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By Katy Swain, 21 July, 2026

Fun with Corporate Firewalls and Self-Hosting

I've been playing around with self-hosting Jitsi Meet for online chats. And I've been playing around with the podcasting studios at a local library. So I've also been playing with recording remote interviews using both.

The last of these didn't go well. It turns out that accessing the Jitsi Meet instance on my server (or indeed any old server) is no problem at all. Works a treat. Unless you're behind a firewall that blocks User Datagram Protocol (UDP). It turned out that remote video and audio didn't come through (although text chat worked), and when I had two laptops (one just to record the session) connected simultaneously on my side, the connection dropped entirely every minute or two, requiring logging in again every time.

By Katy Swain, 8 November, 2024

The Phone Situation

Update, 20/12/2024: I shouldn't leave my audience hanging. A few weeks after writing this, I had a working phone, but there was a snag with transferring my old number over. As this was now at the pointy end of the academic year, I hadn't the time or spoons to deal with this, but I could at least make and receive phone calls. A few weeks later, my assignments all submitted, I finally got that sorted. Numerically, I'm me again!

Granted, I knew this was coming. I'd heard from better informed people than myself that although my phone works on Vodafone's network, which had switched off it's 3G support in January, it would not work on Telstra's network when it came to decommission it's 3G.

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