Note

The strategy described below doesn't seem to work, at least when taken to the extreme of a repeated meeting with 24 hour duration. The MEC computer is always disconnected unless we log in with someone's account

This how-to can be simply stated and so may not need a long article: if you log in and schedule the zoom to cover the times when it will be used, then it will not shut down even if only mec-opr is logged in.

If you simply create a meeting with no parameters then it will shut off after 40 minutes of having no one logged in (e.g., just the control room computer). However if the meeting is scheduled for specific times then it should persist within that schedule. Zoom meetings can be made to repeat.

Step-by-step guide

  1. POC schedules the meeting in zoom, and selects the date and time to cover the whole first shift.
  2. Set the meeting to recur for each of the shifts in the experiment. 
  3. Feel free to add additional time.
  4. Be sure to add other POCs and favored users alternate host status by adding their email addresses at the bottom
  5. Log in from mecopr and don't worry about the meeting timing out so long as you are within the scheduled windows.


The slack tip

Razib Obaid  1 hour ago

What I did recently: schedule a meeting at the Zoom, using my stanford credential to access premium feature, by going to the Zoom app --> Schedule a new meeting --> Select the date and time (make sure you select the time longer than an hour, I selected a 12 hour timeslot). Then with the meeting ID and password (selected a manual password), I logged in from the control room zoom. Later on, you can make the meeting a recurring event. In this way, the control room Zoom always access a meeting scheduled by a premium account. So, no kicking out of the Zoom (at least for now). I have an instance of Zoom still running for the last 6 hours.