[HN Gopher] Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps
___________________________________________________________________
Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps
Author : tomrod
Score : 299 points
Date : 2024-09-22 06:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nextcloud.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nextcloud.com)
| jmakov wrote:
| https://owncloud.com/compare-filesharing/owncloud-vs-nextclo...
| gostsamo wrote:
| No comment on anything else, but the tone of the page is so
| schoolyard. For a company that targets enterprise and
| government clients, petty jabs at the weather app look
| unprofessional.
| polycaster wrote:
| The "Comparison" section of the Product Ownership also seems
| rather ridiculous, where NextCloud is just a questionable
| "fork" while ownCloud glouriously carries the torch of
| product ownership. Especially since it's placed directly
| below the "License" section. Apparently, someone didn't quite
| understand the idea behind the GPL.
| CretinDesAlpes wrote:
| Especially since ownCloud was started originally by Frank
| Karlitschek who left to fork and create Nextcloud!
| davidee wrote:
| This is just like Oracle claiming OpenOffice is the better
| project and the LibreOffice fork is a shady knock-off.
| bloqs wrote:
| Contempt and snobbery are no way to win customers
| phntxx wrote:
| With Owncloud having been bought by Kiteworks it'll be
| interesting to see where they'll be heading product-wise.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The one legitimate point that page makes is that it's scummy
| that Nextcloud paywalls its documentation. See also
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.en.html
| kkfx wrote:
| Honestly I do not favor this paradigm, no matter if NextCloud,
| O360, SandStorm and alike: the point is that we should teach the
| desktop paradigm, syncing data around, not using desktops as
| monsters, hyper-expensive thin clients or more properly dumb
| terminals of a remote "mainframe".
|
| It's easy today because current IT evolution is totally skewed,
| derailed for commercial reasons, but that's untenable. Who think
| it's normal being even unable to access already made documents
| only because "the remote service or the network is down"?
| Propelloni wrote:
| I agree -- to a degree. But the "cloud first" paradigm broke
| MS' chokehold on the desktop and arguably enabled Linux and Mac
| to become viable alternatives in that space. Today I can use
| any major Linux dsitribution and just don't have to worry about
| interoperability in bread and butter use cases. Even MSO365
| works fine.
|
| Considering the continued shrieks of pain coming from the
| graphics design people this is not the case. Those people are
| still tied to desktop applications and look what freedom of
| choice they have. Virtually none.
| ezst wrote:
| > Honestly I do not favor this paradigm
|
| I think you are not alone, but I also wouldn't be surprised if
| this frog is boiled so slow that our opinion eventually becomes
| irrelevant: today's teenagers are *less* proficient on a
| keyboard than their elders, because they no longer "type" but
| "tap" instead. When the average exposure to computing is
| reduced to dumbed-down "consumption-only" devices running
| iOS/Android, and that goes for a generation or more, the
| perception of us would likely be that of old folks yelling at
| clouds.
| touggourt wrote:
| The new paradigm is smartphones firts, not only for
| childrens.
| kkfx wrote:
| I definitely follow you but noting a thing: the more we
| "advance" the more we implement again very old solutions,
| back for the pioneering Xerox PARC era, some random examples:
|
| - most UIs actually have switched from the "commercial menu"
| model to a "search&narrow" one, now are kind of very
| rudimentary CLIs;
|
| - from "commercial widget-based GUIs" back to some kind of
| DocUIs, today they are web, back than PostScript and alike,
| but the idea is essentially the same;
|
| - NotebookUIs (like Jupyter, IDEs like R-Studio where some
| "GUI elements exists mixed with text) are more and more
| common and well, tomorrow someone will rediscover Emacs
| buffers ideas...
|
| So, while most computer users are consumer only, those who
| can't consume only a little step at a time, following a kind-
| of Greenspun's tenth rule reimplement partially and with many
| bugs and limits old ideas. I do not know where we could go in
| 10+ years, but... Even with all the bug-ridden modern
| overhead, we actually rediscover classic solutions, at a
| certain point classic desktop computing will came back
| forcibly IMVHO...What I do not know it's how much time and
| injuries we will suffer in between...
| ezst wrote:
| > we actually rediscover classic solutions, at a certain
| point classic desktop computing will came back forcibly
|
| You make it sound like evolution being circular is matter
| of fact/inevitable (and, to be fair, tech history proves
| you right in more than one occasions!), though I wouldn't
| discount the sheer power exerted of the tech monopolists of
| today: we don't have dumbed down pocket computers out of
| technical necessity, or because users "demand" that, or
| because new trends and implementation paradigms emerged:
| the dumbing down is purely a marketing strategy meant to
| extract more profit from users (by controlling the user
| experience through an "app store", where every app is not
| just "sold" but "installed").
|
| This time around, I fear that we would have to break those
| monopolies, or have governments intervene and compel them
| to open-up their stores and OSes to get back to a fair and
| fertile ground for innovation.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Nextcloud can do local first, they call it desktop sync. Like
| Dropbox.
| https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/file...
| v4rp1ng wrote:
| still love it. Been hosting a small (aprox 20 people) instance
| for a non-profit since more than 8+ years (even before owncloud
| and nextcloud split up).
| ang_cire wrote:
| I love my nextcloud server. I set up an instant upload for my
| phones camera photos to replace Google photos. Now I get all my
| photos automatically synced to my server at home.
| mort96 wrote:
| I use Nextcloud, but I'm disappointed in their transition from a
| file host/sync solution to a "do everything" solution. Their sync
| client has languished and their server-side sync software has
| severe performance issues; the core of what made Nextcloud
| valuable to me has seemingly remained untouched for half a decade
| as they chase everything else.
|
| I hope some people find it valuable though.
| asmor wrote:
| I run Seafile for this reason. The sync client isn't pretty,
| but file transfers are fast, conflict detection good and it's
| pretty light on resources.
| mort96 wrote:
| I have looked into Seafile, but the thing is that I like
| _some_ of the extra Nextcloud things, especially the
| calendar. I just wish that file sync was the main focus and
| not an afterthought.
|
| But honestly, I should probably just use Seafile and get
| another, more lightweight CalDAV server.
| kiney wrote:
| I use syncthing for files and radicale for calendar and
| contacts. Very lightweight and stable for years. Radicale
| sits behind a proxy with basic auth, so dont have to worry
| about patching vulns to much.
| asmor wrote:
| Syncthing is also a very solid choice and I'd use it if I
| didn't need the ability to create links for people -
| either to download or upload.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I agree with this but at the same time I find NC very useful as
| a hub that centrally hosts my data and can then speak to other
| software using common protocols. For example my calendars,
| contacts, todo lists and notes are all hosted via NC, and I use
| WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV clients on my laptop and phone to
| interact with it.
|
| I definitely agree NC's core functionality could be more
| polished though. Performance issues don't bother me as I only
| host for myself but there are UI issues and bugs that get in
| the way of functionality. I feel like everything is 90% there
| but there seems to be little interest in making it to 100%. The
| collaboration stuff they are mostly focused on is useless to me
| but I can understand why it's their priority, commercially
| speaking.
|
| Occasionally I toy with the idea of replacing it with separate
| tools for file sync, photos, calendars, contacts, notes, etc,
| but it's very convenient to have it all as one.
| mort96 wrote:
| The performance issues are noticeable to me because I'm
| hosting it on a Raspberry Pi 4. I figured that the bottleneck
| when syncing etc would be network and disk IO so the Pi would
| be fine; however when I'm syncing, all cores are pegged at
| 100% by _the PHP processes_. I 've enabled bytecode cache and
| Redis and all the other normal performance things, PHP itself
| is just too slow. And I imagine that at least part of the
| issue is that every tiny file request or directory listing is
| its own, separately authenticated HTTP request.
|
| But I definitely agree that all the other things are half
| baked. The media player in the iOS app is extremely buggy.
| There's jank all over the place. The photos UI is pretty much
| unusable if you have a lot of photos.
|
| And then there are the constant updates; I get notifications
| all the time that Calendar or some other app has received an
| update. I wish they'd coordinate releases of their official
| apps so that I can get a notification every now and then that
| I need to update all the apps, rather than constant
| individual app update notifications.
|
| In short, as you say, everything is 90% the way there.
| moondev wrote:
| I assume you are not running on the sd card?
| mort96 wrote:
| I boot from the SD card but I have a USB SSD connected
| which I use for file storage. I have also configured
| stuff and set up bind mounts such that everything that
| gets written to regularly (such as logs, the Nextcloud
| install itself, Postgres, ...) is on the SSD.
| leetnewb wrote:
| In the past, the discussion about sync speed seemed to
| focus on the webdav implementation that nextcloud uses.
| encom wrote:
| I ran OwnCloud for a while, until that project died. I liked
| that it focused on file sharing/syncing only. Reluctantly
| migrated to NextCloud and it's bloated beyond belief. It works
| though, and I've been too lazy to look into alternatives.
| preya2k wrote:
| There's OCIS now, which is a very good alternative if you're
| only looking for a file sync solution (without all the App
| platform aspects of Nextcloud)
| encom wrote:
| Enterprise focused software written in a meme language. Not
| interesting.
