[ops][infra] Meetpad (was: ops meetups team meeting 2020-5-5)

Clark Boylan cboylan at sapwetik.org
Thu May 14 20:17:53 UTC 2020


On Thu, May 14, 2020, at 10:42 AM, Chris Morgan wrote:
> We on the ops meetups team had a trial meeting on meetpad.opendev.org 
> this morning and for the most part it worked very well (detailed 
> feedback below). Speaking personally, I am very happy to see an open 
> source solution for video conferencing being adopted by the foundation 
> to some extent. I had and continue to have reservations about Zoom, but 
> at the end of the day no matter how well they respond to the security 
> and privacy concerns it will still be a proprietary solution and no 
> more true to the openstack tenets than slack is as a replacement for 
> irc.
> 
> feedback
> 
> - etherpad integration is cool but several of us found the window 
> seemed to disappear inexplicably

It seems that when a call starts the etherpad starts "pinned" but then certain events can cause jitsi to go back to its normal "focus on the person talking" mode of operation. In the bottom right is a "3 dot" menu and from there you can open and close the "shared document" this allows you to toggle the etherpad manually.

Even after toggling it directly it seems that jitsi wants to keep focus on speakers in some cases. I've been fiddling with it to try and understand that better and it seems like some of these things may help (though I can't say for sure):

* Click in the document directly
* Collapse the right hand column of mini webcams using the > in the bottom right


> - colored highlighting of fragments on the etherpad showed up 
> overlapped for some but not all meeting members, obscuring some text

I've noticed this too. Toggling authorship colors in etherpad's settings menu seems to correct this.

> - background blurring seemed very heavy for some participants computers 
> and this possibly lead to some sessions locking up

I believe this is specifically listed as an "experimental" feature in the menu. I expect this is why. Should probably avoid using it.

> - it's not clear what named meetings persistence is, for example a 
> named meeting from yesterday is still shown today, but doesn't have the 
> password I applied yesterday
> 
> My guess is some (all?) of this is just how Jitsi is right now.

Few other things we've noticed:

* Chrome/Chromium seem more reliable than Firefox
* The jitsi logo watermark in the overlay can clip text in the etherpad.
* If your webcam is operating in a resolution that your browser and/or jitsi don't like then you'll get a message about the webcam not satisfying required constraints and it will refuse to work. At least one person had this happen because their webcam resolution was tiny (100x100 ish pixels).

I expect these issues will improve over time. If people know how to address these problems we're more than happy to help incorporate fixes into this deployment.

> 
> The team (openstack ops meetups) is now talking about possibly hosting 
> a global ops meetup on this platform. How can we determine when and if 
> the infra for this is ready for it, and how many participants is a 
> reasonable cap? What about streaming, can we stream the whole thing 
> continuously to youtube? We are thinking that each topic would have a 
> small number of presenters/participants in the video conference itself, 
> but allow a larger group to see it on youtube and contribute via the 
> etherpad. Is this a reasonable plan?

I think we are ready for people to use it understanding its a new service we are trying to run and there may be hiccups. In particular I don't think we've been able to do any serious scale testing yet. If you are using it and find those limits we'd love to hear about it. Also feedback like what you posted above is great too.

Jitsi does have a component, jibri, which enables streaming (and recording). I don't think we've deployed any of that toolchain yet. It appears that a jibri process per recording is required and distributing jibri instances across servers is recommended for performance reasons. If there is interest in pushing patches to add a jibri instances I expect you'll find plenty of help. Zuul acts as our continuous deployment management system and all of the configuration for that is in the open at https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config. playbooks/roles/jitsi-meet/ is probably a good place to start looking.

One drawback to the "few presenters, many participants" model for collaborative discussions is that you're preselecting who can get their voice heard. It might be best to find the limits of the existing tool before we design solutions for potential bottlenecks? I expect there will be limitations, we just don't know what they are yet so designing solutions is difficult.

> 
> Thanks for doing this!
> 
> Chris
> 
> On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 12:57 PM Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
> > On 2020-05-05 12:06:42 -0400 (-0400), Chris Morgan wrote:
> >  [...]
> >  > we had a quick IRC meeting today, and also a trial run at an open
> >  > source based video conference meeting using jitsi via an instance
> >  > running on infra provided by Erik McCormick. This seems to be
> >  > promising. We'll look into trialling some ops related events
> >  > leveraging this.
> >  [...]
> > 
> >  It's probably been flying under the radar a bit so far, but the
> >  OpenDev community has put together an Etherpad-integrated Jitsi-Meet
> >  service at https://meetpad.opendev.org/ which you're free to try out
> >  as well. We'd love feedback and help tuning it. Also if you want to
> >  reuse anything we've done to set it up, the Ansible playbook we use
> >  is here:
> > 
> > https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/playbooks/service-meetpad.yaml
> > 
> >  It utilizes this role to install and configure jitsi-meet containers
> >  with docker-compose (mostly official docker.io/jitsi images, though
> >  we build our own jitsi-meet-web published under docker.io/opendevorg
> >  which applies our Etherpad integration patch):
> > 
> > https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/playbooks/roles/jitsi-meet
> > 
> >  We're not making any stability or reusability guarantees on the
> >  Ansible orchestration (or our custom image which will hopefully
> >  disappear once https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/pull/5270 is
> >  accepted upstream), but like everything we run in OpenDev we publish
> >  it for the sake of transparency, in case anyone else wants to help
> >  us or take some ideas for their own efforts.
> >  -- 
> >  Jeremy Stanley
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Morgan <mihalis68 at gmail.com>



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