I apologize if this is a pretty basic question, but i am a bit of a newbie to this…
I am running sbs2003 and openfire for our jabber network. Everything works like a dream within the domain. Is there anyway for me to configure the server so that, for example, i could use spark on my home compter and connect to the jabber network?
You need to do more than open the ports on the server that hosts openfire to access it from outside the domain.
You need to add it to your external DNS
If your openfire server does not have a real world IP Address you need to set an address translation on your router to the server’s inside address and a real world IP address which is set on your external DNS
You need to open the ports on your firewall/pix/router to allow the data to pass from outside into your domain
“Connection refused” usually implies that there’s nothing listening to that port. Are you sure that your Openfire is running and listening to that port? One of the ways to confirm this is to do telnet localhost 5222 at the server you run Openfire. If you’re sure Openfire is listening to the port, my guess is that your Openfire server is in your LAN and isn’t exposed to the internet via something like NAT.
Did you setup “port forwarding” on your firewall? Just “opening” the ports is not enough. You need to tell the firewall where to send the traffic inside.