15 ms·

Nextcloud Hub 21

208 points by threatofrain 6y ago

foolinaround 6y ago
what would be great is to allow a client to connect to more than 1 nextcloud instances. For example, from my machine, i can connect to my nextcloud, and also to some folders shared from my group's nextcloud.
- gramakri 6y ago
  The Linux client can connect to multiple nextcloud instances. Its been that way for years.
- biktor_gj 6y ago
  You can connect multiple accounts from the desktop client if that's what you mean... If you mean nextcloud to nextcloud there's also federation, but haven't really tried that as I've never needed it.
- kop316 6y ago
  What client are you using? I have that capability on my Android client, Linux client, and windows client, and it works extremely well.
40four 6y ago
I started running a self hosted Nextcloud instance last year, and I couldn’t be happier with it! This release sounds exciting, guess it’s time to go upgrade :) For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.
- Iolaum 6y ago
  Same here. Happy user of self hosted nextcloud through the nextcloudpi project. It's been so care free I don't remember the setup details any more :)
- belval 6y ago
  I think my instance is 3-4 years old at this point and I am impressed by how little work I had to put into it over the years. I set it up using Snap and it auto updates so the whole process is quite carefree.
- hexanal 6y ago
  To echo what the other replies are saying: mine has been running on a DigitalOcean droplet since early 2019 and I only had to reboot it once. It syncs everything, the iOS app and web dashboard are adequate. I would recommend it (but I haven't tried anything else, other than Google Drive or Dropbox, of course)
  - reasonabl_human 6y ago
    Haven’t used droplets, do you have to manage backups yourself or is it part of the service?
    - notesinthefield 6y ago
      Its a paid add-on iirc
    - 40four 6y ago
      Droplets are great, and I like the ease of use of Digital Ocean. But, as far as server backups go, I've never liked managing these, so I use an external data store and DB server. In my case, my instance is wired up to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an RDS database. If you set it up this way, there is no need to worry about backups of the application server. I could nuke the app server, change hosting providers, or if there was a hardware failure or whatever, it won't matter. I can always spin up a fresh server, and plug back into my external DB and data store.
    - jffry 6y ago
      You can add disk-level backups to droplets, IIRC it will keep four weekly backups, for +20% price to the droplet
- reasonabl_human 6y ago
  Very easy to setup and maintain with a dedicated unraid box. Grab an old dell enterprise server like the r210 II and put some WD reds in raid + zfs, install unraid, and it’s good to go. I actually virtualize unraid within esxi so that one small 1U box can be my router / firewall and an unraid machine serving home services. Best setup I’ve ever had and learned so much along the way!
  - 40four 6y ago
    This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :) I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.
    - teekert 6y ago
      My physical home server is a nuc. Could also be a Raspberry Pi 4, little hardware skill required :)
    - cbcoutinho 6y ago
      How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.
      - 40four 6y ago
        That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it. In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :) Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space. You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Are there recommendation for hosts which offer pricing comparable to Google One[1], has backup & trust in the community? [1]https://one.google.com/about/plans https://one.google.com/about/plans
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Hetzner offer managed Nextcloud instances for quite cheap. It works well. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
  - trystero 6y ago
    Lots of them: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers
aargh_aargh 6y ago
HN hug of death? https://web.archive.org/web/20210222123752/https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-21-out-with-up-to-10x-better-performance-whiteboard-and-more-collaboration-features/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210222123752/https://nextcloud...
- josalhor 6y ago
  Looks to me more like Reddit hug of death: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_now_using_rust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_n...
  - rapsey 6y ago
    A /r/rust reddit thread is nothing compared to front page HN.
    - josalhor 6y ago
      To be fair, at the time I wrote my comment the Reddit post had 400+ votes and the HN one was in the early double digits IIRC.
- GreenToad 6y ago
  anyone remembers the term "slashdotted"?
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    Oh to be young again
  - reasonabl_human 6y ago
    No, where did this come from?
    - phaer 6y ago
      https://slashdot.org/ https://slashdot.org/ was quite a popular source of tech-related news back in the very late 20th and early 21th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot
francis-io 6y ago
