Johan de Koning

In my previous blogpost, I talked about my goal to make an XMPP implementation within .Net based on Windows Communication Foundation. Before I can start, I had to find out how a normal XMPP stream would be send/retrieved between client and server.

In this blogitem, I will explain the steps I took to install the OpenFire server. http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp Within my other blog I used a seperate environment which is mostly based on Ubuntu. This time I install the OpenFire server within Windows Vista. The reason for this is that it is also the environment of my .Net development tools.

Installation wizard

First download the installation file of OpenFire from the website. I use Openfire 3.6.4 http://www.igniterealtime.org/downloads/index.jsp

The OpenFire website

Download page

The installation wizard is quite straight forward and more like next-next-finish.

Language selection

Welcome step of the wizard

License Agreement

Installation location

Start menu shortcut

Progress of installation

Completing wizard step

On the last step, mark the Run Openfire option (which is marked by default) to launch the Openfire server. This makes it possible to continue the installation from the Admin Console (which runs inside the browser).

Openfire server status

Admin console installation/configuration

To finalize the installation, some setup steps will be shown within the Admin Console. Select the prefered language in the first step

Language selection

You can keep the server settings values the default. Because I will only use the Openfire server locally (or within my own netwerk) it is not important that the right domain is set. The clients will connect to localhost or the ipaddress of the computer.

Server settings

Because I want to keep the installation as simple as possible, I choose for an Embedded database. The performance penalty with the embedded database is for test purposes not an issue.

Database settings

I will create the test users from within the Admin console. This means that I don’t need Active Directory/LDAP or Clearspace integration. I choose for the Default option to store users inside the server database.

Profile settings

To access the admin console after these setup steps, it is important to setup an Administration account. The username of this account will be “admin”

Administrator account

This completes the openfire setup process. You can now login to the real admin console

Note: I had some trouble to log in to the Admin Console on my Vista enviroment. The admin user was not valid. I found out that I had to restart the Openfire server by stopping the server, quit the status dialog and start the Openfire server again for the start menu. It is important to start the Openfire server as administrator (right click on the shortcut and select Run as administrator) otherwise you are still not able to login.

Admin console login

Server information page

What’s next?

As a mentioned the installation of Openfire, with the (default) settings I chose, is easy and straight forward. The next step will be to configure some users and to connect a XMPP client to the server. In the meantime I really like to have you feedback on this blogpost (did you like the images to explain the installation) or on my other blogposts.