JITSI Pi IN THE SKY/CLOUD

If you’re feeling adventurous, it is possible to install Jitsi Meet on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB (the 8GB version will perform better though). This isn’t officially supported and setup is a little complicated. Also our Pi 4s are all locked up in Future Towers until such time as it is deemed Covid-proof.

We were feeling extravagant so we took advantage of Mythic Beasts’ commitment-free, per-second billing and rented ourselves a remote Pi 4. Mythic Beasts’ offerings use PXE booting and mount the root filesystem via NFS from their own storage arrays. This means you’re not at the mercy of unreliable SD cards, and also allows you to rent up to 250GB of storage. We were more frugal, and went with the minimum 10GB; this costs just over £10 if it’s provisioned for a whole month. With monthly billing it’s £7.50.

If you’re setting up Jitsi on your own Pi locally you might have to do a little detective work (or plug in a monitor) to find your Pi’s IP address on your LAN. And if you use Mythic Beasts’ offering be aware that its Pi servers are connected by IPV6 only. A gateway is available so that Ipv4-only users (that is, a large chunk of the UK’S population) can still connect to it, but you’ll need a real DNS record (DUCKDNS doesn’t count here) to use it for anything other than as a standard web host. We were a bit embarrassed that it took us a while to figure this one out.

If you’re keen you can find a recipe to get everything working on the Jitsi Github at http://bit.ly/lxf268jitsi.