this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
131 points (91.2% liked)

Selfhosted

39256 readers
366 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Just had NextCloud denying my credentials (not for the first time). I know they weren't wrong because I'm using a password manager. Logs didn't say much. Was about to reinstall (again, not the first time nextcloud went bonkers on me) before I tried a docker compose down && docker compose up. Lo and behold after a restart the credentials worked again.

This stuff is just way too flaky for something so important.

Is OwnCloud good again? My main usecase is saving photos but I don't want them locked away in a database so SeaFile is out.

Edit: I'm going to take the time to reply to you all, bit busy with work and family suddenly. But a little update - I've quickly setup Immich and fired up the CLI to import my library. AFAIK the files are still stored on disk somewhere but metadata is in a database. I didn't realize this before, knowing that I think my mind is made up and Immich is the best solution. Thanks everyone!

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not done but I'm so tired of just stupid error messages that don't help from developers. I love the open source community but for gods sake devs, handle your errors in a format that makes sense.

Nextcloud or others, it's always the same. I either get a 200 line stacktrace that means absolutely nothing to me because the dev didn't bother to handle the exception (like you submit a form and get a null reference back. It sure would be nice to know what field was null) or of course the infamous "Exception occurred" and nothing else.

My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like "x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?" Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can't even with that

[–] midas@ymmel.nl 6 points 1 year ago

I'm also a develop and my philosophy is that stack traces are for the developers but they should be translated to informative error messages for the user. Otherwise you're doing security through obscurity.

[–] domi@lemmy.secnd.me 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My favorite was I tried to submit to Jellyfin a fix for one of their very opaque exceptions, keep the stack trace but rewrite the error message like "x exception occurred, do you have permissions to do that?" Or something and the PR was rejected. I just can't even with that

Out of interest, which PR was that?

It's uncommon to rewrite exception messages to be user friendly, they are for developers. The exception shouldn't be thrown in the first place if it's a common issue or the error message should be more generic for unhandled problems.

ehh I try to keep me here and my real github separate. I'm all for exception messages being for developers especially in logs, but things also shouldn't error silently either. This was a case where there was something different with my OS I was running and I wanted to show an error that there was a common reason for that exception being thrown. This was years ago though, so I don't remember details

[–] christophski@feddit.uk 5 points 1 year ago

I strongly disagree with this, any error message shown to the user should be helpful to the user

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] notsofunnycomment@mander.xyz 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I almost don’t dare to say this, but I’ve been running the snap for more than a year and have no complaints.

[–] hempster@lemm.ee 22 points 1 year ago

Too daring of you to say snap

[–] regulatorg@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

6 years here and went from ubuntu 16 to 22

[–] steel_moose@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Glad someone said it out loud 😁 I've been running the snap for almost three years now 24/7. I works really well!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most likely you got blocked for some time by the brute force prevention. Have a look at your logfiles.

[–] homegrowntechie@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

^this. You probably had a Nextcloud client somewhere with wrong credentials that was trying to reconnect repeatedly which locked you out. It happened once to me.

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

My problem with nextcloud is more the performance of the web interface rather than it's reliability (and that's even with mariadb + redis setup and a decently fast minipc). It's fine if you avoid the web interface, but that's part of the draw of the thing.

The poor performance carries over to the sync clients too because they're just using webdav http requests. Nextcloud will take like 10+ hours to sync my folders, vs about 10 minutes with Syncthing or something else.

[–] pim@feddit.nl 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The performance is indeed pretty terrible. Most stuff runs fine on my NUCs except nextcloud. Maybe throwing more hardware at it solves it though.

[–] CypherPsycho@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Nope lol I have a pretty godly server and nextcloud is slow as a mf

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] clegko@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

MariaDB runs like hot garbage with Nextcloud imo. I’ve gotten to the point where I use legit MySQL or PostgreSQL and performance is night and day. I have no idea why Maria acts out with Nextcloud for me, but I’ve gotten tired of troubleshooting it.

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Interesting. MariaDB was the path of least resistance for me but I normally prefer PostgreSQL. I'll put it on the list.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] festus@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What name do you assign the DB for PostgreSQL in Docker and does it by chance happen to match the name of any other containers, possibly in other docker compose files?

I'm only mentioning it because I experienced weird inconsistent issues with a service I was running where it was sometimes having trouble connecting to its DB companion and I eventually realized that it was sometimes connecting to the other container. I was also finding that turning it off and on again was often 'fixing' the issue, at least for a while. Might be worth checking out. I'd also consider viewing the logs for Nextcloud (docker logs -f ) when you're unable to login and see if there are any errors. Frankly I've never had these specific issues with Nextcloud, and given that it's based on PHP (it only 'executes' on an HTTP request), it seems like restarting shouldn't help unless it's something else.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Nsh@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I haven't got this kind of issue with nextcloud, I'm pretty sure you can reset your password using occ via cli

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] morethanevil@lmy.mymte.de 12 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I am using nextcloud for years now with postgres, redis and configured PHP setttings, but I installed it on the host. Never had any problems, Performance is awesome... Almost everytime I read about problems is with the docker images. The new AIO image shall be bad too, but I can not say anything to this, since I don't use it.