I trialed setting up my own nextcloud instance a while back. It's still very complex to get working in docker. From memory, the card/caldav traefik rewrites are still not working. SSL was complex to setup with Collabora, and still required manual GUI steps to link into Nextcloud (my biggest pet peeve). I also remember getting the initial setup wrong a few times in the initial setup wizard, which required me to delete my whole local config. Performance was a little slow, but that could be down to my own hardware. It was just consumer grade i5 cpu and a basic SSD, in docker. The examples they provide are good, but you cant really provide for every different config. I wanted to use traefik, so I brought the complexity on my self. Heres where I got too, eventually stopping my trial of Nextcloud. https://gist.github.com/francis-io/935be5679b3308f5fbc3fe1bb78ae885 https://gist.github.com/francis-io/935be5679b3308f5fbc3fe1bb... My wishlist for future effort by the devs would be: - Fully configured via env vars (and in Collabora too). - I would rather any config or state be kept in the db. It makes backup and restore easier. Env vars could be set in the db, and any restart, has the set env vars overwrite anything in the db. I want to have confidence that I can restore a db + files and have a working service come back up. At the moment, I don't trust Nextcloud to always come back up. - Keep config separate from user files. - Focus on improving speed (which it looks like they are adressing with this post). - Focus on more app usability. I remember in portrait it being hard to use. Overall, the software is great and I'm looking forward to the future, but to store my personal data I will need to have a little more confidence. (I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN)
- 3np 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience, given how I treat software it sounds like I would extremely frustrated with some things that "the average user" doesn't mind at all. Sounds like I should give it another year or two before considering Nextcloud (because her, I assume they're working on it!) > (I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN) For short points: indent with two spaces (longer become horrible on mobile). Or just do double newlines between the points like a normal person (;))
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Hmm, my Docker-Compose file is much less complicated: https://www.pastery.net/zykzva/ https://www.pastery.net/zykzva/ Though I do have a 4-line Caddy config and a Postgres server on the host.
l72 6y ago
I really wish there was an LTS release that was supported for at least 2 years (just bugfixes, no new features). I self host my own instance, and I really just want to set it and forget it. I don't mind doing low risk patches every few months or weeks, but I don't want to do a major version upgrade every 4-6 months. I did my last major version upgrade only 15 months ago, and I am now 4 major versions behind, which means: 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks! 2) I either start over with the latest version I like that open source moves fast, but at some point, I just want to stop fiddling with it and let it run with minimal maintenance.
- znpy 6y ago
  > 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks! I did a similar path (started from 18 iirc) and nothing broke. But there's a catch, because I have some safeguards in place: 1. Nextcloud has its own dataset in a ZFS zpool. I take snapshots hourly, and I took a snapshot just before upgrading 2. I run nextcloud and its own postgreql via docker-compose. the docker-compose file along with the configuration and data are stored in nextcloud's own dataset. This means that os-level dependencies are not a problem for me. this also mean that reverting the whole thing to before-upgrade is very easy: just rollback to the before-update snapshot. 3. (unrelated) snapshot are replicated to another location, which means that I might perform the upgrade on that other site and switch the dns when it's done and if i'm satisfied. I don't do that, for my personal use 1-2 hours downtime it's okay. 4. I'll let nextcloud perform its auto-upgrade procedures, take a snapshot after every upgrade, and at the end I'll perform the tasks suggested in the self-assesment page (adding indexes, changing columns types etc). You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem.
  - prophesi 6y ago
    > You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Sure, better dev ops would make major upgrades safer and easier. But for a hobbyist self-hosting their own instance, a LTS release would be a godsend to save them hours of unpaid work.
e-Minguez 6y ago
I'm a little bit worried with the shift from a 'cloud' storage solution to a groupware software... I only need the storage bits but it seems they are focusing on the groupware thing lately...
- laurent123456 6y ago
  They are focusing on entreprise features, because that's where money is. I also wish they had a separate "light" offer with just the storage and a few basic apps. As it is, I think they are stretching their resources and some part of their offering is going to suffer as a result (we already saw quite a few severe bugs in the past year and some basic functionalities, like file locking or caching, is still not right). Personally I'm only staying with Nextcloud because there's unfortunately no good alternative for now.
- berkes 6y ago
  I presume that is where the money is. Either independent contributors who make money as consultants, or a foundation that gets sponsoring, or a commercial company behind the project: enterprise has the money. So inevitable, it will gravitaye towards more enterprisey features. I'm not saying that I have knowledge about what happens here with Nextcloud. But in FLOSS this has been seen often: from Drupal to LibreOffice: it moves away from 'consumers with simple needs' and towards 'heavy users'.
- nodja 6y ago
  This is my problem with it as well. I used to have a self hosted nextcloud instance, but my main usage was for the file syncing. Nextcloud seems to be poor to decent at everything it does, but never great. So unless your goal is to have a suite of mediocre appliances that do the bare minimum, nextcloud is good. But all I wanted was a nice and quick way to sync all my files (I'm talking 500k files here) and have some sort of versioning in case I fuck up, so I moved to syncthing.
  - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
