I am running OpenFire 3.8.2. I had similar symptoms: pidgin and psi could connect to the server, but peers showed up as offline/server not found.
When I got things to work, specifying buddies using the normal jive URL (e.g., bob@192.168.1.12) worked fine.
I believe that the critical steps to getting things to work were:
- Turning off and deleting the iptables service on the client and server hosts.
- Sending an authorization request to a peer and having the peer authorize the request.
YMMV.