BigBlueButton

We run an instance of BigBlueButton at https://bbb.csclub.uwaterloo.ca. BigBlueButton is a free and open source videoconferencing platform with many features such as multi-user whiteboards, embedded videos, and interactive polls. You can check out some tutorial videos here.

Installation

BBB is currently running in an LXC container on xylitol. Here are the steps that were performed to install it.

Prerequisites

The container in which BBB is running should have:

• Ubuntu 16. This is the only Linux distro supported by BBB.
• A FQDN (bbb.csclub.uwaterloo.ca).
• A public IPv4 address (and optionally an IPv6 address).
• Firewall exceptions for TCP ports 80 and 443 and UDP ports 16384 - 32768.
• Ansible installed. This can be done via apt install ansible.

Instructions

1. First we will setup the database. Login to coffee as the postgres user, run psql, then run the following:

   CREATE USER greenlight WITH PASSWORD 'replace_this_password';
   CREATE DATABASE greenlight;
   ALTER DATABASE greenlight OWNER TO greenlight;
   

2. I wrote an Ansible playbook here which automates most of the setup (steps adapted from here). This also takes care of installing Greenlight, which is the web frontend for BBB.
   Git clone the repo into a folder, say /root/ansible, then run ansible-playbook playbook.yml.
3. Once the playbook has finished, open /opt/greenlight/.env and set the value of DB_PASSWORD.