Hi,
from time to time there is an app request for jitsi & BigBlueButton here in the forum. I would like to throw my 2 cents into this discussion.
First: We need a turn server on port 443 and 80 to help people join conferences. There are so many stupid networks / firewalls that a turn server is mandatory. Good news: We have a turn server as an app on Cloudron. Maybe later, it's possible to configure this app.
Second: What is the background to this request? A video conference with friends? Say up to 10 people on the server? A combination of moodle and BigBlueButton for your local school? All my experience with video conferencing for larger groups brings me to the conclusion: forget these apps on Cloudron. They are hungry. In terms of RAM, CPU and bandwidth. The underlying software stack is real-time critical. Better use bare metal instead of cheap VMs. For schools, you need a cluster of BBB nodes and an upstream load balancer. Because of latency, you need a hosting provider close to most of the people using the video conference. For really huge conferences you need a dedicated 10 Gbit network. You need a lot of customisation under the hood. In short, to have a reliable infrastructure for videoconferencing, you need a lot of time to dig deep into the subject.
(My) conclusion: We have Kopano Meet as an app. Let's make this app better for our use case (having a self hosted videoconference for our family and friends meetings). We have Greenlight as a frontend for dedicated BigBlueButton infrastructure. We can use Moodle, Nextcloud and WordPress as alternative frontends for BBB servers. We have Grafana and Prometheus for the metrics of BBB servers. We can use Statping.
Good news is:
The installation process for a dedicated BBB server is painless.
https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install
Wait for the configurable turn app on Cloudron or install a coturn yourself.
- Click yourself a dedicated bare metal. Let's say https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/ax41-nvme
- Install ubuntu 16 on it.
- SSH into it
- wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -w -v xenial-22 -s bbb.example.com -e info@example.com -c <hostname>:<secret>
- Install Greenlight on Cloudron
- Take the output of bbb-conf --secret and put it into .env of Greenlight.
- Restart the Greenlight app.
- Happy videoconferencing with many users.
For a better understanding of "What's going on?" install https://github.com/greenstatic/bigbluebutton-exporter to your BBB instance and add Grafana and Prometheus to your Cloudron.
The basic installation of a dedicated Jitsi instance is also trouble-free.
https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-quickstart
Since my larger conferences rely on BigBlueButton, I didn't feel the need to dig deep into jitsi's scaling. That's why I've installed jitsi meet on cheap VMs for up to 30 users.
But if you want to go deeper into this topic, here is a link to a talk by a maintainer of jitsi meet -> https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/jitsi_scaling/