    I moved from syncthing (and seafile) to nexcloud because I was missing one key thing: the ability to share files (by providing an URL, or to a group (think common files with spouse)). Otherwise I completely agree with the sentiment.
goalieca 6y ago
I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance. Perhaps there is a configuration issue, but at my work it is one of the slowest services aside from jira. I actually try to avoid opening jira and next cloud because it’s frustratingly slow to browse. Edit: I was eager to see the link with the 10x performance number. I do hope it improves because we are in need of a service like that.
- jerf 6y ago
  "I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance." Static file serving is easy. If you don't even need SSL because it's all signed content, it's really easy. Linux has a syscall [1] where you can tell the kernel "ok, now, send this file through this socket without bothering userspace anymore", meaning you get full kernel-mode file transfer without even context switching. I've got static file servers serving similar types of content shipping out dozens to hundreds of megabytes per second that barely hit 3% of one CPU usage. [1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html
  - goalieca 6y ago
    Browsing a directory of essentially static artifacts is really slow in nextcloud. Git isn’t the best place to store binaries and assets and we tried nextcloud as an alternative since we are already hosting it.
    - jerf 6y ago
      Nextcloud isn't serving static files, it was serving a database hit in a PHP environment throwing away a lot of stuff on every connection and doing all sorts of things. Presumably this newer backend does less stuff (as that is the key to performance). Debian serves static files.
      - pessimizer 6y ago
lou1306 6y ago
Personally, I love NextCloud as a contacts/calendar storage. I have an instance from a cloud provider, I use DAVx5 [1] to sync with my Android phone, and I set up a CalDAV account on my MacOS, so I can see nextCloud calendars on Calendar.app. Sadly, NextCloud's CardDAV doen not seem to work on macOS, but that's a relatively minor issue. [1]: https://www.davx5.com/ https://www.davx5.com/
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  I have it working on macOS for me.
- znpy 6y ago
  Big kudos to davx5, it helped me set up calendar integration on android.
MayeulC 6y ago
I'm not sure there is such a thing, but I would like to see some CRDT format being adopted as a first-class data structure inside of nextcloud. This could be built upon for things such as the Whiteboard, but also note-taking applications (Carnet, nextcloud notes...), contacts, and more. Also, I wish nextcloud talk was using Matrix, there seems to be much duplicated effort between the two, and I am not even sure Nextcloud Talk federates.
rektide 6y ago
> The High Performance Back-end for Files in Nextcloud is an optional, binary component developed in Rust. It is capable of maintaining a direct connection with desktop and web clients, providing file change and notification updates to the clients. petty as heck but nextcloud being entirely php (afaik) until now has been a huge turn off. Moving some critical online bits to rust is a huge indicator to me that the team is taking resource consumption & performance optimization seriously.
jaxslayerv 6y ago
https://birdtraps.com.ng/ https://birdtraps.com.ng/
pid_0 6y ago
I wish companies would stop using emojis completely. Its just weird
Aachen 6y ago
Does that mean it's now reliable when putting it in a public-facing place? An orga that shall not be named used nextcloud for various important things and had it connected to the Internet, which for modern open source software is usually okay. But then a friend found that you can take the whole system down from a 56k modem (pre-auth) and it had to be recommended the Orga keep it internal, which was an issue because they iirc also used it for file sharing with externals. As far as I know it's very rare that someone bothers with exploiting denial of service bugs, but given how trivial (triggerable by hand) this was, it's still a bit risky. The bug was of course reported to them but closed as wontfix dontcare because there were too many other ways of taking it down already. Php was blamed iirc (which really isn't the culprit).
- 40four 6y ago
  I'm really not sure why you are asking this question? Nextcloud is used by thousands of enterprise level & small private users on public facing servers. Can you be more clear about what you mean by "a friend found that you can take that whole system down from a 56k modem"? I have no idea what you mean by that. You mention denial of service. Are you claiming a Nextcloud instance can be DoS'ed by a single computer with a 56k internet connection? Respectfully, that is quite a sensational claim/ stance to take.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    Yeah I'm being a bit more vague than I'd like, I should have taken the effort of going to my pc (am on phone) where I have a password manager to login to the account under my real name. I don't want to connect this one too much. Without posting the specific exploit, the issue is with the server-side sleep() in the login system. If you spawn enough threads, which you could easily do in the given time from even a 56k modem, it will for some reason crash the whole thing. Tested with a couple friends and all the instances had to be restarted manually, none of them (running on different web servers) withstood it. It's not clear why as the sleep should simply run through and then unblock the threads; for some reason that's not what happens. Again, this was reported and they don't care. If you want more info, this should be enough to reproduce it without much effort and/or ask them about it (not sure if they made the ticket public, initial report probably was presumably private due to the pre-auth/unconditional nature).
