[HN Gopher] Own your calendar and contacts with OpenBSD, Baikal,...
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Own your calendar and contacts with OpenBSD, Baikal, and FOSS
Android
Author : baak6
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-05-15 10:26 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (baak6.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (baak6.com)
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Related reading: GrapheneOS.org
| kkfx wrote:
| I do, but without Android and {card,cal}dav... Emacs/org-
| mode/org-agenda/org-contacts for in-Emacs usage (for instance for
| email/notmuch) and with classic LDAP on the homeserver for my
| VoIP phones...
| rollcat wrote:
| There are plenty of good alternatives for calendar/contact sync
| _servers_ , but I haven't seen any good, native _clients_ that
| work on modern BSD (or Linux) _desktops_. Both Evolution and
| Thunderbird tend to be slow, clunky, glitchy, generally doing
| pretty poorly when put side-by-side with e.g. the built-in macOS
| counterparts.
|
| I'm trying to use an OpenBSD laptop in parallel with a macOS
| desktop, and while it's perfect for coding and OK for web
| browsing, the rest of the desktop experience is just... not
| there.
| pseudostem wrote:
| I went all in ~1 month ago after using on servers since late
| 2000s. My findings:
|
| 1) can't have something like a /var mounted on iscsi. The Rd
| kernel doesn't support it. 2) help for DEs is patchy. In my
| example XFCE behaves differently on major linux distributions
| than mine. Intellij too is slightly different. 3) there are
| some bugs in upstream software which as an OpenBSD user are
| simply unacceptable to me. I had to disable compositing. 4)
| things like Bluetooth for some people (not me) may be a deal
| breaker. Bluetooth sound works perfectly. 5) if you want to use
| myfavsoftware X, you may have it in ports. But the reason you
| want to use it relies on mynotfavsoftware Y which may not be
| available on OpenBSD. 6) if you use OpenBSD you will become a
| cynic because of bad documentation most places elsewhere. I
| mean this seriously, I view rest of the world as moving on to
| just getting things done without giving thought to underlying
| correctness. Maybe it's a good thing, maybe not.
|
| That said: 1) it is the easiest thing to operate. Like really
| easy. You know which file is doing what, when. 2) there are no
| gotchas. This is a very predictable and consistent system. 3)
| if it's not there in documentation, you don't have to ask "how
| to x", be rest assured if it's not there in the docs, it is not
| available, else it'd have been there. 4) contrary to public
| opinion, very very helpful community.
|
| I think I am a fanboy. Previously have used (rev chronological
| order) - pop!os, enso OS, windows 10, snow leopard (another
| brilliant one), freebsd for a month, Ubuntu, redhat 5, XP,
| 2000, NT 4, 3.11. By far OpenBSD is something I have loved the
| most.
| rollcat wrote:
| > if you use OpenBSD you will become a cynic because of bad
| documentation most places elsewhere.
|
| I found it the other way around, I feel inspired to write
| better documentation.
|
| > things like Bluetooth for some people (not me) may be a
| deal breaker.
|
| I'm spoiled by Apple. It must either work really well, or
| otherwise indeed I won't mind it not being there.
|
| > Bluetooth sound works perfectly.
|
| What do you mean? The whole BT subsystem got rm -rf'd years
| ago. Or are you using some sort of a 2.4GHz dongle that just
| shows up as an audio interface?
|
| > contrary to public opinion, very very helpful community.
|
| Indeed, you just need to show you've done basic research
| before asking questions. Which goes a very long way in any
| case.
|
| > I think I am a fanboy.
|
| Oh me too. I've been using OpenBSD for 6-7 years, on & off,
| as my backup / "code in peace" machine. I absolutely love the
| base system and I think it does what it's supposed to do
| extremely well.
|
| I have very mixed feelings about the state of the free
| desktop environments though, again, spoiled by Apple. So I
| tend to stick to minimalist solutions such as dwm. I could
| probably switch to OpenBSD full time any time, except I have
| plenty of non-free software I need or want to run. Between
| macOS and Windows, at least Macs are decent BSDs.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| Kontact for Plasma/KDE has worked perfectly with Baikal for me.
| rollcat wrote:
| I will give it a try, however I personally dislike KDE, it
| feels pretty much like a kitchen sink of options and
| preferences, yet I somehow still can't configure it to feel
| "right".
