How To Install and Configure the Galene Video Meeting Server

Direct from its website:

First, ensure you have the latest FreeBSD system updates installed. Use the following command (as root, indicated by the leading #):

Next, update your pkg repository to use the latest branch. Edit /etc/pkg/Freebsd.conf and change the string quarterly to latest. Run the following command to get the latest pkg database:

Before we install Galene from the package, we add a couple of ZFS datasets to hold the videoconferencing data in /var/db/galene. This step is optional and Galene works just as well on UFS2. We use ZFS here as it offers extra features that may come in handy when running Galene in production.

Let’s say our pool is called videostar. Let’s create the datasets under /var/db for Galene.

With these commands, we created the galene subdirectory with a separate dataset and below, three more datasets: recordings, data, and groups. We will populate these shortly.

FreeBSD’s package collection is easy to use and contains a ready-made Galene package. We install it next:

During the installation, the directories under /var/db/galene would have been created under /var/db. Since we created them with ZFS datasets, managing them became more flexible. For example, we can set a quota on the recordings dataset. These tend to grow big in size for long videoconferences. The quota prevents Galene from filling up the remaining disk space in the pool.

Before we can start Galene for the first time, we need to define what groups are available. These form the videoconferencing rooms and let multiple users join a single room or hold conferences in different rooms without interfering with one another. Also, users define what kind of permissions they have and their passwords.

A basic example file in /var/db/galene/groups looks like this:

Here, we define a user called bob, a password and operator permissions in the room. The room itself is called videostar.

Although we have not added it to the Ansible playbook, it’s relatively simple to add a valid SSL certificate, from letsencrypt.org. We’ll leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader. In short:

The galene package installed along with the binaries also the startup files in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To start Galene when the system boots, add the following line to /etc/rc.conf using service:

Start the service afterwards by running:

Check that the service is running:

A message saying that Galene is running should be displayed along with a process ID (PID). If not, then re-trace the steps above and check /var/log/messages for additional hints.

We can find the PID of the running Galene process in the output of sockstat -l (listening sockets):

In the same line, you can find the default port 8443 that Galene is listening on for incoming connections. Assuming our hostname is videostar.example, we can enter this in our browser URL bar: https://videostar.example:8443

A webpage opens asking you which group you want to join. Enter videostar (the one from our configuration above) and click the Join button. On the next page, enter the username and password from the configuration file. Select what kind of devices (camera, microphone) to allow and then click the Connect button. If all went well, you are now in videoconferencing room with full permissions. Give that url to other people after adding more users in the videostar.json file and restarting the galene process. Congratulations and happy video conferencing!