Recording fails after upgrading 2.3 to 2.4 (solved)

[Hiroshi Suga]

Hi there,

I would like to share my bad experience when upgrading 2.3 server to 2.4 (knowing it's not recommended, but I had no time for clean install).

I have been annoyed by a persistent problem of no recoding after a session. 

The symptom was that there was no raw data in /var/bigbluebutton/recording/raw, thus the recording process fails always at sanity check.

I thought it's a directory permission problem, but never found anything wrong. No error from bbb-conf --check either. Every service was working well.

After a lot of sweat and tears and blood, I have found a small error message in syslog. The problem was that the ruby module optimist was missing. "sudo gem install optimist" solved all the problem. 

Would it be possible to include it in bbb-install script?

[Hiroshi Suga]

Forgot to tell: optimist is required from /usr/local/bigbluebutton/core/scripts/archive/archive.rb. Until 2.3, trollop was used instead of optimist.

[Anton Georgiev]

Hi Hiroshi,

Looking at https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/v2.4.x-release/build/packages-template/bbb-record-core/after-install.sh#L57

There's a step to install all gems from https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/v2.4.x-release/record-and-playback/core/Gemfile (if I understand it correctly) and optimist is in the list.

In your investigation did you see any reason why this would  not have been run? Are the versions of your 2.3 and 2.4 bbb-record-core packages somehow the same?

-Anton

[Hiroshi Suga]

Hi Anton, thanks for the reaction. 

Well, I have no idea why it happened. What I did was to purge all *bbb* packages and install back 2.4 by install script. Since I was not successful, I repeated this many times, sometimes manually removing the configuration files or directories that were not removed by apt purge command. And once I manually remove ruby gem. I also reinstall 2.3 then tried to upgrade it to 2.4 using the install script. 

So my speculation is that when I removed manually ruby gem, install script misunderstood anyhow that the gem files were already up-to-date although it's still those for 2.3.