problems upgrading BBB, and its packaging scripts

[Brent W. Baccala]

Hi -

I've been having trouble upgrading my Big Blue Button servers when new packages are released.

I've now determined that part of the problem lies in the installation scripts for the bbb-apps-akka package.

Several other packages (bbb-freeswitch-core and bbb-html5, possibly others) work by having their preinstall scripts save copies of their old config files in /tmp; then the postinstall scripts copy settings from the saved files and update the new config files.

bbb-apps-akka does not do this.  This means that the "bbbWebAPI" and "sharedSecret" don't get updated in /usr/share/bbb-apps-akka/conf/application.conf, which breaks a Big Blue Button installation.

The easiest way to fix this is to run "bbb-conf --setip HOSTNAME" which also sets the sharedSecret (though it doesn't print a message indicating this).

In my opinion, it's still a problem.  For one thing, we need to shout out to all our administrators:

You need to re-run bbb-conf after every apt upgrade!

We also should also modify the pre and post install scripts for bbb-apps-akka so that it does the same thing that the other scripts do - save a copy of the old config file and update the settings in the new one.

There are copies of those scripts in the package files, but the source code (if you can call it that) for the packaging isn't being published openly by BigBlueButton, Inc.

I'm working on developing my own packaging scripts that will be published.  That certainly won't fix the problem if we end up having two different sets of packaging scripts.

So, I'd like to call out for the existing packaging scripts to be published!

Otherwise, let's at least fix the packaging scripts from bbb-apps-akka so that people can do an "apt upgrade" without breaking their installation.

...and then I'll be releasing my own packaging scripts early in 2021.  Sigh.

    agape

    brent

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Brent,

We've been able to write our own packaging scripts for bbb-freeswitch-core and bbb-html5, but we've been using sbt to build the .deb file for bbb-apps-akka and the .postinst scripts are the defaults provided by sbt.  To update all the configuration files (including those fo bbb-apps-akka), administrators need to run bbb-conf --setip.

The documentation states that administrators must run bbb-conf --setip upon any manual upgrade, see

  https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.2/install.html#upgrading-from-bigbluebutton-22

We have an internal build system that is non-standard and had good intentions in 2020 of providing more standard Debian packaging scripts; however, Covid-19 saw us put all our efforts into increasing the pace of improvements to 2.2 (we did 31 updates in about 9 months).

BigBlueButton 2.2.31 is getting good feedback on these forums, and we're looking forward to publishing a proper build system for BigBlueButton 2.3-dev in 2021.

Regards,... Fred

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