| mort96 wrote:
| There are plenty of things to not like about Go, but it's
| certainly not a meme language. It's one of the first
| languages I'd personally seriously consider if I were to
| write server-side file sync software. (PHP, on the other
| hand, would be way far down on the list.)
| preya2k wrote:
| How about you give it a try first? It uses about 1/4 of
| resources as Nextcloud in my experience, is a lot faster
| and has a way nicer UI.
| jarbus wrote:
| I love nextcloud, it's so easy to use once it's set up and I love
| how it can do so much of what Google offers like contact sync and
| calendar
| boramalper wrote:
| I started using Nextcloud first to have an alternative to big-
| tech in case Google locks me out of my account, and then it
| became my daily driver. It's fast, private, and has mature
| clients for all major desktop and mobile platforms. Together with
| OnlyOffice, it's a good-enough substitute for Google Docs Editors
| (the office suite) for non-collaborative editing.
|
| I love self-hosting but file storage is one thing that I don't
| want to risk. I've been paying for Hetzner Storage Share [0]
| happily to save myself the headache.
|
| If you want a different hosting provider, Nextcloud now has
| Simple Signup program[1] which helps new users to sign up for a
| free plan with a provider near them, offering >= 2GB of storage.
| You can also browse the entire list if you want to pick one
| manually.[2]
|
| [0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
|
| [1] https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/
|
| [2]
| https://nextcloud.com/providers/#:~:text=Providers%20for%20h...
| raybb wrote:
| If you start on a free plan but then ultimately switch to
| another provider do you have any idea of how hard it would be
| to export and import all your tasks, files, etc?
| boramalper wrote:
| Files are files so you can download them to your computer and
| upload them to the new provider. Unfortunately I am not aware
| of any direct provider-to-provider sync.
|
| Application data depends on the app. For example, _Notes_ [0]
| save your notes as Markdown files so you can move them (along
| with your files) wherever you want. However, _News_ [1] don
| 't and don't have export/import features at the moment either
| [2].
|
| Nextcloud as a file storage solution and a non-collaborative
| office suite is great, but I cannot recommend its apps the
| same way. They are very convenient to install, but the
| quality varies a lot in my opinion so evaluate before you
| adopt.
|
| [0] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notes
|
| [1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news
|
| [2] https://github.com/nextcloud/news/issues/2503#issuecommen
| t-2...
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| You can share folders between nextcloud instances and copy
| from one to another. No download needed.
| boramalper wrote:
| TIL, thank you!
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| I have moved twice now. First from my raspberry pi to cloud
| and the second time between cloud providers. There might be
| other ways but you can share folders between Nextcloud
| instances. I have shared my whole nextcloud from the old one
| to a folder in the new one. Then in the new instance you copy
| folders from the shared drive to your new instance. For
| ~300-400 GB in takes a moment and I do some spot checks, but
| after half a day it's done. And you don't actually do things,
| you just wait that a folder copy finishes, check and then
| start the new one. There might be more automated ways, but
| this worked for me.
| qwertox wrote:
| > I've been paying for Hetzner Storage Share [0] happily to
| save myself the headache.
|
| Assuming you start with NX11, which has 1TB storage, and before
| hitting the limit you want to upgrade to the 5TB storage, NX21.
|
| Can you just call Hetzner and tell them they should upgrade
| your NX11 plan to NX21 in-place, or will you have to order NX21
| and then move all the data over to the new instance yourself?
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Pretty sure you can do an in-place upgrade on the web
| interface of Hetzner
| saligne wrote:
| In place, you don't need to move data yourself to a new
| instance. You just choose the bigger plan in their web
| portal.
| qwertox wrote:
| To answer my own question: Scalability
| Stay flexible with your Storage Share. Regardless of how your
| requirements change over time, you can upgrade or downgrade
| your Storage Share in a few quick steps and without worrying
| about data loss. Simply switch between the Storage Share
| package size you need by going to your account on the
| konsoleH, and then to "Account type".
|
| It's nice to see that they also offer the ability to
| downgrade.
| sneak wrote:
| The desktop clients are anything but "mature", and the whole
| point of GDocs is collaborative editing. If you don't want to
| collaborate, syncthing works fine and doesn't need a server.
| boramalper wrote:
| > the whole point of GDocs is collaborative editing
|
| Strong disagree. Collaborative editing is one of the major
| points but not the only one. For me and I believe many
| others, being able to view and edit my documents in a web
| browser is a huge convenience.
|
| (Speaking of collaborative editing, OnlyOffice too supports
| it. [0] However, you might need to setup a standalone
| "document server" [1] if you've a lot of collaborators.)
|
| [0] https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/onlyoffice-
| editors/onlyoff...
|
| [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-
| share/faq/addition...
| homebrewer wrote:
| I supported a NextCloud + OnlyOffice server for 4 years for
| a 100-person company, and have since moved to Collabora
| Code (which has been running for ~2 years now). IME Code
| has better performance, is easier to upgrade, provides
| better compatibility with MS Office (since it's basically
| LibreOffice with a web UI), and is easier to integrate with
| (I wrote some integrations for a couple of internal systems
| and it's been a breeze).
|
| It's fully FOSS. https://www.collaboraonline.com/code
| boramalper wrote:
| Good to know. I've been sticking with OnlyOffice only
| because it's supported out of the box on Hetzner [0] (as
| in, I don't need to setup and maintain any "document
| server"). Surprisingly, this is what they say about
| Collabora:
|
| > Due to performance reasons, we cannot support the
| built-in version of Collabora. So if you still want to
| use Collabora, you will need to provide your own server.
| You could use, for example, one of our unmanaged
| dedicated root servers or a Hetzner Cloud server. You can
| activate Collabora via the App Store, but you will need
| to use the other server for data processing. You as the
| customer are responsible for configuring this server
| yourself in the app's settings.
|
| [0] https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-
| share/faq/addition...
| smarx007 wrote:
| How did you solve the fact that Hetzner's instances do not have
| Elasticsearch set up for full-text search?
| zerof1l wrote:
| I've been using Nextcloud for some years now. Overall it's an ok
| replacement for Google Cloud. But for some time now their focus
| has been on developing features for business collaboration as
| opposed to personal & family ones. For example, their photo
| library is quite limited. There's Memories app for Nextcluod, but
| it isn't much better. I'm in the process of migrating to Immich.
| Nextcluod notes app on Android has been broken for some time.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Interesting.. I use Immich and have been thinking of migrating
| to Nextcloud Memories. May have to reevaluate.
| nolok wrote:
| YMMV but any issue you have with Immich that may lead you to
| migrate to NCM you will find again there,IMHO. Update are
| easier but lots of other stuff are very much work in
| progress, even when it works well.
|
| My criteria is "when I want to show my vacation to X on the
| TV at a dinner 6 to 12 months after setup is it reliable or
| does it always need some tweak or whatever and ruin the
| moment".
|
| I dont know the apple ecosystem, for me Google photos is king
| but I want to own and host my data, Photoprism is my current
| goto.
| Ringz wrote:
| I would like to switch to Immich, but it is still unclear
| to me whether my existing directory structure will be
| preserved or not. In the beginning, Immich used his own
| structure, which is a no go for any photographer.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| Immich supports customizing the folder structure[1] or
| using an external directory[2].
|
| [1]: https://immich.app/docs/administration/storage-
| template
|
| [2]: https://immich.app/docs/features/libraries
| Ringz wrote:
| But that's only a half-baked one-way functionality, since
| the set of variables for the template are minimal. Immich
| can't intake my existing folder structure, or am I wrong?
| nolok wrote:
| This is only my opinion : it will work, but you will
| constantly feel like you're fighting against it / the
| expected way to do things.
| nolok wrote:
| As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google
| photo replacement doesn't exist yet.
|
| I have a synology nas and I use the synology photos app for
| auto uploading without loss of quality to my nas. Don't forget
| any picture or videos, deduplicate, figure out what you can
| safely delete from my phone,... All of that works great and is
| reliable.
|
| The synology photos app to watch your photos though, isn't very
| good. Neither on mobile nor the desktop nor android TV. It's
| bare minimum and even that has failures.
|
| Next cloud,... It gives a weird "I don't trust it" vibe. I want
| my stuff unedited unaltered, unmoved from their folder and keep
| your metadata elsewhere, and it just give me a wrong vibe for
| that. This is 100% feeling and not facts.
|
| Immich is great but high maintenance, any update is a risk that
| you have way more work that planned. Their upload app need
| works but I use the synology one. I don't feel safe having that
| handle the main copies of my picture, and the dev are being
| super clear that I shouldn't.
|
| Photoprism has been my go to. You need to pay for any advanced
| features, and unless you're solo you need them for permissions
| only. I love it but I feel like it's still not quite as good as
| I would like.
|
| Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?
| racked wrote:
| Could you give examples of trouble you've had after updating
| Immich? Haven't had any myself.
| mcfedr wrote:
| Photoprisim
|
| Check it out, I've been very happy with that instead of
| Google photos.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I want to like it but it's quasi-open source. As far as I
| understand, from the convoluted FAQ, paid Essentials
| members can't access the source code, and they are
| gatekeeping some quite basic features behind Essentials
| membership.
