BBB and Greenlight on different servers for affordable personal solution

[Alper Yilmaz]

Hi,

I'm a faculty and unfortunately IT dept of our university was not able to install and deploy BBB at our university thus we are stuck with Zoom university-wiide. To save money, not all features were purchased. So, we're stuck with video-conferencing for our online lectures.

As BBB mentions, Zoom is not the best fit  for teaching. I'd like to use BBB for my personal use, for the courses I teach. I tried this 2 years ago during pandemics. I installed BBB on a cloud server and used it for personal meetings. However, due to system requirements of BBB, I had to install it on 2-core and 4GB RAM server. Since the server is on 24/7, I had to pay higher than expected fees.

I was wondering if the setup that I'll describe below is possible/feasible.

1. Rent a 1-core 2GB RAM machine, install Greenlight, keep this on all the time. Students should be able to login anytime and watch the recordings so this server should also keep the recordings.

2. Just before the lecture, spin up a server (4-core 4GB) with BBB on it. Use for the lecture for 3 hrs and after the lecture shutdown the server to save cost.

Is this possible?

Thanks,

alper

[bigbluebutton-greenlight]

Hi alper,

your proposed solution might not work, since GL is a small application using docker containers, but the recordings are kept in the BBB server. If you shutdown the BBB server, GL won't be able to fetch any recordings. You would have to trick GL to somehow search in the server it's currently installed and at the same time tell BBB to copy/transfer the recordings to said server. Sound complicated even as I'm writing this!

The recommended requirements for a BBB server are there for a reason. If you spin up a smaller server you might get BBB working on it, but you will have issues constantly. I would advice against it.

Can't you get a VM from your university?

Regards,

J.

[DistanceLearning.cloud]

If you do just a few classes a week, your best bet it to just get a individual greenlight account from a local bbb hosting company in your region.  The recordings will persist forever, and you don't need to worry...     Since covid no fewer than 20 companies have started offering for less than 50 euros month.. google is your friend to find them.

regards,

Stephen