Owncloud

Last year I decided to give freeNAS another try despite the warnings of not having ECC memory and running in a VM. Long story short, it ran great for awhile. I had freeBSD jails setup for CrashPlan and Owncloud – it was heaven! It was all running smoothly until not having ECC memory caught up to me. I began to have checksum errors, so I had to dump the data. Much faster than restoring from backup.

I then decided to just fall back to my comfort zone and run Windows Server 2012 as a file server. It would give me a good opportunity to become more intimate with 2012. We just have a few servers at work with 2012, so I am still getting my hands dirty with it. My ideal setup would be running Owncloud on Windows with IIS. But Owncloud performance wasn’t up to my standards.

Upon some researching I found openSUSE has a prebuild with everything setup. I decided to give that a try to compare performance. Well that turns out that build doesn’t use MySQL, it uses Owncoud 7 and it has some nuances getting the network interface up. (As of this post, they updated their build to Owncloud 8 and openSUSE 13.2 from 13.1, not sure if it’s been updated to use MySQL).

Via the comments of the openSUSE prebuild, I came across this site. https://www.en0ch.se/owncloud_/pre-configured-owncloud-installaton/ . Perfect! It runs Ubuntu, which I feel more comfortable with and it also has a proper Owncloud install with MySQL and SSL. I just want this project to be up and running in a stable environment so I can get back to developing new products/projects. The goal is instead of running/storing everything on my computer, I’d rather use the server and backup from there. Don’t want to lose EagleCad designs and Arduino sketches! Plus my computer doesn’t need to be on all the time as it has been for years. This will also allow me to provide private storage for friends and family that is easily backuped.

Now back to the project… So www.en0ch.se (Daniel), one of the team members of design, has taken the time to build and share the Ubuntu Owncloud build. With just a few out of the box tweaks, you’ll have it up and running, operating in a self contained environment. Pretty much the only changes in my case is keyboard layout and setting the IP/Domain in the trusted list in the Owncloud config. Ready to rock n’ roll! Oh wait it’s not the 80’s…

In my case the longest part was running VMWare converter to convert from workstation to ESXI which also uploads and creates the VM. Finally the last piece is to mount the Windows data share for secure access by Owncloud. Now I can use my friends/family as guinea pigs, muahahaha.