatic Account Creation

Untested:

There are a couple different ways to do this, Wildfire supports LDAP connections, however as of SME version 6.0 the the LDAP database did not support authentication so I do not believe this is an option. That being said if I am wrong or it has changed in 7.x please let me know.

The second way of doing it by using the pop3 auth code in the wildfire.xml file. This will create a user on the wildfire server whenever a user with a local email account logs into the server. To accomplish this you need to edit the wildfire.xml file:

pico /opt/wildfire/conf/wildfire.xml

This first thing you will need to do is create a new admin account, the wildfire server auto creates one and this causes a problem when using pop3 auth. To create a new user account find the line in the xml file that says:

<-- <authorizedUsernames></authorizedUsernames> -->

Change this to:

<authorizedUsernames>USERNAME</authorizedUsernames>

Insert an active account that you want to have admin rights in the USERNAME area. This account must exist on your server.

Now, we add the pop3 auth code, goto bottom of the xml file to where you see: (approx Line 70)

Insert the following after the above line:

<provider> <auth>
<className>org.jivesoftware.wildfire.auth.POP3AuthProvider</className>
</auth>
<user>
<className>org.jivesoftware.wildfire.user.POP3UserProvider</className>
</user>
</provider>
<pop3>
<host>Insert Host Here</host>
<domain>your domain.com</domain>
<authRequiresDomain>false</authRequiresDomain>
<ssl>false</ssl>
</pop3>

Once you have changed your host and domain, save the xml and restart the server.

/opt/wildfire/bin/wildfire stop
/opt/wildfire/bin/wildfire start

Now login to the admin interface

http://servername:9090

with the user you specified. If all is configured correctly you should be able to login. If successful, any user that tries to sign in with a jabber client will automagicly get created a jabber user account.

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