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Chat Room Servers

I got everything in place only to get mongo timeout errors when trying to start Rocket.Chat.  Increasing the timeout setting didn't help.  This Rocket.Chat thing is just too much a bother and looking at the documentations, you have to be careful to match the mongod version to the version of Rocket.Chat.  Basically put it in place and don't touch it because if you try to update Rocket.Chat and it no longer supports the version of mongod on your system it will break.  You have to make sure to keep the version of mongod in align with the versions that the particular Rocket.Chat version supports.  I had the Chat+ version of Rocket.Chat working but the ouath connection wouldn't work and you really need a simple click to join chat solution.  Making your members log in each time to chat is not good.

I guess I will need to rip this all out and try again.

That was fun - NOT.  If you decide to remove one version of mongod and install another, there is crap left behind that will be pure misery to figure out.  I finally cleaned up the mess and got mongod 4 to start.  It is after 2 am so I think I will go to bed.

The rocket.chat tarball was back online.  I will see how it goes.  I still don't like the limitations in rocket.chat but want to see if I can get the oauth connection working.

I came across several abandoned projects that if they had the proper license might be a starting point for building something that is simple, easy to use, and could be integrated into Cheetah.

Yea. Guess i need to work on a replacement. I have looked several times before for a chat server. I did not have any luck with that either.

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