achempion 6y ago
The project is great and I made simple setup in docker to play around with it. There is official docker image you can use https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud. The problem I see with similar services is they all trying to pack everything. You can also install external components into your system. What it means in practice is huge area for security vulnerabilities, challenge to host/upgrade it at home on weekends and very complex user interface (easy to mess up with privacy settings). I really scared to host such systems because of all related issues. Maybe it isn't big deal at all. Probably, most of home use cases can be resolved by simple XMPP server (video calls, group chat, image/links sharing) plus some shared folder across the network to store some files/photos.
- ev1 6y ago
  I haven't used Nextcloud before, do you happen to know if there's an easy way to just want the file sharing? I don't care for whiteboards or collaboration, I just want a Dropbox equivalent where I can upload files and give other people public or one-time or expiring links to download/wget.
  - mikewhy 6y ago
    When you set up Nextcloud, it has a wizard prompting you for "apps" to install. Can't remember what the choices are exactly, but there's a "simple" choice that is just file sharing.
  - ctrlc-root 6y ago
    Yes, you can disable the internal apps it ships with if you don't want to use them and just not install any third-party ones either. Only caveat is during one upgrade I noticed some of them had been re-enabled so now I make sure to check each time.
  - achempion 6y ago
    Probably the most simple way would be to rent S3 compatible storage at Lidonde/DO and use client like https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io to mount it in your system.
sundarurfriend 6y ago
To the people who have been using Nextcloud successfully for years: is your usage mainly PC-PC or PC-iOS synchronization? Is anyone here running PC-Android synchronization with files that change more often than once a day? My experience with the Nextcloud Android app is that the automatic sync is quite limited (eg. https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/757 https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/757, https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/19 https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/19). Every change has to be manually synced by opening the app and navigating to the Sync option for each file. This is pretty much a dealbreaker for me, but it looks like a lot of people are using Nextcloud successfully. So I'm curious how your usage differs from mine - do you only use it for static unchanging files that don't need to be synchronized that often, or is the sync situation smoother on other devices?
- bisby 6y ago
  I use it for the automatic photos upload primarily. But anything else that changes rapidly, I use a dedicated app. I've never had major issues with the core nextcloud app, but I also don't use it for anything before the photo upload. DAVx5 for caldav stuff, Nextcloud Notes for notes.. These apps seem to handle the sync separately on their own.
- ntnsndr 6y ago
  I use it daily for syncing among multiple Linux PCs and two Android/Lineage devices. I actually like that mobile sync is manual because my usage is so heavy it would involve moving around a lot of data unnecessarily. Setting up my wife with NC on mobile, however, reminded me of lots of ways in which I've accustomed myself to some pretty weird behaviors, like manual syncing, the built in text editor that doesn't load without being online. I love NC (I use it both for personal needs and with students in my lab) but there are definitely UX issues that present a barrier to new users.
kderbyma 6y ago
nextcloud is awesome. I have been using it on my self hosted cloud and it's been fantastic. some features are better than the cloud providers
anderspitman 6y ago
When it comes to self-hosting, there are 2 key components: the service software itself (ie Nextcloud), and the network plumbing to connect everything together. The networking has gotten quite complex due to NAT, HTTPS, DNS, IPv4 exhaustion, etc. I maintain a list of software to help simplify the networking bits: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
- mwsfc 6y ago
  Thanks for the reference. Spinning up individual containers has become quite easy these days, but agree networking still takes some work to get everything playing together nicely.
twobitshifter 6y ago
I tried picloud which packages nextcloud up for the raspberry pi 3B+. It really wasn’t able to handle even a single user but maybe I had something misconfigured.
kissgyorgy 6y ago
If you check my earlier comments, I often praise Nextcloud and the team behind it, but this is even more crazier by their own standards!
swiley 6y ago
I'm still not convinced this is better than a shell account with a c-git and prosody instance.
instb3at 6y ago
I use Nextcloud for almost all the stuff I do in day to day life. I run it in docker swarm mode on a 5yr old pc running Debian @home. Freemyip for updating my dynamic IP address What I use it for ? 1. Notes (Use FSnotes and sync md files) 2. Keypassxc for passwords (sync it using Nextcloud) 3. Photos upload (From Amazon & Google) 4. My recordings & videos 5. Documents (Moved from G Drive) 6. Bookmarks Where I would like to see improvements? Photos - badly want this to be usable on mobile phones I am happy overall with Nextcloud. The only time I screwed up is when I didn't know about the upgrade process. Tried moving from 18→20 and totally gone wrong.
- loughnane 6y ago
  Could you point me to resources on the upgrade? I'm at 20 now (what i originally installed) and am a bit miffed at the process. I use docker-compose and nextcloud is much different than all my other containers.