|
| Reading between the lines I think it is closer to dual
| licensed. With extra conditions for the non-public source.
| mcfedr wrote:
| AGPL for all the public code, which is most of
| remram wrote:
| Which features are you missing in the open source
| version?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| User roles for example. They even call the plan
| "essentials".
| preya2k wrote:
| You missed Ente (https://ente.io)
| sneak wrote:
| I've been using Ente for a month and have been loving it so
| far. The lack of feature parity between iOS and
| desktop/Electron is a bit frustrating sometimes but
| workable as I always have a phone and iPad nearby. I
| reported a bug in the desktop app and they fixed it nearly
| instantly.
|
| Looking forward to it receiving more polish, but it is
| workable in the interim. The public e2ee web gallery
| sharing feature is killer.
| nolok wrote:
| They don't seem to allow self hosting at all
| hommelix wrote:
| > As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect
| Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet. > > The synology
| photos app (...) > Next cloud (...) > Immich (...) >
| Photoprism (...) > > Is there any major, reliable app for
| that I missed?
|
| What about Piwigo ? They have a mobile client in F-Droid.
| I've not used it myself, but a friend is happy hosting his
| own photo gallery with it.
| nolok wrote:
| I have never used it, seems interesting and I will
| definitely will.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Try Immich (pronounce "image") in a couple of months from
| now. At the moment it's in super fast development, first
| stable release planned for later this year, probably early
| 2025. The development effort looks very sustainable, FUTO is
| funding them a lot.
|
| I still miss editing mostly, but it's on the roadmap.
| Propelloni wrote:
| > their focus has been on developing features for business
| collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones
|
| For people like me, who have to contend with GDPR and NIS 2
| requirements on an organizational level in Germany this
| actually is a god-send. MS and Google don't play nice with the
| local law, e.g. refusing order processing agreements, although
| MS has recently started to move on this topic.
|
| We replaced MS stuff (all of Sharepoint, most of PIM) with
| Nextcloud and MS ADS via SAML without too much of a hassle. The
| sync client has its nuisances (e.g. can't name Nextcloud
| instances) and it's getting worse for the last few versions!
| But it does its job, i.e. syncing, and you can always use the
| cloud itself.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Hi, we are evaluating at work. Could you shed some light on
| these questions ?
|
| Do you have one NC instance or do you federate (or plan to) ?
|
| Do you use the mail app ?
|
| Which applications do you use to replace sharepoint features
| ?
|
| Do you use the business version of NC ?
| touggourt wrote:
| IMHO, the mail app is very slow and need a large screen.
| Also it doesn't help to manage emails when you need to
| delete, to search for something, to put in folders and to
| deal with spams. But I am a power users who like to keep
| thing clean. Some employees works with it without
| complaining. Nextcloud recently "bought" Roundcube and it
| might become the prefered mail app sooner.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Hi, I'll try ;)
|
| > Do you have one NC instance or do you federate (or plan
| to) ?
|
| We actually have three instances. Currently they are
| running side-by-side but federation is planned, I think,
| starting October. Account management is still done in ADS
| and will stay there for now. SAML works as intended.
|
| > Do you use the mail app ?
|
| Yes, we use the Nextcloud Mail app without the AI features.
| Most people are using desktop clients, ie. Outlook, for
| daily work and it is important to us to keep Nextcloud Mail
| and Outlook in sync. Since the recent changes by MS new
| Outlook, it is also on the clock, but we are not there yet.
|
| > Which applications do you use to replace sharepoint
| features ?
|
| We used Sharepoint for centralized file storage, project
| management, and department sites and not much else. File
| storage is a given. For projects we moved to Jira some time
| ago, so little to do here. For department sites we use the
| Pico CMS integration.
|
| > Do you use the business version of NC ?
|
| Not yet. We are well below 200 FTE, so too small ;) We are
| interested, however, in the compliance and GDPR
| certification and we have already contacted their sales.
| But I don't know what became of it.
|
| EDIT: formatting
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Thanks !
| clort wrote:
| whats up with Nextcloud Notes, in your opinion?
|
| (I've been using it for 3 years never noticed any broke...)
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| For me it worked great for many years. I do turn off the
| formatting tools though and write markdown formatting if
| needed.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Nextcloud Notes for Android works. You just can't use the rich
| editor. The plain editor works great.
| noname120 wrote:
| What don't you like about the Memories app? In my experience
| Immich is the same thing but less mature and not nicely
| integrated in Nextcloud.
| obnauticus wrote:
| I originally wanted to do this but the CVE history is a bit too
| colorful for something I'd want to trust as a "cloud
| replacement":
|
| https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=nextcloud
|
| A common misconception IMO is that running and owning your own
| infrastructure is somehow more secure. To that I lol, and I'm
| confident that the thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud security
| engineers are all doing a more thorough job than you can. At the
| very very least they receive embargoed bugs which they often
| mitigate before the general public.
| zigzag312 wrote:
| > I'm confident that the thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud
| security engineers are all doing a more thorough job than you
| can
|
| I'm not so confident about that:
|
| https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=azure
|
| It really depends on what you self-host.
|
| https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=syncthing
|
| "Do everything" solutions go against the principle of
| minimizing the attack surface.
|
| EDIT: More is not always better in security. With more people
| doing more things, the statistical odds of miscommunication and
| misconfiguration increases.
| exe34 wrote:
| I think the threat model isn't that these popular services are
| going to be attacked, but that they will engage in the denial
| of service themselves without legal recourse.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| > thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud security engineers are all
| doing a more thorough job than you
|
| All these cloud services are just attack surfaces with a huge
| target on their backs. And the security engineers slip up too
| [0], in the case of Microsoft it's become more of a meme now.
| The North Korean hackers basically own them.
|
| [0] https://www.techspot.com/news/102573-microsoft-left-
| server-c...
| obnauticus wrote:
| Somewhat depends on your threat model. The relative value of
| an iCloud/aws/gDrive 0day is going to be higher than
| Nextcloud. If you're in the category of people concerned
| about this type of breach, self-hosting a PHP web app and
| claiming it's somehow safer wont save you either. For this
| risky population, neither solution works since attackers are
| willing to throw expensive exploits at your data in either
| scenario.
|
| If you aren't being specifically targeted, then you would
| care about low hanging fruits discovered by something like
| automated scanning. Not exposing your service to the internet
| does solve this assuming you're confident in the stack which
| provides this isolation. But managing this stack and
| performing risk calculus here is actually where the security
| horse trading happens. I think most people aren't safer
| managing this themselves -- arguably they're actually worse
| off.
|
| I have high standards for the confidentiality of my data. I
| care about things like lateral movement and the massive
| attack surface that isolation tech to prevent such movement
| has. I also won't design monitoring and alerting, ensure a
| patch state, or perform code audits on Nextcloud and all the
| isolation tech required to secure it to a comporable level of
| security. Because of this, I instead reason around the cost
| of exploitation. I want it to be higher than what I believe
| Nextcloud provides and I'd rather require an attacker to use
| an expensive 0day to extract my data off a cloud provider
| like Google versus a potentially cheap one against my own
| infra.
| MrDresden wrote:
| Your right of course. No way an individual can compete with an
| army of specialists.
|
| But for some of us it is a bit of a hobby to run our own
| infrastructure. And some of it only ever runs on a private
| network.
|
| I rolled my own docker setup for Nextcloud a few years ago, and
| couldn't be happier with the outcome. It does require me to log
| in and update the system and setup from time to time, but
| that's just a good time to drink a hot bevarage and listen to
| podcasts in my mind.
|
| For anyone hosting their own instance, Nextcloud offers this
| scan[0] of your public facing url which might come up with
| something worth fixing.
|
| [0] https://scan.nextcloud.com/
| bravetraveler wrote:
| One doesn't _have_ to expose it to malicious actors. It is
| most-useful that way, sure. Mine is at _10.27.0.68_. Have fun,
| hackers!
|
| Also, I lol at most CVEs. Butterfly farted outside, oh uh.
|
| Take the top one: In Nextcloud Desktop Client 3.13.1 through
| 3.13.3 on Linux, synchronized files (between the server and
| client) may become world writable or world readable. This is
| fixed in 3.13.4.
|
| You mean to tell me a few minor point releases imitated umask,
| making world-readable _[and possibly added writable]_? Oh no!
| The tragedy! Keep in mind most clients are single user systems
| anyway.
|
| Judge them on their facts, there are vulns and then there are
| _vulns_. CVEs are a sign of attention on a project. No more or
| less.
| uselpa wrote:
| I find that one concerning in an enterprise setup (which they
| target). Or the fact that the desktop client has 999 open
| issues. Or that the last version silently takes you off the
| stable channel. I could go on ... Nextcloud desktop has
| severe quality control issues.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| An enterprise setup where people share machines, sure.
| There are plenty of reasons to be afraid _[and
| mitigations]_ , no need to find them.
|
| Either take control or sell/outsource it, no skin off my
| teeth. I _was_ replying to someone making the case for _'
| just trust Google/whoever, lol'_
|
| My point is this nears hysterical fearmongering. I'd prefer
| if you don't go on, but it's more for your benefit.
