Galène Videoconference Server | Hacker News Reader

Galène Videoconference Server

galene.org

52 pointsyamrzou11 comments

I have been running Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/) for a few years[1] for a group of friends to do their monthly meetings during the COVID times, and tried this out a little while ago.

I liked it, but there is still a fair amount of assemby required, and I hope they get it to the point where (like Jitsi) everything is a docker-compose away.

[1]: https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-ubuntu-jitsi - all my tweaks, ready to deploy

I like jitsi, want to switch our whole organisation over.

Why did you decide to have it deployed on your own instead of using https://meet.jit.si?

I'm in telco and I've done this all my career (actually started doing VC over ISDN as an undergrad), plus I could spare the cloud resources (a small 4 core VM was more than enough, and it was scripted to only be available - and with 4 cores - during work hours).

This is a fantastic idea not simply because of saving money, but also to keep work at work. Too often people slack after hours expecting an immediate response. Someone where I work recently went so far as to uninstall slack from their phone so they could have a proper vacation.

I always uninstall teams when im going on more then 1 week of vacation. I always disable all notifications and only 1 person at work knows how to get in contact with me in case of an emergency.

> there is still a fair amount of assemby required

I'm not sure what you mean. A from scratch installation of Galene is just

    git clone https://github.com/jech/galene/
    cd galene
    CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags='-s -w'
    mkdir groups
    echo '{"presenter":[{}]}' > groups/demo.json
    ./galene &

Do you think it could be made any simpler?

Do you now get the entire web UI with it, ready to go?

Yes, and that's always been the case.

whats your monthly bill like?

have you looked at running those cheap VMs from say lowendbox.com ? there are good companies like racknerd.com ? not a shill, just a user....

the reason for this is that i have "tried" to go and buy or use one of the 3 major cloud services but they are too darn expensive and complicated. this way you get a panel and an ssh and do what you want for a fixed price

Around $50 for a B4ms in Azure, automated to shut down overnight, etc. Enough for around ten people to use simultaneously.

You should be able to get much better value with a self-managed solution.

For instance, the server at <https://galene.org:8443> is running on a "Value" OVH VPS (<https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/>) which is rented for under 6€/month. During lockdown, It was regularly used for lectures with 70 students or so, but that's an unfair comparison, since students tend to keep their camera off during the lecture.

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