208 points by threatofrain 6y ago

what would be great is to allow a client to connect to more than 1 nextcloud instances. For example, from my machine, i can connect to my nextcloud, and also to some folders shared from my group's nextcloud.

gramakri 6y ago
The Linux client can connect to multiple nextcloud instances. Its been that way for years.
biktor_gj 6y ago
You can connect multiple accounts from the desktop client if that's what you mean... If you mean nextcloud to nextcloud there's also federation, but haven't really tried that as I've never needed it.
kop316 6y ago
What client are you using? I have that capability on my Android client, Linux client, and windows client, and it works extremely well.

40four 6y ago

I started running a self hosted Nextcloud instance last year, and I couldn’t be happier with it! This release sounds exciting, guess it’s time to go upgrade :) For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.

Iolaum 6y ago
Same here. Happy user of self hosted nextcloud through the nextcloudpi project. It's been so care free I don't remember the setup details any more :)
belval 6y ago
I think my instance is 3-4 years old at this point and I am impressed by how little work I had to put into it over the years. I set it up using Snap and it auto updates so the whole process is quite carefree.
hexanal 6y ago
To echo what the other replies are saying: mine has been running on a DigitalOcean droplet since early 2019 and I only had to reboot it once. It syncs everything, the iOS app and web dashboard are adequate. I would recommend it (but I haven't tried anything else, other than Google Drive or Dropbox, of course)
- reasonabl_human 6y ago
  Haven’t used droplets, do you have to manage backups yourself or is it part of the service?
  - notesinthefield 6y ago
    Its a paid add-on iirc
  - 40four 6y ago
    Droplets are great, and I like the ease of use of Digital Ocean. But, as far as server backups go, I've never liked managing these, so I use an external data store and DB server. In my case, my instance is wired up to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an RDS database. If you set it up this way, there is no need to worry about backups of the application server. I could nuke the app server, change hosting providers, or if there was a hardware failure or whatever, it won't matter. I can always spin up a fresh server, and plug back into my external DB and data store.
  - jffry 6y ago
    You can add disk-level backups to droplets, IIRC it will keep four weekly backups, for +20% price to the droplet
reasonabl_human 6y ago
Very easy to setup and maintain with a dedicated unraid box. Grab an old dell enterprise server like the r210 II and put some WD reds in raid + zfs, install unraid, and it’s good to go. I actually virtualize unraid within esxi so that one small 1U box can be my router / firewall and an unraid machine serving home services. Best setup I’ve ever had and learned so much along the way!
- 40four 6y ago
  This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :) I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.
  - teekert 6y ago
    My physical home server is a nuc. Could also be a Raspberry Pi 4, little hardware skill required :)
  - cbcoutinho 6y ago
    How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.
    - 40four 6y ago
      That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it. In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :) Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space. You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Are there recommendation for hosts which offer pricing comparable to Google One[1], has backup & trust in the community? [1]https://one.google.com/about/plans https://one.google.com/about/plans
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Hetzner offer managed Nextcloud instances for quite cheap. It works well. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
- trystero 6y ago
  Lots of them: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers

aargh_aargh 6y ago

HN hug of death? https://web.archive.org/web/20210222123752/https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-21-out-with-up-to-10x-better-performance-whiteboard-and-more-collaboration-features/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210222123752/https://nextcloud...

josalhor 6y ago
Looks to me more like Reddit hug of death: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_now_using_rust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_n...
- rapsey 6y ago
  A /r/rust reddit thread is nothing compared to front page HN.
  - josalhor 6y ago
    To be fair, at the time I wrote my comment the Reddit post had 400+ votes and the HN one was in the early double digits IIRC.
GreenToad 6y ago
anyone remembers the term "slashdotted"?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  Oh to be young again
- reasonabl_human 6y ago
  No, where did this come from?
  - phaer 6y ago
    https://slashdot.org/ https://slashdot.org/ was quite a popular source of tech-related news back in the very late 20th and early 21th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

