hdhweg-homeschooling-stack

Aim

These ansible playbook aims to setup a stack of homeschooling (Fernunterricht) tools on a single (virtual) server. The installation process, and much more important, the update process should be as less work as possible. All the tools of these playbook are deployed as self-updating docker-compose configurations. This will help you to set up a DSGVO compliant infrastructure for your school with minimal efforts. With your Jitsi Meet installation you can perform video-conferences including screen-mirroring - the configurations for the best performance are automatically included by this playbook. Rocket.Chat is somehow a mix-up between Whatsapp and Discord and and nice way to communicate in chats with colleagues and students. When it comes to exchange files and collaboratively working on "excel" tables and text documents, cryptpad is the suitable tool. With a very simple structured whiteboard you can collaborative work on a common blackboard together with students. Having a common platform to talk to each other is quite important right now. To keep up your lessons and the social structure of your school, you can use Mumble as a voice-chat server. To work together on documents a collabora server gets deployed. You can use this server by suitable plugins of e.g. moodle or nextcloud installations (not included in this playbook). For some applications it might be handy to have a mailserver around, e.g. to send service mails from your Rocket.Chat instance.

While this repository sets up an server with collaborative tools, it might be not possible for some people to use the tools due to the lack of devices at home. Therefor a possible solution is a ubuntu configuration playbook to set up a custom ubuntu installation image or configure an existing ubuntu installation.

Contributions are always welcome -- feel free to join this project.

Data privacy

It is mandatory to collect as less data as possbile - preferably none. A big advantage of the containerized applications of these stack is the dedicated selection of files that are kept and are necessary to run the applications. All other files are stored within the container-instance and get recreated every day. The configurations of these repository are optimized for as less data collection as possible - for the best of our knowledge.

• Jitsi configurations

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the ZSL/LFB and Ulm for their great ansible playbooks. The playbook of this repo is basing on these repos.

Check out these repos as well:

Repo	Description
Ulm	A BigBlueButton-cluster with Prometheus monitoring and Greenlight frontend.
Ulm	A small scale BigBlueButton-cluster with Prometheus monitoring.
ZSL/LFB	The BigBlueButton-cluster of the ZSL/LFB accessed by a moodle-frontend.

Requirements

• A (virtual) server hosted by the company of your choice.
• A domain with an A-record pointing to the static IP-adress of your server.

Prepare

Install all prerequisites:

wget -qO setup.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tna76874/hdhweg-homeschooling-stack/master/setup.sh && chmod +x setup.sh && sudo bash setup.sh && rm setup.sh

Remove the ssh-keys inside the file vars.yml to prevent ssh access of the listed users.

nano /root/hdhweg-homeschooling-stack/vars.yml

Set the variable letsencrypt_email to your mailadress. You don't want your students to have bad warning messages on your nice websites once your letsencrypt certificates expired.

Set collabora_domain to the domain your collabora server should serve its content to, e.g. moodle.myschool.xyz.

Set main_domain to the domain that points at your VM. Be sure, that the following subdomains points to your VM:

• chat
• tafel
• jitsi
• cryptpad
• collabora
• mumble
• mail

Run

Now you can set-up the different apps to your needs. Multiple tags can be appended, e.g. -t jitsi,mail.

setup.sh -t [TAG]

Available tags:

• rocketchat
• jitsi
• mail
• whiteboard
• cryptpad
• mumble
• collabora
• security
• backup

To manually start or stop the containers, enter the respective folder in/srv/ and either just start the application by docker-compose up or docker-compose down to stop.

Example:

cd /srv/cryptpad
docker-compose up

Backups

Backups are important! In this repository restic is implemented to perform snapshots of the /srv folder. To perform a backup run:

sudo ansible-playbook /root/hdhweg-homeschooling-stack/main.yml -t backup

It is strongly advised to copy the restic-repository /restic to a local resource, e.g. with scp. Do not forget to save the random generated password /root/RESTIC_PASSWORD - otherwise you will not have access to the snapshots that are encrypted by default.

Every restic command can be called with the script backup.sh, e.g.:

backup.sh snapshots