Final Report of the "Investigation and provision of meeting software" project (Project 333).

History

Apr 2016

Initial setup and configuration

Downloaded source in two forms, packaged as RPM from from https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/rpm/, and as zip file from https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/src/jitsi-src-2.8.5426.zip.

Installed various components, following notes on https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/manual-install.md:

• Install prosody
• Configure prosody
• Install nginx
• Install Jitsi Videobridge
• Install Jitsi Conference Focus (jicofo)
• Deploy Jitsi Meet

...installing the prosody RPM installed:

• lua-socket-3.0-0.10.rc1.el7.x86_64
• lua-sec-0.5-4.el7.x86_64
• lua-expat-1.3.0-4.el7.x86_64
• lua-filesystem-1.6.2-2.el7.x86_64
• prosody-0.9.10-1.el7.x86_64

...and following the "Configure prosody" notes, created /etc/prosody/conf.avail/jitsi.cfg.lua with test values. Also generated certificates and made other initial configurations as per the notes.

Started prosody XMPP server with the test config using prosodyctl restart.

Puzzled by the suggested use of restart as the argument to prosodyctl, since it hadn't been started yet. However, something did start, and we have a prosody process

prosody  23983  1  0  17:23  ?  00:00:00  lua /usr/lib64/prosody/../../bin/prosody

Set up test account via Jabber, connecting to chat room "jtest" on conference.jitsi.inf.ed.ac.uk.

Then installed nginx and videobridge, but Jitsi Conference Focus (jicofo) has proved more recalcitrant. Still working on that.

Discovered https://jitsi.org/Projects/JitsiMeet, and investigated installation. Not quite sure how this relates to the above installation of Jitsi...

July/August 2016

Project has been on hold for a few weeks, not because of anything blocking it, but just due to other priorities. Not much further progress, as work on SL7 has taken precedence.

2017

As of 28 Feb 2017, there is now a header, dice/options/nginx.h, so disabled explicit nginx stuff in profile, and included new header. Experimented with using that instead of a full manual installation, but still had problems with configuring Jitsi Videobridge.

Conclusion

The complexity of configuration became an issue, and collaboration was sought.

> Having attempted a manual install with the help of
> https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/manual-install.md,
> I'd installed and experimented with configuring prosody, nginx, Jitsi
> Videobridge, Jitsi Conference Focus (jicofo), and the overarching
> Jitsi Meet. However, the configuration options seemed somewhat
> convoluted, and I couldn't get everything working.
>
> Do you have a working jitsi configuration setup that I might
> take a look at? Perhaps comparing what should/does work with what I've
> cobbled together might shed some light on what else I need to do.

However, this was not possible, and it was therefore decided not to proceed further with this. It was observed that projects such as this should always be collaborative.

It was also noted that if something does not work immediately on DICE, a more standard (vanilla, default) environment should be tried first (so the software could be investigated further, before attempting to migrate it onto DICE).

-- RogerBurroughes - 14 Dec 2017