Good update on this ... I attended the Faculty Senate meeting today and turns out that BigBlueButton was quietly turned on in Canvas at our site about 4 years ago but information was slow in getting out! Problem solved ... JMH On 4/23/20 9:48 AM, Jonathan Haack wrote:
Hi all,
Thanks for all the talk about Jitsi - yes, it is very easy and secure to use and great free software.
However, I am also a teacher - and group work, or breakout rooms in conferencing systems is _*essential*_ to many of the lessons I teach online.
For that reason, I reached out to Dave Lane, President of NZ Open Source Society, and also head sys admin at OERu.org.
He suggested I run BigBlueButton, and allowed me to test his self-hosted instance last night: https://bbb.nzoss.nz/b
BigBlueButton's community server cannot handle classes over an hour due to increased load, so my question to everyone here is ... is there interest in the NM GLUG community for setting up a community BigBlueButton instance?
The server requirements are actually fairly beefy: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#minimum-server-requirements
Of course, this project is FLOSS or I would not share it (LGPL licensed): https://bigbluebutton.org/open-source-license/
Anyway, if someone can provide the host and bandwidth and give me shell/key access, I can do all the set up DNS, etc., and server configuration, mail relay for accounts for us, etc. I just don't have enough space on my home server or another spare host - and putitng this in a VPS would be $$$$$$ as fuck.
Other ideas also welcome as a solution to this ...
Thanks all,
Jonathan Haack