How do I force Jabber to use MRA instead of VPN

[Mark VandeVere]

We want to force our Jabber users to always use MRA instead of connecting through the VPN firewalls. Does anyone have a way to make that work? By default they try to connect internally when the VPN is active, and we need to break that behavior to force the CUCM connection to go through the Expressways.

[Jaime Valencia · Accepted solution]

Read these two docs:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/jabber/14_0/cjab_b_planning-guide-cisco-jabber-14_0/cjab_b_planning-guide-cisco-jabber-129_chapter_0100.html

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/jabber/14_0/cjab_b_deploy-jabber-on-premises-14_0/cjab_b_deploy-jabber-on-premises-129_chapter_01101.html

You need to understand how the login process works to know how to force it to use MRA.

[Mark VandeVere]

Thanks Jaime!! Appreciate it.

[Roger Kallberg · Accepted solution]

Make sure that the client can resolve the SRV record used for external access, ie the one pointing to the MRA infrastructure, but not able resolve the SRV record used for internal access. These are described in the documentation Jamie linked to. Apart from that you’ll need to make sure that the VPN connection allows split-tunnel so that the traffic to the MRA system is allowed to travel outside of the tunnel.

[Mark VandeVere]

Thanks Roger!! Appreciate it.

[b.winter]

Disable the option that Jabber looks for the CUCM SRV records, while installing Jabber:
EXCLUDED_SERVICES=CUCM

[Elliot Dierksen]

---

@Mark VandeVere wrote:

We want to force our Jabber users to always use MRA instead of connecting through the VPN firewalls. Does anyone have a way to make that work?

---

Several others have addressed the how, so I won't. My question is why do you want to do that? The Jabber clients should have full functionality regardless of the connection method.