|
| Stopping before I start my own rant about risk tolerance
| littlestymaar wrote:
| An number of github issues is even a worse metric than
| CVEs, many people just post wishlist issues there.
| laymansterms wrote:
| Yeah, one CVE is literally "You can use the MacOS variant of
| LD_PRELOAD on the client to hook libc calls! Oh no!!" This is
| a bogus CVE; _any_ application can perform arbitrary actions
| when its system calls are hooked, but it requires such a
| strong threat model that the adversary realistically gains no
| ground by doing so.
|
| ("A code injection in Nextcloud Desktop Client for macOS
| allowed to load arbitrary code when starting the client with
| DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES set in the enviroment")
| saagarjha wrote:
| You will note that the PR strengthens that model
| regardless.
| nepthar wrote:
| Yeah, it's strange to me that's a CVE. That seems like
| "working as intended" if I, the owner of the machine, want
| to load other libraries, why shouldn't it respect that?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >A common misconception IMO is that running and owning your own
| infrastructure is somehow more secure.
|
| If done properly cve-s don't matter that much. You create a
| headscale install on a pi and the headscale port and your
| router's ssh (key only) are the only things visible from the
| outside. Take any other than a home router - aka something with
| support. And you are done.
| Jnr wrote:
| Or go with Wireguard. It uses UDP, it has a silent protocol,
| no one from the outside can see it. (unless they can MITM
| you)
| ReptileMan wrote:
| headscale boils down to syntaxis sugar over wireguard.
|
| To the headscale and tailscale teams members reading this -
| please don't kill me. You are making awesome things.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > If done properly cve-s don't matter that much.
|
| I think it depends on the CVEs and where they are. If it's a
| software vuln that requires root or some other complex
| prerequisites then w/e. But, if we're talking about low level
| problems in either the OS or network layer (e.g. firewalls,
| routers) then big clouds are most likely going to have that
| patched and rolled out more quickly IMO.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| I would dig a bit more into the breakdown of the CVEs:
|
| https://www.cvedetails.com/product/34622/Nextcloud-Nextcloud...
|
| As well as if this reflects a systemic issue with the codebase
| or if it is just getting much needed attention from security
| researchers. More CVEs can just mean they're cleaning up after
| vulns really well. But at the same time, if they have critical
| vulns over and over again, that might indicate bad coding
| practices or carelessness.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Nextcloud is well known for it shitty legacy PHP codebase.
| obnauticus wrote:
| Agreed. The breakdown is indeed pretty poor IIRC.
|
| Generally you use these disclosures to make directional
| decisions about infrastructure. The list of fixed and
| disclosed CVEs combined with the legacy PHP code base doesn't
| really pass the security sniff test. You really wouldn't know
| for sure without doing a full code audit.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm not a security specialist, but it seems to me that while
| managed services typically have better security and sysadmin
| resourcing, they also have the downside that their security can
| fail at a massive scale. If someone defeated the security of,
| say, GitHub, they could leak _all_ the private repos stored
| there.
|
| Managed services also have to accept connections from the
| public Internet, which on-premises solutions do not.
| akdev1l wrote:
| > If someone defeated the security of, say, GitHub, they
| could leak all the private repos stored there.
|
| In theory you are correct but this is like saying keeping
| your money under your mattress is safer than a bank.
|
| Yes, in theory someone can still all the money at a bank but
| the bank is infinitely more qualified/competent to not get
| robbed than you would be.
| waveBidder wrote:
| banks aren't safe because they're unrobbable, they get
| robbed all the time. They're safe because they're the ones
| taking on the risk. Data isn't fungible like cash though.
| izacus wrote:
| Those cloud specialists aren't configuring your ACLs and
| firewalls - the most common source of severe security problems
| in the cloud.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Yes, there is a concept of "shared responsibility" in the
| cloud. Obviously the provider is going to handle some things
| and you have to take care of others.
| izacus wrote:
| Yes, and those "others" are massively more complex and hard
| to get right than on non-cloud deployments.
| bpfrh wrote:
| Running and owning your own infrastructure exposed to the
| outside world can be more insecure, running your own
| infrastructure at home in segmented networks with wireguard
| will solve most problems.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| It's written in PHP, the most insecure web language on the
| planet.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| What, in your opinion, makes PHP less secure than Python or
| JavaScript?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Not gp but I'd say because it's littered with footguns like
| this:
|
| https://dev.to/klnjmm/be-careful-about-the-switch-
| statement-...
| touggourt wrote:
| This is a very very old opinion, and not true for years.
| protocolture wrote:
| Secure from who I guess.
|
| Like sure, someone particularly interested in your home
| nextcloud instance could probably find their way in eventually.
|
| But if you are concerned more about dropbox killing your
| account due to nonpayment, cloud backups getting encrypted and
| the master key being lost, cloud engineers snooping on your
| files, cloud platforms targeting ads based on your downloaded
| files etc etc etc it offers an alternative.
| antman wrote:
| Lets not forget iPhone vendor lock in that specifically slows
| down or entirely closes background connections for all other
| vendors except Apple. So syncing files with Nextcloud or any
| other app except Apple cloud is an exercise in undocumented
| futility.
|
| You can put it as a front application and wait (if corporate
| hasn't forced a screen turning off timeout)
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well, honestly, Apple is not wrong here.
|
| App Developers usually don't give a flying cluck about anything
| other than their apps. Battery, CPU, mobile data? Zero
| consideration.
|
| But then of course the fault lies on Apple (and MS - it's the
| same thing in Windows - see the CrowdStrike fiasco)
| dual_dingo wrote:
| Well, no. This argument might be correct if this policy
| wouldn't very strongly incentive people to use (possibly
| paid!) iCloud instead and if Apple would just allow any app
| onto the app store (or effortless sideloading like on
| Android). Instead, they heavily scrutinize everything that
| gets submitted. They could just have special permissions for
| apps like Nextcloud that would only be enabled if the app
| behaves correctly regarding this background sync
| functionality.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, there is an anti-competitiveness aspect here, and I
| agree with you that the access to the api should be allowed
| (given some limits)
|
| But nobody wants to sysadmin their phone with rare
| exceptions
| nrabulinski wrote:
| The solution shouldn't be to forbid anyone but apple from
| doing stuff in the background but to make permissions very
| clear, allow for stuff like scheduling background tasks
| and/or limiting background resources and, for power users, to
| outright allow specified apps to run in the background. So
| no, apple isn't right here
| shwouchk wrote:
| Not sure how the apple rant is related to the post but; I use
| syncthing (via mobius sync) on my iphone and am quite happy
| with it. It seems to be OK with enough background syncs as it
| is, but to top it off i added a shortcut that keeps the app in
| the foreground while the phone is charging and im always up to
| date, pretty much instantly. Used to keep a couple hundred gb
| in sync that way (books, papers, org files, passwords, etc).
|
| Not affiliated with the product.
| sneak wrote:
| It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth when opportunists
| charge money for software they didn't produce, simply by
| capitalizing on the fact that it's difficult and annoying to
| sideload on iPhones.
| shwouchk wrote:
| It's a one time $5 fee, integrates with the files app and
| generally has a few features that are not part of the base
| OSS app, such as the background syncs. It also sometimes
| gets affected by bugs that are not do not affect the
| "vanilla" syncthing, which takes some non-zero time to
| resolve and which indicate there is some effort going into
| creating this "port".
|
| That took some time for the dev to create and would take me
| at least an hour of my time to reproduce, for which im
| happy to exchange $5.
|
| I could probably set up an ST instance inside iSH but it
| won't work as smoothly, or create a native port myself, but
| I would rather not and feel thus is a fair exchange.
|
| Of course, I would welcome and am waiting for the release
| of your alternative free version. Until this time I'll take
| your comment as yet another "i hate apple" post.
|
| Judging by your comment I suppose you don't use generic
| drugs or any products based on expired patents not by the
| original patent inventor.
| sneak wrote:
| I cannot enter into the Apple Developer Program, or I
| would have released a lot of free builds of f/oss iOS
| apps already.
|
| Sadly Apple requires doxxing yourself to publish apps,
| which IMO is a human rights violation. You also need to
| provide a working phone number to be able to install even
| free apps on a phone or tablet you have already
| purchased. These policies stand directly in opposition to
| their stated value that "privacy is a human right".
|
| The time of forced side loading support cannot come soon
| enough.
|
| > _Of course, I would welcome and am waiting for the
| release of your alternative free version. Until this time
| I'll take your comment as yet another "i hate apple"
| post._
|
| In my home a few minutes ago I just re-hung a framed,
| signed, and numbered print of some of Susan Kare's pixel
| art for the original Macintosh System 1.0. It's a common
| misconception that I hate Apple, but nothing could be
| further from the truth. Of course, you are free to
| continue believing incorrect things. :)
|
| FWIW, I paid the $5 and have Mobius Sync Pro installed on
| my phone. But, as a Syncthing contributor, fuck them.
|
| (Separately, it doesn't even work right, whilst iCloud
| does, because of Apple's anticompetitive bias against
| third party apps replicating OS functionality.)
|
| > _Judging by your comment I suppose you don't use
| generic drugs or any products based on expired patents
| not by the original patent inventor._
|
| I don't believe in the concept of intellectual property.
