Use Mumble as a virtual conference room

Hello folks,

I am sure you know that communication is one key for successful development or project work. Companies usually have a conference room, or you meet somebody in the hall or in the elevator that you need to talk to. But nowadays people work from home in different cities, countries or even continents. Therefore you need a virtual place to meet.

That’s why I am going to write a little about Murmur / Mumble for those who haven’t heard about it. Mumble is a voice over IP service, like Battlecom, Teamspeak or Ventrillo.  The advantages of Mumble are an excellent quality of speech,  database support, server & client support for all major operating systems, text chat, and encrypted traffic — all for free!

First of all, we should differentiate between the server (Murmur) and the client (Mumble). Murmur defines and handles all Mumble requests: a typical client / server system.
But enough of this chitchat. We have to set up a Murmur!

Installation of Murmur:

Therefore we should start with installing Murmur. Installing Murmur on Windows shouldn’t be a problem, but what about Linux? All common distributions offer a binary packet of Murmur that you can install via your package management tool like yast, yum install “packetname” , apt-get install “packetname”, etc.

I am going to describe another way and will use the
“Static Linux Server stable packet” which you can download here.

Download murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2.

Now untar the compressed file.

tar xfvz murmur-static_x86-X.XX.tar.bz2

Go to the directory which has been untared or move it for example to /home/murmur. Of course you can also run Murmur in the current directory.

Now it is time to decide whether to use SQLite or a “real” database like MySQL. SQlite has the advantage of running with Murmur right out of the box. The disadvantage is command-line-based user management, like adding new users or administrators. With MySQL you could use phpMyadmin (if installed) to do the management, so future administrators wouldn’t need shell access to add new users.

So if you want to use SQLite, ignore the MySQL part of the murmur.ini

Create a database or use an existing database of MySQL!

Edit the murmur.ini with MySQL support:

database=putyourdatabasenameinhere

dbDriver=QMYSQL
dbUsername=database username
dbPassword=Ilove-securePasswords
dbHost=localhost #localhost or the ip of the remote database
dbPort=3306 #usually the default port of mysql is 3306
dbPrefix=murmur_ #prefix name of your tables within the database

### SQlite and MySQL has to edit the lines below ###

host= the ip or domain # if you want to bind the murmur server to a default address

port=64738 #port you use for your murmur server

serverpassword=NicePassword # password for non-registered users. Keep it empty for no password login

Save the murmur.ini and exit it.

Now set up a superuser with the following command:

./murmur.x86 -ini murmur.ini -supw

Under Windows, of course, use cmd and type murmur.exe instead of murmur.x86

Now the superuser is saved in the database.

That’s it!

Murmur is running. Now you can login as “superuser” with your Mumble client and configure the rooms with a helpful GUI. Click on “channel” and then “add”. Now you can add a channel/room. This shouldn’t be a problem.

Enjoy your virtual conference room!

Documentation is available at mumble.sourceforge.net

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