francis-io 6y ago

I trialed setting up my own nextcloud instance a while back. It's still very complex to get working in docker. From memory, the card/caldav traefik rewrites are still not working. SSL was complex to setup with Collabora, and still required manual GUI steps to link into Nextcloud (my biggest pet peeve). I also remember getting the initial setup wrong a few times in the initial setup wizard, which required me to delete my whole local config. Performance was a little slow, but that could be down to my own hardware. It was just consumer grade i5 cpu and a basic SSD, in docker. The examples they provide are good, but you cant really provide for every different config. I wanted to use traefik, so I brought the complexity on my self. Heres where I got too, eventually stopping my trial of Nextcloud. https://gist.github.com/francis-io/935be5679b3308f5fbc3fe1bb78ae885 https://gist.github.com/francis-io/935be5679b3308f5fbc3fe1bb... My wishlist for future effort by the devs would be: - Fully configured via env vars (and in Collabora too). - I would rather any config or state be kept in the db. It makes backup and restore easier. Env vars could be set in the db, and any restart, has the set env vars overwrite anything in the db. I want to have confidence that I can restore a db + files and have a working service come back up. At the moment, I don't trust Nextcloud to always come back up. - Keep config separate from user files. - Focus on improving speed (which it looks like they are adressing with this post). - Focus on more app usability. I remember in portrait it being hard to use. Overall, the software is great and I'm looking forward to the future, but to store my personal data I will need to have a little more confidence. (I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN)

3np 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience, given how I treat software it sounds like I would extremely frustrated with some things that "the average user" doesn't mind at all. Sounds like I should give it another year or two before considering Nextcloud (because her, I assume they're working on it!) > (I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN) For short points: indent with two spaces (longer become horrible on mobile). Or just do double newlines between the points like a normal person (;))
StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, my Docker-Compose file is much less complicated: https://www.pastery.net/zykzva/ https://www.pastery.net/zykzva/ Though I do have a 4-line Caddy config and a Postgres server on the host.

l72 6y ago

I really wish there was an LTS release that was supported for at least 2 years (just bugfixes, no new features). I self host my own instance, and I really just want to set it and forget it. I don't mind doing low risk patches every few months or weeks, but I don't want to do a major version upgrade every 4-6 months. I did my last major version upgrade only 15 months ago, and I am now 4 major versions behind, which means: 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks! 2) I either start over with the latest version I like that open source moves fast, but at some point, I just want to stop fiddling with it and let it run with minimal maintenance.

znpy 6y ago
> 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks! I did a similar path (started from 18 iirc) and nothing broke. But there's a catch, because I have some safeguards in place: 1. Nextcloud has its own dataset in a ZFS zpool. I take snapshots hourly, and I took a snapshot just before upgrading 2. I run nextcloud and its own postgreql via docker-compose. the docker-compose file along with the configuration and data are stored in nextcloud's own dataset. This means that os-level dependencies are not a problem for me. this also mean that reverting the whole thing to before-upgrade is very easy: just rollback to the before-update snapshot. 3. (unrelated) snapshot are replicated to another location, which means that I might perform the upgrade on that other site and switch the dns when it's done and if i'm satisfied. I don't do that, for my personal use 1-2 hours downtime it's okay. 4. I'll let nextcloud perform its auto-upgrade procedures, take a snapshot after every upgrade, and at the end I'll perform the tasks suggested in the self-assesment page (adding indexes, changing columns types etc). You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem.
- prophesi 6y ago
  > You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem. Those aren't mutually exclusive. Sure, better dev ops would make major upgrades safer and easier. But for a hobbyist self-hosting their own instance, a LTS release would be a godsend to save them hours of unpaid work.

e-Minguez 6y ago

I'm a little bit worried with the shift from a 'cloud' storage solution to a groupware software... I only need the storage bits but it seems they are focusing on the groupware thing lately...

laurent123456 6y ago
They are focusing on entreprise features, because that's where money is. I also wish they had a separate "light" offer with just the storage and a few basic apps. As it is, I think they are stretching their resources and some part of their offering is going to suffer as a result (we already saw quite a few severe bugs in the past year and some basic functionalities, like file locking or caching, is still not right). Personally I'm only staying with Nextcloud because there's unfortunately no good alternative for now.
berkes 6y ago
I presume that is where the money is. Either independent contributors who make money as consultants, or a foundation that gets sponsoring, or a commercial company behind the project: enterprise has the money. So inevitable, it will gravitaye towards more enterprisey features. I'm not saying that I have knowledge about what happens here with Nextcloud. But in FLOSS this has been seen often: from Drupal to LibreOffice: it moves away from 'consumers with simple needs' and towards 'heavy users'.
nodja 6y ago
This is my problem with it as well. I used to have a self hosted nextcloud instance, but my main usage was for the file syncing. Nextcloud seems to be poor to decent at everything it does, but never great. So unless your goal is to have a suite of mediocre appliances that do the bare minimum, nextcloud is good. But all I wanted was a nice and quick way to sync all my files (I'm talking 500k files here) and have some sort of versioning in case I fuck up, so I moved to syncthing.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  I moved from syncthing (and seafile) to nexcloud because I was missing one key thing: the ability to share files (by providing an URL, or to a group (think common files with spouse)). Otherwise I completely agree with the sentiment.