| You misunderstand where I'm coming from. It's a dick move
| to profit directly off the misfortune or hard work of
| others, which is precisely what the Mobius Sync authors
| are doing. It has nothing to do with patents or
| copyrights or what is or is not legally permitted to be
| done with the code.
|
| You will note that I release all of my own software into
| the public domain, _not_ under copyleft licenses. People
| should be free to be a dick, just as I'm free to point it
| out.
| tredre3 wrote:
| If what the Mobius dev did is so easy and they are indeed
| freeloading, why doesn't anyone replicate it in the open?
|
| It's not because of the forced doxxing, syncthing has a
| foundation with a legal address and real people, using
| that info on the app store is a non-issue. It's not
| because of the $99 fee, syncthing has some cash flow.
|
| It's been 10 years already, so why?
| sneak wrote:
| You could also ask the question of Blink, a f/oss SSH
| client for iOS that charges money for IAPs.
|
| It is trivial to remove the feature gating and republish.
| Yet no one has. Would Apple deny it as being too similar
| to an existing app? Who knows?
|
| I can't test any of these theories as I am not in the
| ADP. I even tried applying one time like a dozen years
| ago and was denied because I didn't have a DUNS number.
| shwouchk wrote:
| You don't believe in intellectual property? Well, I don't
| believe in gravity.
|
| Ill be waiting for your public domain repo with ios
| syncthing build instructions - no need to doxx yourself.
| ill happily build it for myself - i don't have a dev
| account either.
|
| FWIW that app works much better than icloud has ever
| worked for me. eg with icloud you never know when the
| device decides to remove a file from local cache until
| youre offline and need to use it.
| sneak wrote:
| Intellectual property is a fiction, created to prop up an
| industry. It was invented and established and promulgated
| and maintained by modern human beings.
|
| Gravity existed long before humans, and will exist after
| them.
| shwouchk wrote:
| money is a fiction, property is a fiction. human rights
| are a fiction.
| touggourt wrote:
| One of my employees use Nextcloud on its iPhone and it works
| fast and well.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Syncthing (via Mobius Sync) works quite (surispsibgly!) well on
| iOS, but there are still many paper cuts. I'd have hoped the
| DMA would have forced platforms to be decoupled from services.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Legally, Apple must not provide its own services with an
| advantage over the competition. I think the background sync
| restrictions are a DMA violation legally speaking.
|
| Give the EU some time, I'm sure there'll be a lawsuit about
| iOS doing this stuff some day.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| In case some people don't know using NextCloud + floccus = great
| bookmark sync (I self hosting it but setup one on a cheap cloud
| VM is also fine)
|
| Not using NextCloud for anything else yet though
| touggourt wrote:
| Thanks! I didn't know about that.
|
| There is some under documented good little tools that can sync
| between devices, browsers and Nextcloud :
|
| - Qownnotes for notes, selecting text from web pages and
| bookmarking (I'm curently testing it).
|
| - Someone told me that Zotero can do that too.
|
| - Vdirsyncer for synchronizing calendars and addressbook
| between NC and uncompatible apps (Odoo mainly).
| jmhammond wrote:
| Zotero can sync the actual entry's media via WebDAV which
| Nextcloud handles very well. I've been using it since around
| 2019.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| I am using https://joplinapp.org for notes, using Dropbox for
| sync though (can also use NextCloud or other sources see
| https://joplinapp.org/help/apps/sync/
| MrDisposable wrote:
| A newbie question: How does Nextcloud compare to Dropbox and
| Syncthing? Can it serve as a replacement / alternative to them?
| mglz wrote:
| 100%. Nextcloud Desktop works well and i use FolderSync on
| android. Has worked perfectly so far :)
| noname120 wrote:
| +1 for FolderSync, it works great. I haven't had a single
| synchronization issue or missing files whatsoever after using
| it for 2-3 years already. Note that I never had the need to
| handle conflicts (I don't modify files from two different
| devices at the same time).
| touggourt wrote:
| I don't know which one is better, but considering file hosting,
| sync and web access, Nextcloud works very well. Regarding
| usability, as NC doesn't works like Dropbox it is a matter of
| taste, I prefer NC over Dropbox.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Apples and oranges. Syncthing is a selfhosted p2p syncing
| network and it's miles better for this. Nextcloud is a
| selfhosted "cloud platform" like Google Apps. How good it is
| for each use case varies greatly. Most often it is used for
| easy web/mobile access for files and photos.
| remram wrote:
| Syncthing is much faster at syncing files. So much so that I
| use both.
| a022311 wrote:
| Honestly, I feel that Nextcloud is full of bloat, the performance
| is quite disappointing and it's very unstable. I only use it for
| file storage, because I can't find a better alternative out
| there. My advice: never upload directories that may have many
| small files (and certainly not git repos). For photos, don't even
| think about it. Use Immich or PhotoPrism.
| vr46 wrote:
| What issues did you find with the file storage? I'm using it
| backed by S3 and it hasn't given me any issues at all so far,
| be nice to know what to watch out for.
| preya2k wrote:
| Performance of the S3 backend was pretty bad compared to
| local storage folders on the same host, last time I checked.
| a022311 wrote:
| Every now and then uploads might crash, it takes ages for
| files to load and the whole app freezes. I'm using it with
| local file storage on an SSD over a relatively fast network.
| PHP just isn't made for file storage.
| gchaincl wrote:
| The idea of using a private cloud sounded wonderful, ran an
| instance of Next Cloud using encrypted storage, it didn't take
| long when my files disappeared due to a bug on the encryption and
| los my files for ever. Never went back to it
| greatgib wrote:
| I like very much Next loud (the idea, the project, some part of
| the design like storing files flat easily backup able) but my
| major issue is with the file synchronisation with the Android.
|
| It totally does not work. If you try to send or synchronize just
| a few files it is mostly ok. But when trying to upload more than
| a few dozen files, things starts to not work well, like transfer
| being stuck, or the transfer completing ok but then only a
| portion of files were transferred.
|
| That instability is the main reason preventing me to use it daily
| as in the end I will just use it on the computer where the main
| value would be on mobile.
| opengears wrote:
| I have good experiences with Syncthing for file syncing.
| kgeist wrote:
| When I tried Nextcloud, I found there was an option to sync all
| photos from Google Photos. It synced around 10% photos and
| reported success. Overall, Nextcloud had lots of breaking
| bugs/instability issues like that in almost all cases I tried,
| so I ended up just buying a second account at a different cloud
| provider, so everything is now synced to 2 providers, in case I
| lose access to my Google account.
|
| I experienced the bug you mentioned about 5 years ago, I wonder
| if they ever fixed it.
| Joeboy wrote:
| File syncing also frustrates me, although I think it's working
| as intended. I would expect that if I update a synced file on
| my laptop, that should also automatically update it on the
| cloud. But it seems like there's an extra step where I have to
| go to the web ui and say that I want it to use the updated
| version.
|
| Also sharing has been very confusing, people keep thinking
| they've shared files they haven't.
|
| Maybe the problem is me / us, idk. Or maybe it's better as a
| "personal" cloud than a shared one. I have, overall, not
| enjoyed using it. I wish management would just let us store
| docs in a git repo, which would be much more intuitive for most
| of us.
| sneak wrote:
| No, it's just broken. It's not you.
|
| The software is unfit for purpose.
| poisonborz wrote:
| You shouldn't use NC for syncing, much better options exist. NC
| is great for sharing files and photos though web or mobile
| apps.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Nextcloud is a nightmare.
|
| First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or
| better than specialized apps)
|
| Its internals are a shitshow - a question about getting the real
| IP of the calling client raised a 10 pages discussion where
| people said "it works" and other days "it does not". The
| "solution" required you to change a volatile setting within the
| docker container (and do it again when the container changes)
|
| Finally the upgrade is insane. I once tried to upgrade my
| installation, was told that n+2 upgrades are not possible (fair
| enough) and ... the installer destroyed the database. What a
| piece of crap. Thanks god for backups.
| sneak wrote:
| Nextcloud ate my data on a single user installation with no
| fancy settings turned on, with no upgrades attempted.
|
| The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only 200GB
| of 800GB was on the machine.
|
| It's some of the worst software I have ever used. It's the
| pentagon house with the inverted roof built with the two-clawed
| hammer that eevee described.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| I had a similar experience with ownCloud. Regularly, file
| uploads were timing out, leaving the database in an
| inconsistent state (apparently), which then later caused the
| files to be deleted on my desktop where the files were coming
| from. I'm still not sure why I put up so long with it. It was
| a slow mess, especially on the single-board computer I ran it
| on, and SyncThing was a breeze compared to it, with no data
| loss at all (and much faster on the same SBC).
