Assumptions:

• You have a Linux 20.04 VM that had root enabled and available for login.
• The VM is able to have the minimum specs required for Big Blue Button.

Prerequisites:

1. You have an email available to use for Big Blue Button
2. You have a subdomain available to use for Big Blue Button

1.1 Starting Off

• Log in with root by hitting the not listed icon and inserting root in the username field then enter the password. After logging in, you will want to navigate to the following website: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/administration/install/
• (Note: The following steps are optional, however, every time that something went wrong with the installation I had not done these.) You will want to do the following pre-installation steps to check the requirements:
  • In terminal, use the following commands:
    • cat /etc/default/locale
    • systemctl show-environment
    • free -h
    • uname -m
    • ip addr |grep inet6
    • uname -r
    • grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo
    • ufw allow 80
    • ufw allow 443                             

• • The responses you should get are as follows:
    • LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″
    • LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″ PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
    • total used free shared buff/cache available
      Mem: 15G 3.1G 1.0G 305M 11G 12G
      Swap: 0B 0B 0B
    • X86_64
    • inet6 :: 1/128 scope host
    • 5.4.x-xx-generic (Note mine did not exactly match this and it still worked.)
    • 8

1.2 Installation

1. Download the script from the following website: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install/blob/v2.7.x-release/bbb-install.sh
2. Enter cd ~/Downloads into terminal. (This changes the active directory to the Downloads folder)
3. Next, you want to make the script executable use this command: chmod +x bbb-install.sh
4. This command runs the script: ./bbb-install.sh
5. You should see a bunch of information regarding the script pop up.
6. We are then going to navigate back to the website that you downloaded the script from and go to the page titled “READ ME”                     
7. Located in the README document is the command for installing Big Blue Button, along with Greenlight. Scroll down until you see the heading titled “Installing on a Private Network”.
8. Right above that heading, there is a command that is available to copy, copy this command and paste it into terminal.
9. Once pasted, delete the “[options]” part and instead put in “-g”. This is to install greenlight along with Big Blue Button. You will also need to enter that email and domain that I mentioned earlier. 
10. Once pasted, click enter and it will run the command, it will take a little while to install everything.
11. Once done, you should see a link to the domain that you entered into the command, click on it and if you see the following screen, you have successfully installed Big Blue Button.
12. If using with Moodle, you will need to obtain the “Secret” along with the domain. You will obtain both of these using the following command: bbb-conf –secret.

We recently acquired 3 IceBreaker 4936 servers from DoDCFL (for free) and were looking for the best use for these bad boys.  We landed on our CCTV setup.

They are all 36-thread servers with 256GB of RAM and 216TBs of HDDs.  While the storage isn’t blazing fast by today’s standards, it is great archival storage.

Our CCTV system is Milestone, which requires the storage drives to be local.  We decided to try and set up TrueNas on the Icebreaker to allow us to greatly enhance our storage longevity.  The RAID and TrueNAS install are covered in a separate post by my excellent Miami intern (Maverick Peck), that completed that part of the process.

After TrueNas was installed we had to first setup iSCSI on the NAS.  We tried other solutions but in the end, the only one that worked with Milestone was having the drive on the recording server connect with iSCSI Initiator.

Step 1 – On the server that is connecting to the NAS, install iSCSI Initiator.  By typing iSCSI in the start bar you will get the best match of iSCSI Initiator, simply click on it.  Click the Yes button to make it a service that starts automatically in the future.

Step 2 – Set up the iSCSI Share you will be using on TrueNAS.  This YouTube video capture covers the process of:

• Setting up the Zvol storage pool
• Configuring the iSCSI Block Share
• Enabling the TrueNAS iSCSI Service
• Connecting the NAS Volume to iSCSI Initiator on your server
• Finally, setting up the new disk in Disk Management

Hopefully this helps anyone else looking to setup a NAS and getting drives mapped as local drives on their server.

Occasionally a Windows system will decide to bother us with a blue screen of death.  There are a few things we can do that may (and usually does) fix the issue.

1.  Open Powershell as an administrator and run: sfc /scannow
   • This will search for bad windows files and replace them.
2. Now run : DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
   • This will really do the same but replace them from Microsoft services if the above command could not fix them.
3. Lastly, run: chkdsk /r /f
   • This will do a checkdisk on your OS drive and attempt to repair the errors.  You technically could do this first, but I got the BSOD when I did it in that order, and fixed my issue when I did it in this order.
   • You will have to do a restart to allow the chkdsk to run on the OS drive.

The WD_BLACK SN770 is a M.2 hard drive, that was made by Western Digital Corporation. The Western Digital Corporation is a company that makes computer drives, data storage, and data center systems, and cloud storage services. Their Headquarters are in San Jose of California. So the WD_BLACK SN770 is a Solid State Drive meaning it can only last for so long, how long? It’s Mean Time Between Failure last for 1.75 million hours, meaning this would last 199.7716895 years.

Now for speed and other stats, it’s read speed is 5000MBps and write speed is 4000MBps. it’s gigabyte is 500 and PCle is a Gen4 16GT/s, and can be up to 4 lanes. The 4KB Random reading is 460,000 and it’s 4KB Random writing is 800,000. and getting a WD_BLACK SN770 also comes with 3-year warranty, but this SSD does not come with a buffer and does not specify if it’s a TLC, MLC, or even a QLC. But the price isn’t that bad for a Solid State Drive, using this SSD was pretty decent, it had plenty of room and lasted for quite a while. So if you want one the link is right here Newegg.com only for $39.99.

Note: This review is for a classroom project.