| ekianjo wrote:
| faster to use Nextcloud that does a lot more things out of the
| box in a single install
| deutschepost wrote:
| I also use Nextcloud for this. Works pretty good. The only
| problem I have with it is that there is no automated way to
| backup your calendar/contacts.
| tcit wrote:
| The Nextcloud Android app has built-in backup of contacts and
| calendars.
| ekianjo wrote:
| You can backup contacts and calendar usually from within your
| email client
| pferde wrote:
| I tried using Nextcloud several times in the past, but the
| experience on Android was always sketchy for me. Contacts and
| calendar that would randomly (and silently) stop synchronizing,
| their mobile app stuck on endless spinner when browsing photos
| and files.
|
| It has pretty web interface, but it was just unusable where it
| mattered.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Try feeding it a redis instance. That caused a "several
| orders of magnitude" improvement in interface responsiveness
| and my weird syncing problems stopped immediately.
|
| I also disabled every module and plugin I didn't consider
| essential.
| emteycz wrote:
| Same here, and I have many problems with the web interface
| too. And sometimes when I add an app to my Nextcloud user,
| the whole instance just stops working and I wasn't able to
| find a way to recover.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Nextcloud totally breaks down if you try to use it for photo
| syncing. It can't handle thousands of files in one directory.
| brnt wrote:
| Hows Owncloud doing? They were rewriting to Go, to improve
| performance in such cases. I kind of lost track though.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The impression I got was that the problem was not related
| to php being slow but just a general scalability problem.
| If go runs it 2x as fast, it will still fail with 2x as
| many photos which is very common. Maybe as part of the
| rewrite they will address this but I think photos is a
| fundamentally different problem to hierarchical file
| storage that they require being split up like how google
| photos is not part of google drive despite sharing the
| same storage usage quota.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| With DAVx5
| (https://f-droid.org/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/) I find
| contact and calendar sync with Nextcloud to be quite
| reliable.
|
| That said, for file syncs I do prefer Seafile over Nextcloud.
| I don't think I'm the only one that prefers Nextcloud just
| for contact/calendar sync because Mailcow uses the Nextcloud
| platform just to accomplish that, with file sync disabled.
|
| On desktop the sync integration is fine. It's only on mobile
| that the experience is lacking.
| conaclos wrote:
| An interesting alternative is Radicale [1]. Both are very
| lightweight. I mainly chose Radicale over Baikal because it is
| written in Python. On the client side DAVx5 [2] do a good job.
|
| [1] https://radicale.org/v3.html [2] https://www.davx5.com/
| pkulak wrote:
| How do you host your email? I figured it would be a pain to not
| have my contacts and email very tightly integrated, so I just
| keep it all with Fastmail.
| conaclos wrote:
| I did not need a tight integration between my phone contacts
| and my mail contacts. However, I think a good mail client
| such as thunderbird could do a good job.
|
| I am using my own domain and I am using OVH as my mail
| provider.
| andrewzah wrote:
| I tried Baikal but Radicale was much easier to use and set up.
| It's been solid for the last two years for me.
|
| That said I try to avoid self hosted services written in
| Python, especially if they use Django. I've had nothing but
| issues dockerizing them. I just want a static binary ideally.
| cube00 wrote:
| I've been using Radicale for a few years now and it has been
| fantastic. Extremely lightweight but also quite flexible with
| its permissions model since we have a shared family calendar.
|
| The backend storage is simply ics/vcf files and while I'm sure
| it's not the most efficient if you had a large number of users,
| for our small group it's been perfect and very satisfying
| knowing your data is there in plain text files.
|
| Although if I'm honest I'm just cheap and wanted to get by on
| the smallest VM offered by my cloud provider and NextCloud was
| too demanding for that.
| jamessb wrote:
| > Extremely lightweight but also quite flexible with its
| permissions model since we have a shared family calendar.
|
| How are you doing this?
|
| A while ago I skimmed the documentation for a couple of
| CalDAV servers to try and figure out how I could self-host a
| shared calendar, but couldn't see an easy way to do this.
|
| I've just done some more searching, and it seems there are
| two suggested ways to do this with Radicale:
|
| * create a separate account for the shared calendar, and tell
| everyone who needs write access the password
|
| * create the calendar in one use's directory, and add a
| symlink to it in the user directories for any other users who
| need write access.
|
| Both of which seem like a bit of hack compared to bring able
| to explicitly state that a list of users have write access to
| a calendar in a config file or through a UI.