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I ultimately moved to Syncthing too. It requires
| understanding how it works, but once you do it is
| wonderful.
| touggourt wrote:
| > The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only
| 200GB of 800GB was on the machine.
|
| Did you read the manual? It is recommended for such size to
| do the first sync using rsync (or similar) followed by the
| CLI command to build the files database.
| mort96 wrote:
| Silent data loss like that is not acceptable, even if there
| would have been a way to sync which would have worked
| around the data loss bug.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| A service that manages data cannot fail on such things.
| Nextcloud could refuse this first sync and point to
| solutions but losing data just "because the manual says
| rsync" is not acceptable
| touggourt wrote:
| You're right.
| lolinder wrote:
| > it wants to do everything and does none well
|
| I can't speak to the other points you made because this has
| always stopped me from investing in it. What I need in my stack
| is a focused Google Docs alternative, but every time I've
| installed it (3-4 times at this point) I'm quickly overwhelmed
| by the quantity of stuff it includes and by how complicated
| actually setting up the Docs replacement was (at the time the
| recommendation was to install Collabora and link it up with
| Nextcloud, which I never could get working).
|
| What I _did_ see out of the box was a slow and bloated web
| portal, a bad calendar, a bad video conferencing app, a file
| backup solution, and a terrifying app store filled with add-ons
| that may or may not be maintained. Oh, and now it looks like
| they have an AI assistant?
|
| I'm honestly relieved to see this here and know it's not just
| me. I ended up going with Seafile for file backups and have
| been very happy with it, though I'd still love to find a
| focused collaboration tool I can run.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > it wants to do everything and does none well
|
| On that topic, it's amusing to see when the "are we a product
| or a platform?" confusion jumps from its native host
| (publicly listed tech corps) to FOSS projects - different
| species altogether.
|
| The _idea_ of owning your own server just like any other
| device like laptops, smartphones and tablets, is just
| wonderful. But that means Linux! And Linux is absolutely
| infamous for poor application distribution (well technically
| the Linux distros). So now people make their own half-assed
| "app stores", which is infinitely worse.
|
| We would need a platform spec so that application developers
| can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform
| providers can implement against a shared spec. That would be
| such a major step away from the surveillance economy and
| towards data sovereignty.
| bzzzt wrote:
| > We would need a platform spec so that application
| developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and
| platform providers can implement against a shared spec.
|
| That's been tried with Linux Standard base, but it seems
| 'standardise on glibc 2.31 and Qt 3' is not a viable way to
| describe system dependencies.
|
| Such a spec also doesn't exist for Windows or macOS
| systems.
|
| If you target 'living' operating systems you need living
| applications that are updated to keep working. We're well
| past the point you can assume some 20 year old binary will
| work unless you're running it in an emulator.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Microsoft is so committed to backwards compatibility for
| Windows that you are very likely to be able to run 20
| year old binaries without any heroics. They don't need
| any kind of platform spec, because they put in serious
| work to maintaining that kind of compatibility.
| wvh wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but aren't
| containers pretty much that application platform? Or stuff
| like Helm, when you're talking about larger, more complex
| deployments? I imagine Nextcloud needs at least a database,
| web server and the ability to send emails, and possibly
| some form of backup and high availability if you really
| want to rely on it. There are a lot of non-trivial ways to
| skin that cat.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Maybe I misunderstand what you're suggesting, but
| aren't containers pretty much that application platform?
|
| That's right. And for UI, web is the obvious choice. But
| it's not an application platform alone. You need at the
| very least file systems and networking/routing over https
| and maybe lower level protocol support too, that apps can
| use/discover without having to have a phd in Linux
| configuration. But to be truly useful, you need a lot
| more stuff wrt identity & auth, server-to-server
| networking, service discovery, cross-app communication,
| etc. Something more like Dokku probably.
|
| > Or stuff like Helm, when you're talking about larger,
| more complex deployments?
|
| Well fortunately you don't need to open the Pandora's box
| of consensus problems for a personal node (again like any
| other device). Also too much Yaml to make it sane
| probably?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > What I need in my stack is a focused Google Docs
| alternative
|
| Try Etherpad (https://etherpad.org/)
|
| > I ended up going with Seafile for file backups and have
| been very happy with it
|
| I went through probably dozens of solutions and ended up with
| Syncthing for synchronization of data (it requires
| understanding how it works but once you do (usually an eureka
| kind of moment) this is a very powerful system.
|
| For me using _synchronization_ software (Seafile, Syncthing,
| ...) to do _backups_ is dangerous. Borg is a very good
| solution (or Restik, or Kopia)
| touggourt wrote:
| >> What I need in my stack is a focused Google Docs
| alternative > Try Etherpad (https://etherpad.org/)
|
| He should better use OnlyOffice, Collabora or Cryptpad
| office suite. The Cryptpad server is the only one which is
| not a nightmare to install and setup.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Etherpad took me a few minutes to install on docker. Not
| sure why you do not like it
| touggourt wrote:
| I like Etherpad very much, but it is very lite as a
| Google docs alternative. Collabora, Only Office or the
| Cryptpad suite are better, but from the 3, the cryptpad
| server is the easiest to install.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> For me using synchronization software (Seafile,
| Syncthing, ...) to do backups is dangerous._
|
| Yep. Just synchronisation on its own for backup is at best
| better than nothing, a first step. It fails to protect from
| at least three very common occurrences you need backups
| for: accidental deletion, incorrect update, or corruption -
| the broken data is quickly synced everywhere. Adding
| snapshots and regular integrity checks is essential.
| lolinder wrote:
| I guess to be clear, I do both--the central Seafile server
| is backed up by Borg.
|
| Seafile has file version history, so it's more than pure
| syncing and has so far been sufficient for backups, but I
| also run it on site so it's not safe in that sense and the
| data matters enough to be worth redundancy.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Ah ok, same as me. I gather data from other places with
| Seafile to a ToBackup older (with a subfolder per system)
| and this gets backed up together with the main server key
| data.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << I'm honestly relieved to see this here and know it's not
| just me.
|
| In a way, I have the same feeling. I really wanted it to
| work, but the install ( in my case via unraid ) broke
| multiple times after I started doing anything outside the
| basic functionality.
|
| Eventually, I gave up on it and moved to dedicated apps for
| each portion I wanted and I have not looked back.
|
| edit: syncthing for file sync wps-office for general doc work
| photoprism for pic library
| righthand wrote:
| Honestly I realized I don't need a web editor to change the
| documents, I just needed the documents on whatever device I
| was using. I set up syncthing to sync my Documents folder
| with a whitelist for specific directories and a $5 vps lets
| me get access to whatever documents I need. No need for a
| domain name and web ui when it's all desktop apps all the way
| down.
|
| For collaborative editing LibreOffice Writer has a
| collaboration feature. Otherwise I'll send a copy via message
| service of some kind (email, txt, chat, whatever) or download
| a copy to my Documents folder if someone sends me a google
| docs link or whatever.
| lolinder wrote:
| Does LibreOffice now allow collaborating on one document at
| the same time? I can use local synced files for most
| things, but when I need to work with my wife on a document
| together I always have to fall back on Google.
| n3storm wrote:
| Between a couple of initial versions after fork there where a
| couple of bumpy upgrades, but last 4 years have been smooth
| soraminazuki wrote:
| _Nextcloud 's_ "internals are a shitshow" because _Docker 's_
| networking stack prevents it from getting the IP of the calling
| client? That's an unreasonable take. Why single out Nextcloud
| here?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| This is a Nextcloud issue, in the way it forwards headers.
| See https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-get-the-real-ips-in-
| logs... for the long thread
| thepill wrote:
| Running the snap-version since 5+ years without any problem
| komali2 wrote:
| This might be true but I finally deployed nextcloud for our co-
| op because I couldn't find any other solution to easily have a
| shared calendar with granular permissions to accounts I assign
| for write privileges, but also a dynamic ICS file download
| endpoint I can publicly expose. I tried a couple other caldav
| servers and none had this. So it does at least one thing better
| than specialized apps, which I typically prefer to use.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| I've run Nextcloud for almost 3 years now via docker on a vps ,
| it hosts my contacts, calendars and files. There is a apache
| reverse proxy in front of it, and a postgresql-database in the
| back.
|
| Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new
| updated images.
|
| Occasionally it whines about missing indices, but that is
| easily fixed using the occ command line tool. The clients real
| IP is forwarded by the proxy.
|
| What I want to say is just that Nextcloud works fine.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I have also found that if you stick to the core functionality
| it works fine.
|
| As soon as I started to add apps from the store it starts to
| be a pain. An upgrade comes out and you're stuck on that
| version until they all update, OR you update not realizing
| and lose the functionality for some time.
|
| Since I self-host a bunch of apps, it made more sense to use
| different apps dedicated to those features, like Miniflux or
| Navidrome. Not for everybody though.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| You haven't necessarily gained anything by going to
| managing standalone apps individually, though. You've
| removed the unifying layer, but you're now having to keep
| up with the app versions and upgrade them individually by
| hand instead of letting the unifying layer handle it.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| If you use docker + watchtower all this is done
| automatically
| doubled112 wrote:
| I don't use Watchtower, but a script that takes a btrfs
| snapshot before doing a docker compose pull, then docker
| compose up.
|
| Same idea, just safer and fewer surprises.
| sach1 wrote:
| That's nice and simple, do you have a shareable version
| of this script or some advice on btrfs pointers/pitfalls?
