Most people by now know that #
videoconferencing in times of #
corona / #
covid19 is hot, and that #
Zoom is not. Well, not if you're the slightest bit concerned about #
privacy. There are a number of alternatives, and because I just love #
OpenSource, that's what I picked. #
Jitsi for the win!
The standard installation is not only open source, but completely open. That is, everyone can connect, start a room and invite people. I don't have unlimited resources, so I figured I had to arrange for something a bit more restricted than that. That turned out not to be very difficult.
First I installed Jitsi, as explained on the
Jitsi Quick Install. Smooth sailing there: Jitsy in a jiffy.
Then I changed the default domain from anonymous to authentication and added a guest domain for unauthenticated users, see
Jitsi Server Authentication. So now I could login with my specially made account and invite others.
Nice, but I'd like my friends and family to have that power too. Incidentally (well, not quite) they have accounts on my #
LDAP server for #
email, #
Nextcloud and #
Hubzilla, so I figured that if I could have Jitsi authenticate users against LDAP too, I'd be done.
After a bit of #
DuckDuckGo-ing, I found
this nice post that describes just that. So I installed the modules, created my ldap.conf.lua and changed authentication from "internal_plain" to "ldap2". After that I created a service account for Jitsi in LDAP and restarted #
Prosody. And lo and behold: it works. My own Jitsi, that should not be so easily abused by every Tom, Dick and Harry who stumbles upon the URL.
Didn't take too long to set this up. All in all a few hours work, including a fresh installation of Debian.
Man, I love Open Source