OwnCloud Anyone? 3
Has anyone checked out OwnCloud?
Did an install a few days ago. Of course, used MariaDB instead of MySQL. Haven’t had a chance to try everything or even the synchronization across more than 1 machine, but I did try the photo gallery, music files and fought to get contacts into the system – LDIF is not a supported contact file type?
Anyway, any tips?
10 Reasons You Should build your own cloud
For the uninitiated, OwnCloud is a roll-your-own dropbox with some advanced features and it does not appear to require a 3rd party included in the file communications like Tonido or PogoPlug require. You control the amount of storage you want mirrored and which devices you’d like to mirror between. You control the which files are shared with whom too. Users can be part of your infrastructure OR external email addresses. You can prevent an externally shared folder from being re-shared according to my reading. Not certain how this works.
There are published calendars that work with Android too. I’ve not been successful accessing my Zimbra calendar from Android, so if this works, it will be very nice.
I read where one group decided to use OwnCloud contacts for all their Android devices and removed the connection to Google Contacts completely on their devices. They claimed the phone features worked as expected after too.
Anyway, I could use some guidance, some specific plugins to try, etc.
I don’t plan to allow access to our instance except via VPN, so all the php insecurities shouldn’t be too much risk.
Don’t have any experience with OwnCloud myself, though it’s been on my “check out” list for some time now as it shows promise for… a number of things. The one thing I’m most curious is how it does file uploading via the web interface. Does it just use POST (blech), which would require me increasing PHP’s POST size or does it use AJAX to enable use of PUT.
It’s pretty sad how bad the state of file uploading is. WebDAV never got the love it deserved (both on servers and clients), FTP is… FTP, FTPES is a hack, HTTP PUT isn’t supported vanilla in-browser, allowing large HTTP POST opens you up to a lot of abuse, and SFTP has a pretty big throughput bottleneck + a pain to allow and get a random person to access your SFTP server.
Really sad state for a DIY guy. I wish WebDAV was in better shape… Anyway, I look forward to seeing how OwnCloud works for you.
I’ve written about OwnCloud a few times – thought I’d posted it here.
Guess not.
In short, performance has been terrible. File sync of 1 album of MP3s took about 30 hrs on a gigE network …. for some unknown reason. The server and a linux client was always on. Using the web interface to upload a few hundred photos worked relatively quickly and smooth. It was just the automatic client upload/sync that seemed stuck.
The server was always using CPU – ALWAYS. I think the server was manually checking for any file updates instead of using inotify features.
Contact support didn’t work well at all – data include in the uploaded vcards wasn’t displayed or exported out … 2nd email addresses, seemed to be lost. If there was an email AND a phone number, only 1 was displayed. I didn’t test extensively, so I can’t say too much more.
I agree that WebDAV never got the love it needed. I worry about security for anything with “DAV” in the name. Early on, there were some huge security issues with DAV and I’m not convinced those have all been addressed on every platform.
Php on the internet concerns me. We won’t do that so a VPN will be mandatory to use this.
For SFTP – basically they either use the built-in CLI client or FileZilla or WinSCP. From a security aspect, if we run Fail2Ban, I’m not too concerned.
It was very interesting how they used different F/LOSS tools and built a large set of features. I can see real promise when/if the project gets enough love to start working well.
At this point, there were enough concerns that I powered down the VM. I’ll revisit in a few months after a major release happens. The team appears to be doing smart things (besides selecting php) for the project. I probably shouldn’t complain unless I’m willing to help make it better. It clearly works for a large group of users, so the issues could be all on my side.
I wrote lots of comments about OwnCloud in a recent thread on the ubuntu forums if anyone wants to read more.
What is the link to your posts?
I just found your blog and am really enjoying it. All of the latest privacy shenanigans has made me want to find a way to get modern computing capabilities with real security/privacy. Obviously, ownClowd or some variant is must-have.
Anyway, I’m very new to Linux. I know cd, ls, and top, but I am first planning to build a NAS for all of my photos and videos (my kids). Then, I’ll get more complex. Tips or Guides that you recommend?