| doubled112 wrote:
| It's really just those three steps in a loop, nothing
| fancy SHOT_TIME="$(date
| +'%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M')" for dir in
| /docker/* do cd $dir;
| btrfs subvolume snapshot "${dir}"
| "/docker/.snapshots/$(basename $dir)-${SHOT_TIME}"
| docker compose pull --quiet docker compose up
| -d done
|
| I mount a btrfs subvolume at /docker, and create a
| .snapshots subvolume inside.
|
| Each subvolume is an app and its dependencies, you want
| everything snapshotted as one. This is probably the
| biggest pitfall, if you don't take that snapshot of all
| the pieces. /docker |-->
| .snapshots |--> app_one-2024-08-28_12-34
| |--> app_one |--> compose.yaml
| |--> volumes |--> app_one-config
| |--> app_one-db |--> app_two |-->
| compose.yaml |--> volumes
| |--> app_two-config |--> app_two-db
| doubled112 wrote:
| I gained working music and RSS that week.
| jerf wrote:
| I ran NextCloud for some years, just for the file sharing.
| I was the only user. About every third upgrade cocked up in
| some critical way that required bespoke DB fixes. Twice I
| basically blew away all state and recreated my entire file
| store from scratch from a backup because it was easier than
| fixing the install. Worked for me but is infeasible for any
| larger install. I tried using the office functionality for
| one document and I lost the document entirely on an upgrade
| because apparently the mirroring as a file is an illusion
| and the real office data is stored buried in the database
| in a way I never did manage to recover; I ended up just
| recreating the document. Thank goodness it was just the one
| document.
|
| It is constantly screaming for upgrades but I don't know
| what they are doing with those upgrades because it doesn't
| seem to make the core any more reliable. It's just an
| opportunity for the upgrade to fail and lose data, which it
| frequently took advantage of.
|
| The key thing that really annoyed me is that I couldn't
| hardly have used it more lightly than I did, and it took
| about every other opportunity to fall over and lose data. I
| can't even imagine the plight of someone trying to run this
| in an office environment.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| > Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new
| updated images
|
| I've run it for about a year until the upgrade tipped me
| over. I am sure that correct upgrades (n to n+1) are fine - I
| tried n to n+2 and instead of explaining to me that this is
| not possible, Nextcloud explained to me that this is not
| possible and fucked up big my install. I had to recover from
| a backup.
| VertanaNinjai wrote:
| So they told you that's not supported and don't do it. You
| then did it and seem surprised at a bad outcome. And you're
| blaming the software and/or vendor?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Seriously do you think that for software that manages
| data the proper way is for someone who starts the upgrade
| process to say "this is not supported, and now we fucked
| up your database and you cannot recover from that"? They
| knew that I was upgrading N+2, this is not a surprise -
| and I did not realize that upgrading N+2 is not
| supported.
|
| The proper way would be to abort the upgrade upon
| discovering that I am going for an unsupported way.
|
| This is not serious software.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't understand how commenters here can seriously
| argue this. There should be no UX for "oh this is not
| supported? Eh give it a shot anyway, I don't care about
| literally all my files".
|
| If you don't support upgrading, don't expose that in the
| UI. There's no excuse for having UI that will let the
| user do something unsupported and then screw up their
| data.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Not saying it's the case here, but I wonder how much
| deniably malicious incompetence out there gets covertly
| injected into projects by competitors.
| stavros wrote:
| That's a very interesting conspiracy theory, I assume the
| amount is nonzero.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| Why did you do that when the instructions say not to?
| donmcronald wrote:
| I don't understand why this attitude is so prevalent in
| the tech industry. The person writing the upgrade script
| knows if upgrades can't support n+2 jumps and it takes
| about 30s to build in a check:
| if(target_version > current_version + 1) // not allowed
|
| It's more work to add it to the docs than it is to put a
| fail-fast check in the upgrade script, so why put it in
| the docs where 250k+ admins need to be aware of the
| limitation and avoid it?
|
| It might be creating 100k hours of waste on the sysadmin
| side to save 30m of work on the dev side. I just don't
| get it.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| It's to sit at the top of the tower smugly. I know
| because truthfully I enjoy it myself from time to time,
| we all do in our own little ways. :^)
| GTP wrote:
| Strange, my experience is that, if I don't upgrade in a
| while, the automatic updater goes to the next version, and
| after installing it it tells me there's another update and
| so on. Or maybe you didn't use the built-in updater?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I did use the built in updater. It was 3 or 4 years ago
| so things may have changed
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. The only major
| instability was due to the Ubuntu snap based runtime, which I
| migrated away from a few years ago.
| eptcyka wrote:
| What do you do to make performance not suck? Have been using
| it for years, but it just sucks in terms of showing me my
| pictures.
|
| Also, what do iOS people do to make their auto upload folders
| upload automatically without having to open the app?
| sveske_juice wrote:
| After using Nextcloud for a while i stopped, since it was
| to buggy, and always took an eternity to load simple pages
| like the dashboard.
|
| So i decided to switch to dedicated services, instead of
| using nextcloud to handle everything.
|
| For images i can recommend Immich which is a new open
| source project specializing in storing your images with
| local AI support. I can highly recommend it.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| beware of leaving an open upload on Photoprism for
| example -- close your uploads to $public on any photo
| host IMHO
| KronisLV wrote:
| I had version 17 installed, I wanted to upgrade to version
| 20.
|
| I launched the container for the new version, but got an
| error: "Exception: Updates between multiple major versions
| and downgrades are unsupported."
|
| I then tried launching the container for version 18, which
| should be supported, which initially seemed to succeed!
| However, I was greeted by "Internal Server Error" in the web
| UI, since apparently instead of just quitting, the initial
| upgrade had ruined the DB schema.
|
| After restoring version 17 from backup, migrating to 18 and
| onwards, then trying to register my local apps with it, I
| then got CSP errors in the console when signing in. After
| manually editing the configuration file (which you seemingly
| can't do through environment variables) that seemed to be
| resolved.
|
| Then, I tried syncing my local files but realized that the
| size of all of them is suddenly 0 KB. The files would show up
| in the web UI, but the size would be 0 KB. I had to rename
| the files a few times, which eventually fixed that, no matter
| how odd.
|
| Finally, I realized that trying to open any of the pages in
| the web UI would take around 3-10 seconds. It seemed that
| there was a bug in the Talk application, disabling which then
| gave me the expected performance, even if it affecting how
| the Files application works also seems odd.
|
| I like the utility Nextcloud provides me, but despise
| updating it. At this point I just stick to the core apps and
| wipe the whole thing when I need to update to something
| newer, manually carrying over the files I want to sync in the
| new instance.
|
| Oh, also, out of the box the DB file locking configuration
| causes large file uploads (a few GB) to just hang, in a way
| where I cannot delete them. I had to disable locking
| altogether.
|
| Honestly, it's just weird. If you need 1000 SQL migrations to
| go from version 1 of your software to version 20, just
| include all of them and don't mess around with disallowing
| migrating across multiple major versions. Same for any
| changes that might impact the persisted files on the FS. Just
| have updates be one continuous, long stream of patches,
| applied sequentially. If you do that and have sane defaults,
| you're good.
|
| To not be overly negative: it's good that Nextcloud exists,
| is free, has a somewhat nice ecosystem around it and both the
| desktop apps and the phone apps for iOS/Android are okay.
| GTP wrote:
| I remeber having some issues when I first attemped running
| a Nextcloud Docker container years ago. I don't know it it
| was because it was one of my first times with Docker or if
| it was Nextcloud that was screwing-up, but a native (non
| Docker) install solved all my problems. Was rock-solid ever
| since, up when I retired it recently due to unrelated
| reasons.
| Namidairo wrote:
| The insane thing when I tried to update Nextcloud, was that it
| kept timing out the download because it was too slow, and then
| required me to delete the upgrade in progress file in order to
| try again...
| clort wrote:
| I've seen this, I think its the web server timing out..
|
| I use the php script updater/updater.phar directly and that
| works just fine
| chappi42 wrote:
| With AIO upgrade is a piece of cake. -- For us, Nextcloud is a
| godsend, some things could be improved, true, but they are
| improving; we are more than grateful for this comprehensive
| software. Much less hassle (and even less expensive) than
| Microsoft before.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Running it on k8s has similar issues. I only used it as sync
| for my obsidian notes with occasional (maybe once a month)
| access to those notes via web ui. I wasn't happy with how it
| would reformat my notes on save.
|
| Sync thing supports encrypted storage in VPS and is trivial to
| run in k8s and it's been much better for my needs.
| davidee wrote:
| Nightmare seems like a bit of hyperbole.
|
| Look, it's not without its quirks, but it's pretty reliable.
| Speed and responsiveness can be further upped by using an in-
| memory cache like Redis/Valkey.
|
| Nextcloud can _try_ to be everything it wants, but as users we
| can ignore that and stick to file-sharing /online/cloud
| storage.
|
| If one is using it primarily for file storage/sharing, it works
| reasonably well. We have ~1TB of Nextcloud data on an NFS share
| (itself snapshotted ZFS), backed up to B2 regularly.
|
| If something happens to a Nextcloud server (and it has),
| restoring the data is as simple as recreating the users and
| copying over the data directory for each user (provided you're
| not using it for calendaring and such). A quick OCC command to
| re-index user data and we're back.
|
| We haven't had any issues running the docker image
| (orchestrated via HCP Nomad).
