Rob and I have been emailing back and forth off list (I was sending LDIF data, etc) and I think we have fixed our problem. Thought I would post back, for others that google this later. :)
For the ldap->user section of our virtualhost in prosody.cfg.lua, I had this set:
filter = '(&(objectClass=posixAccount)(gidNumber=10001))'
In our case, I only wanted chat accounts for people that were in the "All Staff" group. (I didn't want service users, etc to have access to chat) However, that group is a different record, in ou=group,dc=example,dc=local. There was nothing in MY record that showed I was in that group. (my primary group, was listed). Perhaps some better descriptions of the ldap config section would be helpful?
Rob had me try running the command:
ldapsearch -h <ldapServer> -s sub -b "dc=example,dc=local" -x "(&(&(objectClass=posixAccount)(gidNumber=10001))(uid=briffle))"
and it returned no results.
However, all my "staff" members in ldap have another option set in their records: zarafaAccount=1 (we use zarafa for email, and love it) By modifying our filter to be:
filter = '(&(objectClass=posixAccount)(zarafaAccount=1))'
things seem to be working great!
In addition, Rob pointed out that I had both a text file group, and ldap one. I disabled the ldap one. We have some people that are not in ldap (they are in a different federated xmpp domain on another server) that we wanted to add to our group.
Thanks Mathew and Rob for all your help (and patience),
Brian