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Daniel Nashed

 

ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

Daniel Nashed  24 August 2020 18:36:25

ST Meetings is finally available as a preview. I looked into the installation and with some minor tweaks and tips you should get it working.

Once you know how it works a Docker setup has really some advantages.

The documentation hopefully evolves over time https://help.hcltechsw.com/sametime/11.0.2/admin/t_deployment_docker.html

Let me give you some feedback from what I just did. It's not a complete installation instruction.
Just my side notes to complement the documentation and it could help when troubleshooting.

Once you know how it works it just needs a couple of minutes to be up and running.
(It's a test environment with a default cert for now)

Image:ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

Environment

I used a SLES 15 SP server as a Docker host and also installed Domino 11.0.1 FP1 along with Sametime 11.0.2.
So I have ST Community server, ST Proxy native on Linux and the ST Meetings server on Docker.


Docker CE 19 Version

First of all you should note that you have to use a recent Docker version. I would personally never install anything earlier than Docker CE 18.
SLES 15 SP2 comes with Docker CE 19 out of the box. But CentOS 7.x comes with a very very old Docker version which will not work!

Depending on how you setup CentOS 8.x you will end up with an up to date installed Podman instance which is sort of Docker compatible. But will not work for what we need.

So you really have to install Docker using their official repro --> https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/centos/
I would stay with CentOS 7, because the containerd version in CentOS 9 does not allow you to install Docker CE 19.x. But  Docker CE 18.x should also work if you want CentOS 8.x
While testing I did SLES and CentOS installation in parallel. Both finally worked.

The important part is to get all the host names and ports configured in the right way.
I have not looked into replacing the certs -- I have not seen if ST Meetings supports Let's Encrypt like the underlying Jitsi server does.


Install Docker Compose

Docker Compose does not come with Docker CE. You have to install it separately.
And it will be used to bring up all the container using the docker-compose.yml file which holds a description of all the containers and the network.

Here is how you can install it --> https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/


ST Meeting Server

The installation comes with the Docker images and installation scripts.

Before you start you really have to look into the custom.env file which is all you need to customize!
There is a .env file which is used by docker-compose. And the docker compose file leverages variables defined in both files.

Along with that the configuration is written into the jitsi-config directory.
This is important information, because if your setup was wrong, you will need o remove the directory to get the configuration reset.

The first installation will also create the JWT_APP_SECRET which you have to copy to your ST proxy and ST community server as outlined in the documentation.
If you have made that configuration, you should pass the base64 encoded value when the install.sh script asks for it.

In my case I had to redo the configuration a couple of times and look into the logs (so pasting the existing secret was helpful).

Also looking into the logs of the container might be helpful.

This command for example gets you the logs from the nginx container which you might need for troubleshooting (helped in my case).

docker-compose logs -f nginx


But if things go right you just run the install.sh script which will

- upload all the Docker images to your docker host
- write the configuration
- use docker-compose up to create all the containers needed

The configuration is local on your Docker host and mounted into the container as a volume.

If you have to stop and remove all the containers you can just use

docker-compose down

This makes it easy if you need to review/update the config and start again.

I hope this helps as a jump-start... The DNUG communications group will look into it for our own server. And that context we might come up with more details.

-- Daniel





Comments

1Rishab  11.10.2020 4:37:36  ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

Dear Daniel,

Was curious to know how did you achieve this where you had a single docker image. I am trying to run multiple domino docker images. One Primary Server and other secondary server. I want to use it for Demos and not for production. I have a Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM. The idea was to load Docker Image with say Traveler and another with Volt. Is this possible and if so how. Some tips will certainly be appreciated..

Warm Regds,

Rishab Sharma

2Daniel Nashed  11.10.2020 7:35:08  ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

@Rishab,

ST Community server is running on the Linux machine native. There isn't a Docker image yet.

The Meetings server is running in a container on the Docker host on that machine.

Because there are no overlapping ports, this works well.

If you plan to have more Docker containers running on the same machine, this will be more tricky.

Docker isn't really an enterprise way running containers. For that K8s would be a better fit.

But for a test/demo environment Docker can work too. It's just more complex.

It's all a matter of how you expose (publish) the ports and also how you define your network.

The default network is bridged and it publishes a port for all IP addresses by default.

So even if your Docker host would have multiple IP addresses, you have to define in the -p statement which IP you want to map to. You can prefix the host port with the IP address.

But still this is tricky for connecting because of name resolution. You have to take care how containers a.) among each other and b.) with the host communicate.

For Volt and for Traveler you might want to use a combined image to keep it a bit less complex.

But once you figured out about the right networking another container might not be an issue any more...

If running multiple containers docker-compose can be very helpful.

You can have a Docker Compose file to define and run multiple containers. The ST Meetings server comes with multiple containers defined already and is a good example.

-- Daniel

3Petr Santrucek  14.10.2020 12:05:19  ST 11.5 Meetings Preview on Docker

Dear Daniel, I have successfully installed ST Meetings using Docker image using your howto. Now it is runing, web gui prompts for login, but I did not found in the documentation, what is default login.

Google does not provide answer too:-(

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