When I first started this blog I said I would never post snippets or documentation that wasn't full. I am however stumped on a problem and just wanted to throw my solution out there for any others also experiencing it.

I use Openfire to facilitate chatting functions and the system works great. If you are considering a good Jabber/XMPP server I would certainly recommend it. The issue I experience is rare (I initially thought it was just a fluke the first time it happened), but it seems to occur every now and then. Yesterday evening I noticed that the Java process spiked up to a good 80% utilization and did not seem to come back down. Being that the system itself (admin and chatting) runs through Java, it stopped working when this spike occurred. Rather than wait it out I decided to just stop the Openfire process which would then kill the messed up Java process. Openfire was unsuccessful in stopping and only proceeded to timeout. The machine was restarted through the command line interface and I decided to deal with it today.

I came in to a freshly rebooted machine and started the Openfire process. Everything worked like a charm except for one thing...I can't authenticate to the administrator panel . No problem, I will just go into the MySQL database and reset my user password. Didn't work. What about the admin user password? Nothing. So Openfire completely locked me out of the system, but interestingly enough I was able to still log into chat. It is not clear why this happens and I can't seem to find any log entry that explains this issue. At this point I think most would begin to get upset and feel doomed (if they didn't have backups), but not to worry as there is a fix (not the greatest, but it works).

SSH or access the Openfire server from the command line. Once in the Openfire folder, change directories to the conf folder. Edit the Openfire.xml file and scroll down to the bottom. Change the setup value from "true" to "false". Now what this will do is tell Openfire that it was never configured and that it now needs to run the setup process. Head over to the admin panel and you will be asked the same slew of questions that you got when you originally installed the server. Once you are done be sure to add yourself (or the admin name) to the list of administrators and then log in. You should notice that all your configuration (aside from the domain and authentication method) should still be the same.

Until I find a better solution to why this occurs, this is all I have. Hopefully this will help someone out in the future because it was a nightmare figuring out that I could recover from this.