Clouds and Shipping Containers

Set up another ownCloud instance today. Had one running for a little while, but something fucked up so it was out of commission for a few months.

First I wanted to try to set up a NextCloud instance because of the way it allows you to interact with it's managed files using SSH. Then I looked at the required PHP modules and felt a little anxious at the prospect of having download all of them. I did still try to give it a shot though. Halfway through the list I found out about a quarter of them are missing in the Debian aarch64 repos. Having tried to get the hang of the basics of docker I decided to give running a NextCloud instance in a docker container a chance. With the help of a guide I found after a few seconds of searxing, it looked like it would be a fairly painless experience.

Boi was I wrong... I think I almost had an instance working at some point, but something crashed and this seemingly caused the stars to drift out of alignment. Whatever I tried after this, I couldn't get it to work.

After I think about 2 hours, I decided to give ownCloud another shot, as it had much better documentation and had been relatively easy to set up the first time, which was a bare metal setup on my trusty Raspberry Pi 4. This time I decided to set it up using Docker, which was even easier then the bare metal setup. The only issue I have with it now is that the logout button returns you to the Pi's local IP address instead of the external logout page.

After the Docker setup is was just a matter of mounting my old storage drive inside the container and setting up a reverse proxy with Nginx so I can use it outside of my home network.

ownCloud vs NextCloud by ownCloud

All in all, I wish I could recommend NextCloud over ownCloud, because NextCloud has a bunch more, really nice looking features, but then, as the NextCloud vs ownCloud article mentions, NextCloud's features are mostly half-baked. As a result of this I really can't recommend it if you want a stable service that just gets the job done and doesn't require hours upon hours of troubleshooting for a basic setup.

2021-05-25 update - some more thoughts

Yesterday I came across moddedBear's article about getting started with selfhosting.

moddedBear - Taking a Stab At Self Hosting

He mentions setting up a NextCloud instance on a DigitalOcean droplet using their documentation and it being a very painless experience. What this looked like in practice was using the snap image.

This decluttered my memories about my NextCloud instance, which was also done using the snap image.

If there is a thing to be learned about that, it's that when you set up a NextCloud instance using the snap image and don't try anything that isn't two steps outside of the default setup, you'll have a good time. My setup wasn't standard back then. I had a 2 terabyte drive hooked up to my Pi that I wanted to use as a storage device for NextCloud as the SD card was 16 gigs. This proved to be quite challenging because it was sand boxed and as a result it couldn't find the drive mounted outside of the sandbox. Back then the solution I decided to go for was to mount the drive using SFTP and a passwordless key as the password field in the NextCloud interface didn't seem to work.

After that, there were some other issues with NextCloud's Android app, which generally worked for basic file syncing of pictures and videos, but had issues when attempting to do something three steps out of the ordinary (I don't remember what I attempted, probably something like syncing my IWADs).

So, NextCloud is great if you're fine with the defaults and never really have any odd infrastructure like an external drive you would like to use as storage as apposed to your install drive.

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