Jitsi upgrade status (was: Re: Zoom is shite)

On 10/26/20 3:18 PM, Adrian Gropper wrote:
> I'm sorry that scarce volunteer resources are being consumed by the
> infrastructure issues. That said, I'm willing to accept the growing
> pains of the Jitsi solution, and I would suggest we continue.

As I stated previously, I'm doing the upgrade and I'm happy to keep
going as long as the community values an open standards-based
infrastructure that enables transparency by default.

As some of you may know, on October 8th, Google pushed out an update to
their browser that increased the size of video packet payloads and
tightened up security by turning on features that had been turned off by
default to date. This broke a number of websites and in particular,
Jitsi. The bug that it caused was that all audio and video sent by your
Chrome v86 browser (including Edge and Chromium that use the same
browser engine) stopped working. The fix was an upgrade to Jitsi that
would enable larger video/audio packets from your browser.

People could still dial in, choose to use a different browser, or use
the Jitsi client to connect. However, folks complained that they
couldn't use their browser of choice, so we decided to upgrade the Jitsi
system (which had been stable for a few weeks at that point). So, we bit
the bullet and upgraded the Jitsi system.

The Jitsi upgrade turned on a new feature (browser-based WebSocket data
channels) that we had turned off before, so people behind aggressive
government and corporate firewalls could no longer connect. It would
affect a small number of the 30-50+ people that usually connect, and
those people could still dial in. However, there was concern that people
would complain that the upgrade wasn't working for them and that would
lead to distrust in the infrastructure. So, we delayed switching back
until we got the folks from behind aggressive firewalls connecting again.

It's not a difficult thing to get working, the main issue is that Jitsi
changed their configuration file format so certain fields don't mean
what they used to mean and we have to map the old values to the new
values. It just takes time to do this and test it. It worked before,
it's not difficult, but needs to be done for us to get back to as close
to 100% as possible.

I'm cobbling together time to work on this in the late hours of the
night and the weekends due to my day job and can only promise best
effort at present due to the crushing day job workload. I'm confident
the issue will be fixed and until it's fixed, we'll stay on Zoom so that
we can have productive meetings without the Chairs having to worry about
the infrastructure.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2020 19:21:01 UTC