| m82labs wrote:
| I've been using radicale for contacts and calendar for quite a
| few years now. Plays nice with iOS Mail and Contacts as well as
| Gnome Evolution and has overall been a great experience.
| adamddev1 wrote:
| I'm a happy radicale user too but I haven't been able to get
| it to work w macOS mail and contacts. I use EMClient with it
| which works great.
| 1over137 wrote:
| https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/1217
| poidos wrote:
| How does this handle calendar invites? I've tried in the past and
| while sending invites works ok, receiving is frequently not
| handled at all.
| rglullis wrote:
| Or use DecSync [0] and eliminate the need for any central server.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync
| durazabu wrote:
| How I use DecSync for my calendar without any central server:
|
| Thunderbird (Linux) - Radicale+Radicale DecSync plugin
| (Linux/Systemd) - 'DecSync' Folder (Linux) - Syncthing (Linux)
| - Syncthing-fork (Android/F-droid) - 'DecSync' Folder (Android)
| - Decsync CC (Android/F-droid) - Simple Calendar Pro
| (Android/F-droid)
|
| Radicale runs only on localhost. Syncthing runs only on the
| local network.
|
| The synchronization only happens if the computer and the phone
| are on the same wifi network.
| heywoodlh wrote:
| I would be super interested to read a more detailed how-to on
| this. I use the crap out of Syncthing (although on iOS -- my
| daily mobile driver-- it is fairly limited what you can do
| with it).
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| I used syncthing until I switched to iOS and found it
| unworkable due to how bad the clients were for iOS.
|
| Nextcloud is what I ended up using; you get file sync and
| contact/calendaring in one, and you can also use it to
| share files "externally" if need be, even flip on the chat
| module and use it to video-conference instead of zoom if
| you want.
|
| I'm using sqlite as the backing database mostly because I'm
| a single user and don't put a ton of files into it. I also
| disabled every single module I didn't need. It was dog slow
| until I connected it to redis, which was a real game
| changer - near instant page loads and file sync. It is
| running on an ancient SATA SSD in a second-gen i5 laptop.
| heywoodlh wrote:
| Yeah, for me I primarily use Syncthing just for syncing
| between servers and computer.
|
| I switched to Migadu for my primary email which includes
| CalDav and CardDav. I also run Hydroxide in my K8s
| cluster for Protonmail syncing on Apple Mail -- I could
| also switch to that for CalDav and CardDav if I wanted
| to.
|
| There isn't much I actually need Syncthing for on my
| phone nowadays. Even if I was back on Android I can't
| think of much I would need it for -- for my workflows.
|
| > Nextcloud is what I ended up using
|
| Nextcloud has always been one of those projects I
| appreciate so much but find so bloatey _for me_ as a
| single user and always end up getting rid of shortly
| after I install it. I feel like if I had a team of users
| (work, friends or family) who fully committed to using it
| then I would love it.
|
| Btw, none of this is meant as a criticism to your setup
| -- it sounds perfect!
| asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
| Where did you see the info for setting this up with
| Migadu? I believe they've had it as an unadvertised beta
| feature and the only write-up I found is this older one:
|
| https://www.billdietrich.me/SecureCommunication.html?expa
| nda...
|
| There's also instructions about caldav only on the migadu
| site here:
|
| https://www.migadu.com/guides/thunderbird/
| heywoodlh wrote:
| Yeah, I reached out to their support a while ago to ask
| about it and they made me aware of the CardDav/CalDav
| instance at cdav.migadu.com. But yes, my understanding is
| the same as yours in that it is an unadvertised beta
| feature.
|
| I can't remember the ports but if you point a
| CardDav/CalDav client at cdav.migadu.com they pick up the
| settings automatically. I've done this on iOS, Android,
| MacOS and Linux and they all seem to work perfectly for
| me with Migadu.
| aklemm wrote:
| "soy infested calendar products" What does that mean?
| baak6 wrote:
| Soy as in "soyftware". I've changed this to bloated as
| apparently some people think I'm some radicalised alt-right
| 4chan user for using this term.
| detaro wrote:
| > _Soy as in "soyftware"_
|
| And that's supposed to mean what?
| baak6 wrote:
| Bloated or over-complicated software, that's how it's used
| in my friend group anyway.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| I've never heard this term at all.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "soy" = "badness" + right-wing culture war group identity
| signalling.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Yep, comes from "soyboy", a pejorative for more feminine men.
