I am not sure why this is happening, but I have had to reinstall Openfire on my RHEL server three times, and the last has my users fed up. Everytime I reinstall Openfire, all the Spark users have to re-invite their contacts. But this is not a Spark question.
The condition is this: after a reboot, it can be that either the users report to me that they are getting authentication errors in Spark, or I will try an log on the admin console, and be told I am using the wrong credentials. The only solution I have used is to uninstall Openfire and reinstall it. I am using LDAP authentication, with the embedded database, and a very recent build (not the one announced on May 28, but the one right before it.)
Any ideas what might be happening? I'm terrified of rebooting the server, because if I do and cannot get into the admin console, I'll have no choice but to blow away the installatio and then have all the users re-invite all their contacts. Again.