Tag: jitsi meet

Use it, or Lose it! 10 Ways of Getting the Most SAS Value from my Retirement…

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To me retirement only means not earning a salary from my SAS programming, which will, from now, become a pure hobby. However, to program in SAS AND to be able to get access to all of its components, including Enterprise Guide, batch processing, and the Program Editor, the SAS licence has to be paid for. For me this would amount to paying around GBP 3,000 a year, and so I have drawn up a list of ways that you can contribute to that total, but at the same time benefit from my 40+ years of SAS programming, and 30+ years as an independent SAS consultant, working in the banking, insurance, IT, pharmaceutical, HR and marketing business sectors, and on IBM mainframe, OS/2, VAX, Unix, Windows and Linux.

Any excess income will be used to extend my SAS licence into the following year. I’m planning to use this income from April 2025, so we now have a few months to raise sufficient funds.

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The following are grouped into group¹ (for companies or collaborating individuals) and individual² options:

For Companies or Collaborating Individuals¹:

No.1 = 1/2 day SAS training, including digital training materials, for GBP 1,800

No.2 = 1 month of confidential online support with unlimited questions for GBP 720

No.3 = 1 day of remote SAS programming for GBP 600

No.4 = 1 hour of 1-to-1 SAS video discussion for GBP 100

  • Book your hour of SAS video discussion.
  • Video discussions use Jitsi Meet, which is limited to 100 participants.
  • Topics include:
    • Base SAS syntax
    • Base SAS functions
    • Base SAS formats and informats
    • Base SAS procedures
    • Data step merging
    • PROC SQL syntax
    • PROC SQL merging
    • PROC SQL updating
    • Macro introduction
    • Macro syntax
    • Macro variables
    • ODS Graphics introduction
    • ODS Graphics procedures
    • Enterprise Guide introduction
    • SAS/Studio introduction

For Individuals²:

No.5 = 1 confidential remote question for GBP 72

No.6 = 1 ebook copy of course notes to one of my SAS courses from GBP 11

  • My SAS course notes are published as ebooks on Lulu.com, who, unlike Amazon, etc., do not take massive commissions, so I receive most of the published price.
  • See my Book Table for more details.

No.7 = 1 ebook copy of one of my SAS books directly from my blog site for GBP 12.50

  • “Saving Time and Money using SAS” is no longer sold in softback, but you can download the ebook directly from my blog site.
  • See my Book Table for more details.

No.8 = 3 months of subscription to the SAS Programming Forum, including access to my online SAS course collection, for 3 x GBP 5

  • Details of what the SAS Programming Forum is can be found here.
  • See how to subscribe to the SAS Programming Forum, including my online SAS course collection, here.

No.9 = 1 copy of one of my SAS paperback books from GBP 10.25 or SAS ebooks from GBP 4.75 from Lulu.com

No.10 = 1 copy of one of my SAS softback books from a reseller from GBP 25

  • Although these options appear to be lower in the list than expected, I receive very little from softback books sold, because I received an advance when they were published.
  • See my Book Table for more details.

No.11 = 1 copy of one of my SAS ebooks from a reseller from GBP 3

  • Although these options appear to be lower in the list than expected, I receive very little from ebooks sold by resellers, because I received an advance when they were published.
  • See my Book Table for more details.

Apologies for the 16 hour server outage today. Note to self: if an installation manual doesn’t mention something important, then don’t try it out in production!

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Apologies for the 16 hour server outage on my SAS-related blog site today. I was trying to install Jitsi Meet, an open-source alternative to Zoom, on my server:

  • While it is possible to organise moderated meeting using the hosted meet.jit.si servers, installing a self-hosted copy of the open-source Jitsi Meet software alongside WordPress seemed to me to be a good idea, so that SAS training could easily be held locally.
  • By default standard self-hosted Jitsi Meet uses Nginx, not Apache, web servers, and assumes a fully qualified hostname, e.g. meet.hollandnumerics.org.uk.
  • What I wanted to create was an installation of Jitsi Meet in a sub-folder on my existing Apache web site, e.g. hollandnumerics.org.uk/meet, which is also part of a Bitnami stack, where software is installed specifically for use by the web server. This use case was not mentioned anywhere in the installation manual, although I did find a number of web forums that described similar environments.
  • That is where the problems started:
    1. To move Jitsi Meet into a sub-folder I had to edit the existing web configuration, the web pages to display the meetings, and the scripts to start the software.
    2. I also had to generate a self-signed SSL certificate for localhost.
    3. I had to reboot the server and restart the web service several times.
    4. Finally I discovered that some of my changes were lost whenever the Jitsi Meet software was updated.
  • At no point did I ever get Jitsi Meet to a point where I could run a test meeting, so I uninstalled it all.
  • Having uninstalled Jitsi Meet, I then couldn’t restart the web server to access WordPress, because something was holding onto port 443 (the secure HTTP port). At this point it was fast approaching midnight, so I decided to sleep on it.
  • Finally, this morning, I found that, when Jitsi Meet had been installed, it had added “Listen 443” commands to the default Apache installation, which conflicted with my Bitnami stack Apache server. Once these were removed my WordPress site suddenly reappeared!

Lessons learned:

  • When installing software you don’t fully understand, if the installation instructions have no information explaining what you should do, don’t just do it anyway!

Thank you for your patience!