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I was about to ask if a Raspberry Pi 2 would be sufficient to run OwnCloud, but it looks like it's the hardware of choice—great! Is there a way to run OwnCloud

I was about to ask if a Raspberry Pi 2 would be sufficient to run OwnCloud, but it looks like it's the hardware of choice—great! Is there a way to run OwnCloud along with a typical system (really, an ssh server and a few utility programs) on the Pi? It's mentioned as an SD card image, but it would be nice to run it on top of a normal Raspbian or Arch installation.

bigiain 11y ago
Keep in mind the choice of using a raspberry Pi comes along with the compromises made in the design of the Pi. For this specific use case, be aware that both network and USB bandwidth are limited. This'd be great for a network backup drive, where something like Time Machine or cron/rsync are regularly-but-not-continuously writing to the drive, but it'd fall to it's knees pretty quickly if you use it to host a household's media library and you start trying to pull several HD video streams from it simultaneously. Here's some good numbers - the onboard 10/100 ethernet can be upgraded with a 1GB USB3 adapter, but you still only get ~220Mb/sec, because you bump into the problem that the USB ports are only USB2, which is pretty much what limits the GB ethernet adaptor. And if you consume all the USB2 bus bandwidth for the network, there's then none left for the USB attached disk... http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gigabit-networking http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gig...
Aeolos 11y ago
ArchLinux ARM has packages for OwnCloud. Unfortunately, the software itself is a PHP spaghetti monster from hell (is there any other kind?) that doesn't really scale. Even worse, the RPi is extremely limited in I/O capabilities, with only a single USB2 hub shared between the 100Mbit ethernet and 4x USB2 connections (including your harddrive.) This means that any file transfer is limited to 10-11 MB/s in the best case... We can only hope that a RPi3 will with USB3 support will materialize before 2020. I am running a RPi2 as a home server / NAS / VPN / seedbox, and it works - as long as you set your expectations right. Finally, note that the RPi kernel stack is always slightly outdated due to out-of-tree patches. Most ARM SOCs suffer from this problem, and the RPi foundation is slowly taking steps to fix that after years of user pressure. However, I have decided to switch to a low-power x86 CPU with a fully open linux stack for my future home server needs, until ARM decides to fix their driver mess.
- Carrok 11y ago
  > Unfortunately, the software itself is a PHP spaghetti monster from hell (is there any other kind?) that doesn't really scale. And here you go invalidating your whole post with some unnecessary inflammatory B.S. Sure, I mean Facebook runs on PHP, but we all know it just doesn't scale and can't be written cleanly.
  - gcommer 11y ago
    On the other hand, Facebook being built on PHP meant they eventually felt the need to dedicate significant engineering time into building their own PHP VM (HHVM) along with their own spin-off of the PHP language (Hack) to get it to work for them.
    - thejosh 11y ago
      Yeah, and they could have switched to any language they wanted, but they stuck with PHP and created HHVM (they most likely run other languages as well). They also felt the need to create other open source things you have had heard of, such as react.
      - bigiain 11y ago
        Heh - it's funny you mention React there, in the context of sticking with PHP instead of jumping ship to some more appropriate technology: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest... It was only 4 years ago when creating HTML5 based hybrid mobile apps was "the biggest mistake Facebook ever made", and it was all about "native apps" for iOS and Android... Now React and React Native are "the new hotness"...
        thejosh 11y ago
        Or maybe the devices are "good enough" now to actually run these sorts of things? But yes, it is a circle of life.

bigiain 11y ago

Keep in mind the choice of using a raspberry Pi comes along with the compromises made in the design of the Pi. For this specific use case, be aware that both network and USB bandwidth are limited. This'd be great for a network backup drive, where something like Time Machine or cron/rsync are regularly-but-not-continuously writing to the drive, but it'd fall to it's knees pretty quickly if you use it to host a household's media library and you start trying to pull several HD video streams from it simultaneously. Here's some good numbers - the onboard 10/100 ethernet can be upgraded with a 1GB USB3 adapter, but you still only get ~220Mb/sec, because you bump into the problem that the USB ports are only USB2, which is pretty much what limits the GB ethernet adaptor. And if you consume all the USB2 bus bandwidth for the network, there's then none left for the USB attached disk... http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gigabit-networking http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/getting-gig...

Aeolos 11y ago

ArchLinux ARM has packages for OwnCloud. Unfortunately, the software itself is a PHP spaghetti monster from hell (is there any other kind?) that doesn't really scale. Even worse, the RPi is extremely limited in I/O capabilities, with only a single USB2 hub shared between the 100Mbit ethernet and 4x USB2 connections (including your harddrive.) This means that any file transfer is limited to 10-11 MB/s in the best case... We can only hope that a RPi3 will with USB3 support will materialize before 2020. I am running a RPi2 as a home server / NAS / VPN / seedbox, and it works - as long as you set your expectations right. Finally, note that the RPi kernel stack is always slightly outdated due to out-of-tree patches. Most ARM SOCs suffer from this problem, and the RPi foundation is slowly taking steps to fix that after years of user pressure. However, I have decided to switch to a low-power x86 CPU with a fully open linux stack for my future home server needs, until ARM decides to fix their driver mess.

Carrok 11y ago
> Unfortunately, the software itself is a PHP spaghetti monster from hell (is there any other kind?) that doesn't really scale. And here you go invalidating your whole post with some unnecessary inflammatory B.S. Sure, I mean Facebook runs on PHP, but we all know it just doesn't scale and can't be written cleanly.
- gcommer 11y ago
  On the other hand, Facebook being built on PHP meant they eventually felt the need to dedicate significant engineering time into building their own PHP VM (HHVM) along with their own spin-off of the PHP language (Hack) to get it to work for them.
  - thejosh 11y ago
    Yeah, and they could have switched to any language they wanted, but they stuck with PHP and created HHVM (they most likely run other languages as well). They also felt the need to create other open source things you have had heard of, such as react.
    - bigiain 11y ago
      Heh - it's funny you mention React there, in the context of sticking with PHP instead of jumping ship to some more appropriate technology: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest... It was only 4 years ago when creating HTML5 based hybrid mobile apps was "the biggest mistake Facebook ever made", and it was all about "native apps" for iOS and Android... Now React and React Native are "the new hotness"...
      - thejosh 11y ago
        Or maybe the devices are "good enough" now to actually run these sorts of things? But yes, it is a circle of life.