With the monthly FSCDC e.V. committee meeting coming up tonight, I took some time to update my Jitsi Meet installation to the current version. There were some inexplicable issues with the one I had (which is by now several years old), mostly during our committee sessions where two parties could join a discussion but when the third arrived, everyone would be kicked off. This was more of a nuisance than a show-stopper, because with some perseverance we usually managed to get a conference going with everyone, but still …
Time for something new. The nice thing is that with cloud servers at
€4/month or so, it's no problem to eschew trying to update the old
server and simply start a new one from scratch – a couple of days'
overlap won't break the bank. I set up a new CX22 instance (the
smallest and cheapest server on offer, with 2 – virtual – CPUs and
4 gigs of RAM) and worked through the installation instructions on the
Jitsi Meet web site. The process was
quite smooth – I should really use Ansible to automate it but I was in
a bit of a hurry, so perhaps next time. I renamed the old server in
the DNS and made meet.pingucloud.de a CNAME pointing to the new one,
so in theory it would be easy to revert to the old server for
the meeting if the new one needed more debugging. But everything went
just fine and I was able to connect to the new server from two
different browsers on my laptop and from my mobile phone at the same
time without any issues. So, great. (Update on 14 February: The
old server is now history.)
Of course the question is, why run a video conference server in the first place? What's wrong with Google Hangouts, the SaaS Jitsi Meet site, or any of various other free (or cheap) offerings? The answer to that is, in part, George Mallory's answer to the question why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest: “Because it is there.” More seriously, it's nice to have a video-conferencing “experience” that is free from ads and also (probably) free from unwanted listeners-in. To me this is worth the price of a fancy cup of coffee per month (which I don't drink, anyway); a €4 server at Hetzner Cloud is certainly enough for our four-party committee sessions, and we did manage a dozen people or more when we had our “virtual classes” during the COVID-19 pandemic. In any case, it's not so much CPU power or RAM which is limiting for Jitsi Meet as it is network bandwidth, and the Hetzner cloud servers aren't so bad in that respect.
So, another item (mostly) crossed off the to-do list; I can hopefully
leave meet.pingucloud.de alone for another couple of years before I
repeat the procedure.
Note that the video conference server isn't public – to start a conference, you need an account with a password and only very few people have one of those ☺. But those who do will probably be relieved to hear that all the accounts on the old server have been transferred over and should work.