Nextcloud and OpenBSD = <3 | Hacker News Reader

Nextcloud and OpenBSD = <3

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91 pointshucste41 comments

I wish nextcloud architecture could move to a more stateless version. It was a huge step forward allowing envars to setup the installation and using a S3 for objects as using it with containers was a PITA. There are still post installation items that don’t allow to just move the server easily. Instanceid, version and others are still generated in config/config.php. Plugins are another one. It’s definitely a great product.

there is the all in one architecture, if you have a system with container runtime at hand and want a more out of the box experience.

I wanted to like Nextcloud, and I made a real effort two different times (hetzner metal servers with attached storage).

Both times it would eventually run into sync problems, where it would just get stuck and refuse to keep things in sync.

I had the same problem with Onedrive (it was worse).

Tresorit was very good and reliable and theoretically very secure, but it was some financial cost.

The last thing I tried is Apple’s 2TB iCloud offering, which is cheap and thus far has not had problems keeping about 1.4TB (around a million files at peak) synced without problems. Of course you must already be living in the Apple ecosystem, but I am and it is convenient.

I do trust Apple to provide reliable and durable service more than I could with my own Nextcloud setup.

I am using both Nextcloud and iCloud, and Nextcloud has been syncing much faster every time it mattered (i.e. when sharing files with the family).

I had that too. It seems to be a problem with the client though. Deleting the local config and reconnecting helped. (Two times in idk ~6 years is still bearable.)

The client is atrocious.

Work your computer from sleep? Server offline!

Moon in the wrong phase? Server offline!

This isn't remote. This is the client and server on the same network.

Worse, the client never seems to retry on its own, and stays offline almost indefinitely. I've ended up with multiple sync conflicts because of this.

Even worse, there's no easily accessible button that says "try now." Pausing and resuming sync doesn't work.

On Windows it's the only software I update semi-regularly that insists on rebooting the whole computer, and yes, that includes other software that integrates into File Explorer.

I've also developed a strong dislike of their weird, "pretty", application-window-in-a-drop-down-menu interface. Just have a simple interface that respects the conventions of the host OS's UI, please...

Nextcloud is fantastic. I'm personally running it on a Debian 11 server. I like the web-ui more than for example onedrive or gdrive, and it's not even that hard to setup.

same. I've been running NextCloud for years on multiple installations (even on a small RaspberryPi under k8s at home) and it works perfectly.

Recently I read up about OwnCloud's OCIS and I really want to try it out, it sounds like it could scale much better than the PHP behemoth that is NextCloud (where all you can do if you have performance issues is throw more CPU and memory at the VM)

I'm not a PHP developer but I know that PHP is really fast, especially after v7. If only PHP developers stopped trying to write your typical corporate Java code with the tool, we'd have much faster websites.

I would love a slimmed down version of nextcloud, as it's php base make it very easy to install on cheap shared hosting.

Do you run it at your home or on some VPS? If the latter, and if you don't mind my asking, where do you find affordable storage for your VPS?

The biggest hurdle for me to use Nextcloud is that attaching a large storage to a VPS seems to be quite a bit more expensive than using Google drive, etc. My current VPS is on DigitalOcean, which asks for $100/month for 1TB storage. (To be fair to DO, the storage is SSD, but in this use case, the benefit of SSD is not particularly important)

Google drive and icloud both offer $9.99 for 2TB, and Onedrive offers 6TB for that price I think. That's $0.005/GB and $0.0017/GB respectively. As a comparison, S3 is $0.023/GB.

I use hetzner storage. You can attach it as external storage and costs 4 EUR https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=de

There's also Herzner storage share with is slightly more pricy at about 5 EUR but they manage nextcloud for you.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Although, as I understand it they don't actually financially support nextcloud. If you want hosted nextcloud that sends money back to development https://thegood.cloud/ or similar would do it.

> Although, as I understand it they don't actually financially support nextcloud. If you want hosted nextcloud that sends money back to development https://thegood.cloud/ or similar would do it.

This is plain stupid. If you want money to arrive at a developer, just send some yourself.

As for Nextcloud GmbH, it looks like they don't even want donations: https://help.nextcloud.com/t/is-there-a-paypal-donation-acco...

I don't think they want your money, not unless you are an enterprise costumer.

But feel free to donate to another open source project:

https://liberapay.com/

>Do you run it at your home or on some VPS?

I run it on a rented dedicated server. Yes, it's pretty expensive, but I also use it for other stuff and this is a hobby for me.

>My current VPS is on DigitalOcean, which asks for $100/month for 1TB storage

Some VPS providers let you attach HDD based storage to a VPS, that's a bit cheaper. For example Upcloud (https://upcloud.com/pricing) prices HDD storage at 0.056€/month. Which is not exactly cheap, but not terribly expensive either.

It seems to be hard to beat big cloud services like google drive in storage pricing. I haven't tried this myself, but Nextcloud can use external storage like Amazon S3 (see the link below). But even then it's hard to beat 2TB for $9.99

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...

