I removed all the Chat+ bits and pieces from the server yesterday and decided to install the latest version of Rocket.Chat to see if I could get an oauth connection to it to work. I got as far as downloading the tarball from the rocket.chat depository but when I went to extract the tarball got an error message that it was not a gzip file. Using file rocket.chat.tgz reported that it was an ascii file. Putting the URL in the browser responded with "service unavailable" message. So much for installing Rocket.Chat. I tried to see if the tarball is hosted anywhere else but had no luck; it isn't on github either. I am following the manual install on rocket.chat for CentOS so I don't know about using a different method. I will wait and see if the tarball becomes available.
I have spent the last two days searching for open source chat self-hosted chat servers and it seems the only two choices is rocket.chat and jitsi. I found some other older self-hosted chat rooms that were not in active development for a number of years. There is always a concern with security using such older software. It is important that member data is protected. I looked at Jitsi but there are no CentOS builds. I came across this on some other chat servers I perused. It seems that many of these platforms are Ubuntu only; I guess because they are using Ubuntu desktop for coding and running Ubuntu as a server as well. Ubuntu is not a harden enterprise level server OS and I have argued this many times. I use Linux Mint; a Ubuntu variant, for my desktop OS but I use CentOS as my server OS. It is not that difficult to know two different sets of commands for performing actions; for example, apt for Linux Mint and yum for CentOS as package managers. I did consider setting up VirtualBox on the server and then installing Ubuntu in the VM but that is adding a whole additional layer for potential trouble. Renting another server for the chat server is not in the budget.
It seems that most of these chat server platforms are wanting everyone to go to cloud services; Jitsi Meet is the solution that Boonex took with UNA meaning that one is putting their chat rooms on another server with all the potential harm that can come. No matter how secure they claim their solutions are; when you give your users to a third party, harm can happen. Zoom users were finding strangers joining in their video conferences; not to mention routing through China where the Chinese are known for their theft of data.
The site I am building needs members to be able to share live video in a secured area; yet it seems that is not as easy as it should be. I will not put my members on a cloud service where their data can be stolen; where confident information they may be sharing can be stolen.
-Geek Girl
