Instant Messenger - Connection Problems from Pidgin

[mtapman]

We're seeing some intermittent connection problems with a persistent chat room, especially when connecting from Pidgin. The connection will work well for a person for a long period of time (days or weeks), then they'll be unable to access the room. No errors are evident on either the client or server side. Sometimes deleting the room from the Buddy List and re-adding it from the Room List is enough to solve the problem but sometimes the Zimbra server actually needs to be restarted.

Questions:
1) Where should these errors be logged on the Zimbra side (if they are Zimbra errors)?
2) Is anyone else seeing anything like this behavior?
3) Is there a way to restart the IM service without restarting the entire Zimbra server?

Thanks in advance.

[mmorse]

Welcome to the forums,

When you say 'unable to join' can you click on it in the buddy list and get a chat dialog to open with no members but yourself? If they close that window and try again does it let them in? Or is it completely unreachable till removal from buddy list/re-add from room list or mailboxd restart?

You could run this to get more output to /opt/zimbra/log/mailbox.log:
zmprov aal user@domain.com zimbra.im debug

[mtapman]

When you say 'unable to join' can you click on it in the buddy list and get a chat dialog to open with no members but yourself? If they close that window and try again does it let them in? Or is it completely unreachable till removal from buddy list/re-add from room list or mailboxd restart?

Thanks for the welcome.

'Unable to join' in this case means that they can't even access the room. We've had people try alternative clients, such as Spark, and get to the second point, the "chat dialog to open with no members but yourself". So I'd say the room is essentially completely unreachable even though they can see it in the room list.

I tried the zmprov aal command and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be adding any detail to the log file. Looking at the wiki, Log Files - Zimbra :: Wiki, it says that account specific audit log settings are reset on server restart, so I assume I'm NOT supposed to restart the server in order to enable the debug level auditing for one of my problem users.