Self-hosters and home-lab enthusiasts ... anyone here have experience running their own Matrix?
Following up on @freddy's query about self-hosting ...
I am trying to set up a self-hosted VPS running Synapse (the server-side component of Matrix), Riot-web, and bundled in Jitsi. I've twice gotten it up and running successfully for internal accounts/users, but federation keeps throwing weird authentication errors when trying to connect with user accounts from other server instances (a week later, my regular Matrix account still has 3 outstanding broken Invites from the new server-account which I can neither accept nor reject ... ).
I'm basically following along with this youtube setup tutorial (except I am using Apache rather than nginx).
Before I start to drill into the nitty-gritty of my issue(s), does anyone here have experience setting this up? Anyone care to dedicate a bit of time and energy to helping me figure out what I'm doing wrong?
Additionally, I saw commentary from @smores that Jitsi isn't performing well for him on his self-hosted server ... any further details you can share?
Edited to add:
Sorry all, I didn't think through the timing. I am still motivated to get a self-hosted Matrix instance up and running; however, right at the moment, I have a couple of other, higher priorities I need to attend to first. If I'd thought about it, I would have held off on starting this thread for a couple of days.
I will get back to this thread ... let's say, Wed or Thurs ... take another crack at the Matrix set-up then, and provide details here, as I do.
Thanks,
EtC
Hello @seizethegoddamngap, thanks for the invite; I just Rioted you ... will follow up more in a day or two, when I sit back down to resolving my Matrix set-up.
Please check out my update to my primary post here.
Side question: What channels are people participating in? I think the tech is cool but I'm wondering what active communities there are.
Hello!! I haven’t dug much into this, but my experience so far have been with Jitsi have been:
The UI is a Little clunky, but generally usable.
On meet.jit.si:
Mostly everything works now. Old versions of Safari still don’t work and I don’t think they ever will. Overall I’ve had success with the hosted version on a few occasions, but I’ve probably only tried it three or four times.
On my self hosted instance:
I need to upgrade and try again, because I haven’t in a while, but I think I might need to set up a TURN server or something (something I’ve been looking into with my Nextcloud Talk Setup as well), because while I can use it just fine with devices on my network, it seems to have trouble connecting to other devices on the internet (I think this is because it’s running behind my router’s NAT, and I think there might even be instructions on the Jitsi documentation on how to handle this).
Ditto here, with Nextcloud. I've had NC Talk running on my Nextcloud server for a few years, including what appears to be a working TURN server (at least, the NC Talk test claims it is working); and texting has worked fine the whole time ... but I've never gotten audio/video to work on it.
This is actually part of the reason I'm taking a crack at a self-hosted Matrix instance.
Please check out my update to my primary post here. And thanks.
I got Synapse set up using Docker on a headless Ubuntu server using this guide with an Ansible playbook: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
Very easy to set up and works well. I haven’t set up Jitsi yet, though it is included in the guide.
I've never actually played with Docker. I know I should try it, but for some reason, I've been afraid to dive into that particular learning curve. I will read through that Github and see if I can use it.
Please check out my update to my primary post here. And thanks.
I have basically zero experience with Docker, I’m more of a Windows Server guy, but the Ansible playbook automates the entire installation while still giving a very clear overview of what is being done, so experience is not actually needed. I had to edit a config file within a container, but how to do that can be googled easily.
Can’t recommend that guide/playbook enough, especially if you’re short on time for the setup.
Possibly unrelated, but can people tell me how much of their server resources Synapse takes? The last time I tried it, it was very resource intensive, but I want to check up on it to see if they've managed to make it a little lighter.
Particular numbers I'm interested in:
I'd like to know this, too, particularly the A/V Jitsi portion.
Online consensus seems to be that small-group private Synapses have "reasonable" resource needs, but opening up an instance to Federation can blow up the server.
But I haven't seen actual RAM/CPU/Bandwidth numbers ...
I've been using spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy very successfully for a while now. Very well maintained, I highly recommend it.