A few items to attempt addressing ongoing commentary from the chat and mailing list.
Poor performance on the call… Having now had more video conference experience as a client and as a host, I can state that using WiFi (on your computer anyway) seems to be a terrible idea. The Jitsi client on my cell phone does not appear to have such an issue, at least not that I have noticed. I have also done Zoom, Ring, WebEX, and Teams meetings, all of which seem to have lower reliability on a WiFi laptop than a wired one. The “official” browser for jitsi is Chrome - the Jitsi website states that explicitly. Other browsers do work, but your experience may be non-optimal. If you have multiple browsers open and you try the conference from one of them first, sometimes the microphone and/or camera does not get released to the new browser. Kill the old browser and restart your new one. That usually fixes it. Remember that in addition to the microphone and camera icons on the bottom of the page, you probably allowed your browser access to the hardware. There is a little icon in the URL bar that shows permissions. If you mess them up, you may need to drop the conference and reconnect to reset those permissions. Audio issues. I have not yet found that the server is the issue. Linux in particular has so many ways of handling sound that it can be difficult to untangle the variety of items. Just ask John about the fun with his music player for the dance music. I have a few hardware devices I have to remember to switch to the correct positions before my sound works and that is before I get into software items. Latency/video quality issues. I look at the bandwidth icon for all participants and I have no idea why some people (me included) end up with a yellow or red icon showing poor bandwidth. As far as I can tell, we all end up routing through Front St. In Toronto. I have pretty good bandwidth and my connectivity traditionally seems a bit poor. Last night, it seems great. One “fix” is to adjust your video quality to low (in the bottom right hand corner pop-up menu accessed via the three dots). John has suggested that a subset of members may want to try some experiments and document their experiences to help others. Let him know if willing to participate. Expected level of effort = 1 hour to try Jitsi (via Framatalk and Jitsi itself), Google Meet and Zoom. The monthly URL ’secret’... I’ll post it here since it was requested: LinuxOttawaYYYYMMDD The club name with mixed case followed by the date of the meeting in year, month and day format. Yesterday we used LinuxOttawa20210401, next month we will use LinuxOttawa20210506. I don’t think that is particularly difficult to follow, but I have been known to be wrong on many occasions and if people want it changed to a fixed string, we can do that. I’m not in favour, but this is a group issue and I will go with what people want. I have been told that browser caching has leftovers from previous meetings in the URL cache and if you don’t complete (and check) the full URL, it could replace the URL you want by one of the old ones, so that may also be causing some issues as well. DNS… Since the video conference server is only used for a couple of hours a month and the existing VPS probably will not be able to host it due to resource limitations, I use a short-lived VM from a hosting provider. I do not have an IP address until I spin up the new instance and receive the new address. I then enter it with the DNS service we have. It is usually live instantly via most DNS services as the elapsed month has flushed it from most caches. I have seen it not resolve a few times the past from some upstream systems and resolve from others. In genera, it is live within a minute of getting the record, which also has a 5 minute life span, so it should refresh quickly. Chrome (and others) seem to have issues with cleanly accessing sites that they have had issues with before, probably internal caching, some less than optimal DNS code or a wealth of other issues (e.g. cookies) that we will likely never know about. Try it in an incognito window and see if it works there. If not, do a check on the command line. Try a different DNS service. Here is a list of well known ones: OpenDNS - 208.67.222.222 Cloudflare = 1.1.1.1 Google Public DNS - 8.8.8.8 Comodo Secure DNS - 8.26.56.26 Quad9 - 9.9.9.9 Verisign Public DNS - 64.6.65.6 OpenNIC - 13.239.157.177 UncensoredDNS - 91.239.100.100 CleanBrowsing - 185.228.168.168 Yandex DNS (Russia) - 77.88.8.7 UltraRecursive DNS - 156.154.70.1 Alternate DNS - 198.101.242.72 AdGuard DNS - 176.103.130.130 Video server readiness… My bad here. Setup time always sneaks up on me. I should have automated it months ago, but I was having a “it only takes 15 minutes” mental block. Yeah, it only takes 15 minutes if nothing else is going on and I’m actually engaged in what I’m doing. I know better at work and have a number of things set up to deal with that mentality. I need to be applying that to this item, so I’ll automate the server build and with a little Ansible scripting. I can probably get the DNS changes handled with a Dynamic record and a little scripting to make it point to a page on our server with a countdown or something like that and change to the new server when it is ready. Hopefully that answers most of the issues people have raised. To unsubscribe send a blank message to [email protected] To get help send a blank message to [email protected] To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org