| The term came about from soybeans having phytoestrogen.
| baak6 wrote:
| I did not use the term in this context. I've never even
| heard of this until people pointing this out today. I just
| meant it as in bloated software. I don't live in America
| and English is not my first language.
| llanowarelves wrote:
| I mean it's just true from the data that men's testosterone
| on average has cratered over the last couple generations.
| They shouldn't be consuming copious amounts of things to make
| that even worse
| aklemm wrote:
| And therefor perjorative, victim-shaming language is just
| the way it has to be?
| dmos62 wrote:
| Any experience interoping something like this with google
| calendar? I'd love to use something like this, but I can't fall
| back to having separate calendar apps for work and personal
| stuff.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| The solution is vdirsync
| kajiryoji wrote:
| Perhaps you mean vdirsyncer[1]?
|
| [1]: https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Ah yes, thanks
| [deleted]
| yoavm wrote:
| I created Callibella for this:
| https://github.com/bjesus/callibella
| markstos wrote:
| The challenge with self-hosting is maintenance. The more
| complexity and more dependencies, the more maintenance.
|
| I believe that's why the author was avoiding NextCloud.
| oblak wrote:
| Yeah but are calendars and contacts that complex? Or rather, do
| they have to be complex? Never worked on such things myself,
| though I'd think the hardest part would be interoperability
| with the big boys
| danmur wrote:
| Nextcloud is pretty low maintenance in my experience, at
| least for a few users doing fairly normal things. I've been
| running it for about 1.5 years (calendar, tasks, documents)
| and haven't needed to do anything except bump versions.
| markstos wrote:
| It's no somuch that, as what's in the stack:
| OS+PHP+MySQL+Nginx+Other Dependencies.
|
| How often do they need security patches or major version
| upgrades that might have breaking changes? How often will you
| need to replace the current stack with the Next Big Thing?
|
| I've been self-hosting a blog for a while. At first, I used
| custom software, because blogging software didn't exist (I'm
| that old). I switched to Movable Type, but that project
| withered. I moved to Wordpress, but found I was spending more
| time running upgrades of the core and plugins then actually
| blogging.
|
| I migrated to a static site generator, Jekyll, which seemed
| popular would solve the problem of security updates with
| dynamic code. My install broke multiple times as I changed
| laptops and Jekyll's dependency stack went through major
| version upgrades. Still, I was spending more time maintaining
| the stack then I wanted.
|
| Now, there have been rumblings about the future of Jekyll as
| well. Maybe I should switch to a single-binary app like Zola
| to solve the dependency hell I've sometimes gotten into with
| Jekyll upgrades.
|
| This is only the history of trying to self-host a personal
| blog from someone whose professional career has been web
| hosting in some form or another. Imagine also trying to self-
| host email, contacts, calendars a mastodon instance and other
| services as well.
|
| We can still support a more diverse ecosystem of tech by not
| using the dominant providers and supporting companies which
| use open source software which people can self-host if they
| want to.
|
| I support self-hosting, but the marriage to your own tech
| stack involves some significant work once the honeymoon is
| over.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Here's what you need to run a small NextCloud server:
|
| * linuxserver.io container
|
| * redis instance (enormous speed-up. Really, do this. Running a
| redis container is very painless.)
|
| * use SQlite for the backend DB (unless you have a huge number
| of files)
|
| * disable every module/plugin you don't NEED
|
| Run a cron script that periodically fetches new images, kicks
| over the container, and purges old images.
|
| Run another script that periodically tries to run updater.phar
| in the container, or notifies you when there's an update, or
| subscribe to the nextcloud RSS feed, etc.
|
| I recommend overriding the defaults for deleted file behavior
| and versioning. Most folks don't want or need deleted files
| hanging around until 50% of your disk space is used, for
| example. The versioning defaults are fairly reasonable IMHO,
| but I decided I didn't care about anything past two months.
| Some folks who have lots of fast changing files will probably
| want to tweak the retention policy because it will save second-
| by-second versions for a few minutes to an hour (I forget
| exactly) and that could generate a lot of IO and SSD wear
| unnecessarily.
|
| Done! I was dreading switching over from syncthing but it's
| been painless, and the NextCloud clients are all pretty slick
| and Just Work.
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(page generated 2022-05-15 23:01 UTC)