Wow that’s expensive. If you are willing to get away from those highly dynamic providers and commit for a month or a year (which seems reasonable for that sort of thing) I currently rent a VPS at strato [1] with 1.5TB SSD/8 cores&16GB Ram guaranteed for 15€/month inkl an ipv4 and a TLD

[1]: https://www.strato.de/server/linux-vserver/

I just set mine up two days ago, VPS for NextCloud and storage is a RPi with a SATA SSD in my closet at home with Wireguard connecting the two. The NextCloud data folder pointed to NFS on storage. Its not the fastest solution, but it does work and gives my RPi a purpose.

How do you protect this setup? Have you used any kind of encryption?

I use Wireguard from the Pi to the VPS. It was really simple to setup.

Have a look on lowendtalk.com there are regular offers for cheap storage servers (I'm currently running a 2 Tb 6G 2CPU VPS that I got for $80 a year). Also if you just want to attach storage to an existing VPS you could get a storage box from hetzner. Other alternatives exist, e.g. Ionos.de had (has?) a nextcloud offer with 2TB for 10 euros a month.

S3 the is quite expensive the cheapest compatible alternative I'm aware of is idrive E2 which is $40 per year for 1Tb, they currently have an offer for $4 for the first year. That said I bought one of those offers and the connection from Europe was quite slow, however for that price it's an easy try.

Depending on your perf requirements, you could use one of those S3 mounts and put stuff in Wasabi or Backblaze.

Also, a minute on DDG brought me to AlphaVPS[0]. No idea if they’re any good, but the point is there are cheap storage providers out there. It’s a matter of spending the time to find and vet them.

[0] https://alphavps.com/storage-vps.html

I have a VPS for web hosting, but not enough storage for my Nextcloud needs. As mentioned by others, Hetzners Storage Box [1] has great value. I hooked up the latter to the former using Nextclouds External Storage and it works flawlessly. You could even think about running Nextcloud locally on a RaspPi and using this method to hook up cloud storage.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box [2] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...

Hetzner are great but you can't encrypt Hetzner Storage boxes. How do you keep your setup secured?

Most of my files are private but not sensitive, so I basically just trust them for those. A few sensitive files, which don't fit on the encrypted VPS, are encrypted classically using Veracrypt. I hope Nextcloud will support encrypting externally in the future, but for my use case it's not a big deal.

Thanks for the answer. So you've created a VeraCrypt file on your nextcloud folders?

Yes, it gets synched just like any other file inside my Nextcloud. However, if you have to often change the data inside, it might not be a suitable solution, since the file has to be uploaded as a whole. If it's a big container, it might be cumbersome to upload a few gig each time you make a small change.

Yes. Cryptomator is better in this regard.

I will have to take a look, thanks for the recommendation.

Nextcloud supports e2ee with a variety of controls, specifically for object storage on an untrusted host.

The keys are stored in the a folder on the server. I don't think it's good enough.

you should search for 'storage vps'

some providers have a dedicated category for these nodes _still using_ HDD

most VPS are only using SSD/NVMe (even attached storage) so it will be too expensive as you can see

example time4vps - 1tb storage is ~ 5 eur https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/

what are the drawbacks for you to run it in a home server?

I'm not the OP but for me it's connectivity (my home connection can be flaky at times) and maintaining a server with all the updates. I'd rather do it on shared hosting.

I can see that but if I were going to put significant money towards a subscription service, I'd rather try to fix my home connection with that money (granted that this may not be feasible in some circumstances, but it is for the vast majority of people)

Nothing wrong with a home server. In fact, I've already gotten a home server running, and I save my backups there. It's just that I don't quite trust my crappy apartment internet connection enough to make it as the only cloud drive. I might suddenly need a file when I'm out, while my computer is offline.

> If the latter, and if you don't mind my asking, where do you find affordable storage for your VPS?

Hetzner gives you 1 TB for Nextcloud for ~5.20 Euros/month: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

They also have their own storage offering, 1 TB is ~3.90 Euros/month: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Contabo gives you an 800 GB VPS for ~10.50 Euros/month or a 1600 GB VPS for ~17.50 Euros/month: https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/

Time4VPS also has a storage VPS, which is about on par with Contabo's pricing, but has discounts for first month. Right now they have a deal where you can get a 1 TB VPS for 26 Euros/year (a bit over 2 Euros/month), though renewals are regular price: https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/?affid=5294#annually (affiliate link, I use them for regular VPSes)

In comparison, a 1 TB HDD costs around 40 Euros where I'm from, way cheaper than most other options in the longer term, even with a backup drive or two added into the equation. Uptime remains a challenge then, though, as might data correctness long term and time spent validating whether backups actually work as expected (and keep doing so).

I run it on DO as well. The key is to shift the NextCloud storage to the Spaces Object Storage which is much cheaper.

How do you deal with encryption? Did you encrypted the storage volume, using the Server Side encryption of nextcloud or any other way? Was just thinking about that and I'm thinking what's the best way to enjoy both security and usability.

I love Nextcloud, I'm running it for years now on my home server (an old office computer, with extra storage). It basically replaces the Google cloud connectivity on my /e/ OS phone, syncing photos, calendar, contacts, todo. The web UI is nice, I use it to share larger videos sometimes.

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