goalieca 6y ago

I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance. Perhaps there is a configuration issue, but at my work it is one of the slowest services aside from jira. I actually try to avoid opening jira and next cloud because it’s frustratingly slow to browse. Edit: I was eager to see the link with the 10x performance number. I do hope it improves because we are in need of a service like that.

jerf 6y ago
"I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance." Static file serving is easy. If you don't even need SSL because it's all signed content, it's really easy. Linux has a syscall [1] where you can tell the kernel "ok, now, send this file through this socket without bothering userspace anymore", meaning you get full kernel-mode file transfer without even context switching. I've got static file servers serving similar types of content shipping out dozens to hundreds of megabytes per second that barely hit 3% of one CPU usage. [1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html
- goalieca 6y ago
  Browsing a directory of essentially static artifacts is really slow in nextcloud. Git isn’t the best place to store binaries and assets and we tried nextcloud as an alternative since we are already hosting it.
  - jerf 6y ago
    Nextcloud isn't serving static files, it was serving a database hit in a PHP environment throwing away a lot of stuff on every connection and doing all sorts of things. Presumably this newer backend does less stuff (as that is the key to performance). Debian serves static files.
    - pessimizer 6y ago

lou1306 6y ago

Personally, I love NextCloud as a contacts/calendar storage. I have an instance from a cloud provider, I use DAVx5 [1] to sync with my Android phone, and I set up a CalDAV account on my MacOS, so I can see nextCloud calendars on Calendar.app. Sadly, NextCloud's CardDAV doen not seem to work on macOS, but that's a relatively minor issue. [1]: https://www.davx5.com/ https://www.davx5.com/

ViViDboarder 6y ago
I have it working on macOS for me.
znpy 6y ago
Big kudos to davx5, it helped me set up calendar integration on android.

MayeulC 6y ago

I'm not sure there is such a thing, but I would like to see some CRDT format being adopted as a first-class data structure inside of nextcloud. This could be built upon for things such as the Whiteboard, but also note-taking applications (Carnet, nextcloud notes...), contacts, and more. Also, I wish nextcloud talk was using Matrix, there seems to be much duplicated effort between the two, and I am not even sure Nextcloud Talk federates.

rektide 6y ago

> The High Performance Back-end for Files in Nextcloud is an optional, binary component developed in Rust. It is capable of maintaining a direct connection with desktop and web clients, providing file change and notification updates to the clients. petty as heck but nextcloud being entirely php (afaik) until now has been a huge turn off. Moving some critical online bits to rust is a huge indicator to me that the team is taking resource consumption & performance optimization seriously.

jaxslayerv 6y ago

https://birdtraps.com.ng/ https://birdtraps.com.ng/

pid_0 6y ago

I wish companies would stop using emojis completely. Its just weird

Aachen 6y ago

Does that mean it's now reliable when putting it in a public-facing place? An orga that shall not be named used nextcloud for various important things and had it connected to the Internet, which for modern open source software is usually okay. But then a friend found that you can take the whole system down from a 56k modem (pre-auth) and it had to be recommended the Orga keep it internal, which was an issue because they iirc also used it for file sharing with externals. As far as I know it's very rare that someone bothers with exploiting denial of service bugs, but given how trivial (triggerable by hand) this was, it's still a bit risky. The bug was of course reported to them but closed as wontfix dontcare because there were too many other ways of taking it down already. Php was blamed iirc (which really isn't the culprit).

40four 6y ago
I'm really not sure why you are asking this question? Nextcloud is used by thousands of enterprise level & small private users on public facing servers. Can you be more clear about what you mean by "a friend found that you can take that whole system down from a 56k modem"? I have no idea what you mean by that. You mention denial of service. Are you claiming a Nextcloud instance can be DoS'ed by a single computer with a 56k internet connection? Respectfully, that is quite a sensational claim/ stance to take.
- Aachen 6y ago
  Yeah I'm being a bit more vague than I'd like, I should have taken the effort of going to my pc (am on phone) where I have a password manager to login to the account under my real name. I don't want to connect this one too much. Without posting the specific exploit, the issue is with the server-side sleep() in the login system. If you spawn enough threads, which you could easily do in the given time from even a 56k modem, it will for some reason crash the whole thing. Tested with a couple friends and all the instances had to be restarted manually, none of them (running on different web servers) withstood it. It's not clear why as the sleep should simply run through and then unblock the threads; for some reason that's not what happens. Again, this was reported and they don't care. If you want more info, this should be enough to reproduce it without much effort and/or ask them about it (not sure if they made the ticket public, initial report probably was presumably private due to the pre-auth/unconditional nature).