I really like docker, but sometimes it is better to install on the host directly or use an LXC if you need isolation. MinIO is the same... Would not want it in a Container

Maybe seafile could be an option for you 🤔

[–] anteaters@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's how I ran my nextcloud for about a decade and never had problems. On my new server I'm running it in docker and so far it seems to work ok.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Been running multiple Nextcloud instances for years on bog standard debian + apache + php-fpm install, as documented in the official docs which do not even mention docker. Upgrades were never a problem. Some apps may suffer some bugs from time to time, but Nextcloud itself works flawlessly. Wrote an ansible role to install, manage and update it. The only thing that deviates from the "recommended" setup is Postgres instead of MariaDB. People need to start following the actual documented/well-supported installation options and stop trying to stick containers everywhere...

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just wanted to +1 your comment. Installing on bare metal host is higher risk, but higher reward as well in terms of stability and performance. In my case I’m using mariaDB, redis, php, and apache and it’s been solid for years now.

[–] morethanevil@lmy.mymte.de 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used it with mariadb before, converting to postgres gave a performanceboost. Don't ask me why but it ran faster

If you are intrested, than here is a guide 😊

[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I’m interested, it’s on the list but pretty far down. pgsql is better hands down imho but I followed nextcloud recommendations at the time I set things up and just never switched. Thanks for the guide!!

[–] DarkIrata@lemmy.gwa.app 3 points 1 year ago

Bare metal club! :D

[–] midas@ymmel.nl 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just don't see how docker can fuck something like this up honestly, the only thing that can be screwy is permissions when dealing with filesystem mounts - but once you've got that working it should be pretty static.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

For photos, I'd highly recommend checking out Photoprism.

the "PhotoSync" app available for both android and apple can sync from your phone to photoprism.

But, nextcloud itself, works pretty nice for me. But, I use OIDC-based logon, with Authentik.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go with immich if you want to ever have multiple users.

Photoprism locks user accounts behind a paid subscription.

Pretty much everything is more full-featured on immich except for incomplete RAW format support because photoprism is mainly focused on photography and now businesses IIRC.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] FermatsLastAccount@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience, Immich is way better for Photos.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe try https://github.com/kd2org/karadav if you want to continue using the NC apps for photo backups.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] wolre@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would be interesting to hear a little more about your setup. I had some issues when I had Nextcloud installed directly on Debian (though nothing this major), have since switched to running it on Docker and it's been very solid.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] BCsven@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So, now's as good a time as any to ask. Why is everyone using Nextcloud? I've been quietly using Owncloud for a very long time and never had any issues with it. How is Owncloud bad?

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Owncloud is not fully open source. Nextcloud is. They have developed in different directions since then, but that remains the fundamental difference that split them apart in the first place. If that matters to you, Nextcloud is the right choice. If that doesn't matter to you, then use whichever you prefer and has the features you need.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] festus@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a good summary, but the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for, while Nextcloud is a fully open source fork.

[–] clegko@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for

This isn't any different than a lot of other softwares, though... Nextcloud has the same Enterprise pricing/features shit, too. https://nextcloud.com/enterprises/

Actually, so does Photoprism. https://www.photoprism.app/features

[–] festus@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Most of the items on that list (with the possible exception of the 'Enterprise Apps') are items that involve them either hosting an aspect for you (push notifications), training, or utilizing their OAuth credentials with Microsoft. Because they forked OwnCloud they're actually bound by the AGPL on that original code and legally can't license features in the main codebase as anything other than AGPL (less sure on those 'apps'), so they're limited in what features they can restrict to paying customers.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] ippokratis@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Nextcloud is an overkill. Its just too much. I'd say better split down the needed services. Baikal/radicale etc for contacts/calendar. Photoprism/librephotos etc for photos. A webdav server for storage. And so on.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I’ve been running two NC instances for over five years (linuxserver docker images)—one has been issue-free, and the other had sporadic issues like OP is describing... but not for the last year or so, so I assumed the issue had been fixed in an update. Or maybe the problem was the network configuration instead of NC.

[–] Reborn2966@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

use immich for photos.

owncloud ocis works but is very young. is literally just file hosting with something to open office files online.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thats frustrating

I second the notion that your ip was banned by nc's brute force detection

The silent reconnects of a DAVx client on a phone could easily trigger this

You can whitelist your home routers ip in the config IIRC Maybe not on the LISO container though, IIRC it is less configurable, but doesn't "just work", I'd ditch that not nextcloud

Quick fix could be to "DELETE FROM" (or "TRUNCATE" if you are certain nobody is blocked correctly) the table bruteforce_attempts (or smth similar). Although that "dc up && dc down" worked could indicate another issue, as you do seem to have persistence with your db in a docker volume (cred are still there) which would mean the time penalty ran out during restart or oits somethimg else

load more comments
view more: next ›