achempion 6y ago

The project is great and I made simple setup in docker to play around with it. There is official docker image you can use https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud. The problem I see with similar services is they all trying to pack everything. You can also install external components into your system. What it means in practice is huge area for security vulnerabilities, challenge to host/upgrade it at home on weekends and very complex user interface (easy to mess up with privacy settings). I really scared to host such systems because of all related issues. Maybe it isn't big deal at all. Probably, most of home use cases can be resolved by simple XMPP server (video calls, group chat, image/links sharing) plus some shared folder across the network to store some files/photos.

ev1 6y ago
I haven't used Nextcloud before, do you happen to know if there's an easy way to just want the file sharing? I don't care for whiteboards or collaboration, I just want a Dropbox equivalent where I can upload files and give other people public or one-time or expiring links to download/wget.
- mikewhy 6y ago
  When you set up Nextcloud, it has a wizard prompting you for "apps" to install. Can't remember what the choices are exactly, but there's a "simple" choice that is just file sharing.
- ctrlc-root 6y ago
  Yes, you can disable the internal apps it ships with if you don't want to use them and just not install any third-party ones either. Only caveat is during one upgrade I noticed some of them had been re-enabled so now I make sure to check each time.
- achempion 6y ago
  Probably the most simple way would be to rent S3 compatible storage at Lidonde/DO and use client like https://mountainduck.io https://mountainduck.io to mount it in your system.

sundarurfriend 6y ago

To the people who have been using Nextcloud successfully for years: is your usage mainly PC-PC or PC-iOS synchronization? Is anyone here running PC-Android synchronization with files that change more often than once a day? My experience with the Nextcloud Android app is that the automatic sync is quite limited (eg. https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/757 https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/757, https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/19 https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/19). Every change has to be manually synced by opening the app and navigating to the Sync option for each file. This is pretty much a dealbreaker for me, but it looks like a lot of people are using Nextcloud successfully. So I'm curious how your usage differs from mine - do you only use it for static unchanging files that don't need to be synchronized that often, or is the sync situation smoother on other devices?

bisby 6y ago
I use it for the automatic photos upload primarily. But anything else that changes rapidly, I use a dedicated app. I've never had major issues with the core nextcloud app, but I also don't use it for anything before the photo upload. DAVx5 for caldav stuff, Nextcloud Notes for notes.. These apps seem to handle the sync separately on their own.
ntnsndr 6y ago
I use it daily for syncing among multiple Linux PCs and two Android/Lineage devices. I actually like that mobile sync is manual because my usage is so heavy it would involve moving around a lot of data unnecessarily. Setting up my wife with NC on mobile, however, reminded me of lots of ways in which I've accustomed myself to some pretty weird behaviors, like manual syncing, the built in text editor that doesn't load without being online. I love NC (I use it both for personal needs and with students in my lab) but there are definitely UX issues that present a barrier to new users.

kderbyma 6y ago

nextcloud is awesome. I have been using it on my self hosted cloud and it's been fantastic. some features are better than the cloud providers

anderspitman 6y ago

When it comes to self-hosting, there are 2 key components: the service software itself (ie Nextcloud), and the network plumbing to connect everything together. The networking has gotten quite complex due to NAT, HTTPS, DNS, IPv4 exhaustion, etc. I maintain a list of software to help simplify the networking bits: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

mwsfc 6y ago
Thanks for the reference. Spinning up individual containers has become quite easy these days, but agree networking still takes some work to get everything playing together nicely.

twobitshifter 6y ago

I tried picloud which packages nextcloud up for the raspberry pi 3B+. It really wasn’t able to handle even a single user but maybe I had something misconfigured.

kissgyorgy 6y ago

If you check my earlier comments, I often praise Nextcloud and the team behind it, but this is even more crazier by their own standards!

swiley 6y ago

I'm still not convinced this is better than a shell account with a c-git and prosody instance.

instb3at 6y ago

I use Nextcloud for almost all the stuff I do in day to day life. I run it in docker swarm mode on a 5yr old pc running Debian @home. Freemyip for updating my dynamic IP address What I use it for ? 1. Notes (Use FSnotes and sync md files) 2. Keypassxc for passwords (sync it using Nextcloud) 3. Photos upload (From Amazon & Google) 4. My recordings & videos 5. Documents (Moved from G Drive) 6. Bookmarks Where I would like to see improvements? Photos - badly want this to be usable on mobile phones I am happy overall with Nextcloud. The only time I screwed up is when I didn't know about the upgrade process. Tried moving from 18→20 and totally gone wrong.

loughnane 6y ago
Could you point me to resources on the upgrade? I'm at 20 now (what i originally installed) and am a bit miffed at the process. I use docker-compose and nextcloud is much different than all my other containers.