|
| We have also helped a friend run Nextcloud for their small non-
| profit, as a snap on an EC2 instance in AWS. It keeps itself
| up-to-date and has been pretty-much problem free for years. EBS
| Snapshots cover backups there.
| ruph123 wrote:
| I run my own nextcloud server now for over 5 years. There are
| some frustrations like the photo app which is uselessly slow.
| But for the files sync, contacts/calendar and some other apps
| it works well. It _does_ offer a million different things and
| some of those are half baked but the core functionality (a
| dropbox-like file storage) is decent in my experience.
|
| Updates have never been an issue. And honestly I am always a
| bit surprised by that. I don't update to a new version right
| away but when I'm ready, I change the version in the docker
| compose, pull, re-up the container. It performs the database
| migration and brings up everything. Never had an issue after
| using it for years. Not sure what your exact setup is, but it's
| certainly not a nightmare to use.
| akvadrako wrote:
| The file syncing is not very good either. It's based off
| WebDAV and very slow. If you only have a few files it's
| workable, but it isn't competitive with Dropbox, SyncThing or
| any of the popular alternatives.
| avuton wrote:
| I've noticed issue with older hardware. After a recent
| upgrade to modern hardware (LAN based), all performance
| issues have been resolved. Currently serving to >30
| devices, including 4K media to multiple endpoints and 100Ks
| files.
| ruph123 wrote:
| It is also workable if you have more than just a few files.
| I sync several GB of data, books, papers, notes, photos,
| videos, etc. Constantly changing and it has been pretty
| fast. Webdav is just the interface used for external
| services that support the protocol. Which may not be the
| best tech but it certainly is supported by many, many apps
| and services. I cannot connect a random e.g. pdf reading
| app with Syncthing and maybe not with Nextcloud directly
| but certainly via webdav.
| MayeulC wrote:
| For photos, I highly recommend "Memories" :
| https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories
|
| They should make it the default, IMO.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I agree that it has its problems.
|
| Last week, I noticed that one of my contacts had an invalid
| date for their birthday. Try as I may, I cannot get Nextcloud
| to recognize 1/5/2000 as a valid date.
|
| (And no, it's not a localization problem.)
| DistractionRect wrote:
| I found keeping it in docker makes it less of a nightmare, but
| it's definitely not something I'd trust with anything
| important.
|
| There's like dozen scenarios where you end up with 0 byte files
| with no warning, error, etc. Sometimes it's an uploading issue,
| sometimes it's a syncing issue, etc. And they are still open,
| mutli-year, issues.
|
| I ran into a version of it where existing uploads were replaced
| with zero byte versions, so I had to manually run a script to
| find them and I restore a pervious version. If it tried to do
| other things, like photos, document editing, collab, etc and
| did those poorly that would be fine. Failing at the most
| central task of just storing the data is not. It's still alpha
| quality, and if one intends to use it, it's critical you setup
| monitoring infrastructure to ensure file integrity (backups
| should go without saying).
| jraph wrote:
| Seeing this top comment is sad.
|
| I handle several nextcloud instances, one of them updated from
| owncloud, I'm very happy, it does a lot of stuff well and when
| you need specialized software you can because it's just files.
| Updates have been painless.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's cool! Other people have had problems with it, and
| losing data is bad enough that it outweighs good experiences,
| even if they are a majority. So it's a good thing that people
| share their less positive experiences rather than just "it
| works fine for me", as one is more actionable than the other
| when we are discussing a "home cloud" solution.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Finally the upgrade is insane.
|
| Wait until you see the "solution" for dealing with the client
| mangling timestamps [1]. After you've been burned by server
| updates, and then burned by client updates, with solutions that
| push the problems onto the system admin, you start to wonder if
| using it in the first place was a mistake.
|
| IIRC, part of the reason they forked was because OwnCloud
| wasn't moving fast enough. My experience makes me think
| OwnCloud might have been right.
|
| 1. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-
| err...
| kyrofa wrote:
| > First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well
| (or better than specialized apps)
|
| Yep. And any extra apps beyond the default just make upgrades
| go sideways. I've given up on it. Using syncthing instead (just
| for file syncing) and haven't looked back. It's not my favorite
| either, but just because it's a pain to configure. Once
| configured, it's been rock solid.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Using syncthing instead (just for file syncing) and haven't
| looked back
|
| After giving up on Nextcloud I tried syncthing too - hated it
| - and most of that time was pandemic and not like I was
| syncing outside of my own home network.
|
| Went back to dropbox instead (just for file syncing) and
| haven't looked back.
| aae42 wrote:
| Used to use next cloud, just recently switched to owncloud
| infinite scale
|
| it certainly seems much more stable so far. The lack of features
| might be a feature itself.
| vid wrote:
| I've been looking into NextCloud to recommend to a government
| agency. The world desperately need competition or at least
| something compatible with the m365 stack, because it's eating the
| world and taking a lot of choice away and killing a lot of
| innovation outside the Microsoft funnel, since Microsoft is not
| interested in a lot of tech (for example, network schemas, useful
| for "tell us once" type applications, since they'd rather you
| just use their tech for everything, and the messier it is behind
| the scenes, the better for them).
|
| Anyway, I have mixed feelings. I admire the community and the
| support it has by many governments, its staunch Open Source basis
| so it's useful for an individual or a large organization. But it
| is building on a lot of crufty PHP, their collection of apps is
| very uneven and it's hard to know what works well without a lot
| of research, and it's going in a few directions to upgrade.
| AppApi in particular is on one hand very innovative, on the other
| going in some odd directions. I know it is successfully used by
| very large organizations, but without spending a lot of time with
| it, it's hard to get a sense of the commitment and considerations
| required.
| rc_mob wrote:
| How can I donate tonthis project? I do not see any limks to
| donate.
| vid wrote:
| I think more than anything they need advocacy and good
| quality product contributions (support, documentation, code).
| From what I know, a lot of the development happens via a few
| consulting firms that support their larger clients.
| bakugo wrote:
| I wish the Android app for this wasn't so unstable and
| unintuitive, currently you can't even sync multiple selected
| files without it getting stuck on the "wait a moment" screen
| forever and forcing you to restart.
| jmakov wrote:
| Looks like an opportunity to "rewrite it in Rust"
| tomrod wrote:
| Given the heavy php nature, absolutely.
|
| I have only just started using it (and hence wanted to check
| what others in HN were using it for). Seems like the personal
| use case for file syncing is difficult; I'm more interested in
| self-hosting Kanban and other things I don't want to pay yet-
| another-SaaS a per-user-per-month for the small business tax.
| Setting up NextCloud with an IdP wasn't too bad, a little weird
| on Googe's side that it doesn't permit SAML SLO (but that's my
| not-terribly-deeply-informed opinion).
| grahamj wrote:
| Just want to say it's times like these I really appreciate the HN
| community.
|
| The NextCloud site makes it all look great and probably easier
| than some parts of my current DIY strategy, but reading here I
| think I'll stick to said strategy.
| mynameyeff wrote:
| It is better to use several open-source projects that "do one
| thing well" instead of a single product that attempts to do
| everything well.
|
| If we can advance portable specs so different open source
| projects can interop... that would be better time spent.
| kragen wrote:
| how does nextcloud compare to owncloud? my wife is mostly using
| owncloud
| ajdude wrote:
| If you're using Mailinabox for your mail server, it comes with a
| copy of NextCloud by navigating to "/cloud" -- you can sign in
| with your mailinabox credentials! I'm using it for everything
| from my keepass database to gnucash syncing, calendar and
| contacts too!
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Similar to many commenters here, I _really_ want to love
| nextcloud. It was the very first thing I installed when I built
| my homelab and it 's still running years later. However.
|
| I just plain can't use the thing. The only thing that works well
| is automatically uploading new photos from my phone. That's _it_
| , that's the only thing.
|
| My server is old, yes, but we're still talking about dual 8c/16t
| Xeons, 128GB RAM, and a 7-disk striped RAID storage. It's no
| slouch.
|
| I can connect to it with a bleeding edge gaming computer with the
| latest i9 16 core whatever and a fancy GPU with any browser
| direct over gigabit Ethernet and it still, somehow, takes a full
| thirty seconds to show the login page. Clicking on anything in
| the browser is at minimum a 15 second delay. Trying to browse
| files takes a good 30 seconds just to switch views to the new
| folder and another 30-60 to render a plain text list of files.
| Browsing photos is only slightly slower. I get the exact same
| level of performance when my client is an ancient first
| generation i3. It's astonishing, really.
|
| I've debugged this far beyond my abilities and the best I've been
| able to determine is that the browser is spending most of its
| time just waiting for the server to respond. The server shows no
| interesting trends in CPU usage, so I have no clue. I can only
| assume it's attempting to render server-side on a single thread.
| Given the poor single thread performance on the Xeon this seems
| fairly plausible.
|
| But regardless, this is by _far_ the single worst performing
| website I 've ever seen anywhere, ever. We've all seen horrendous
| single-word-per-page scroll-scroll-scroll slideshow websites that
| take ages to load. Nextcloud makes those sites look like bare
| HTML GeoCities pages.
|
| It's atrocious, unacceptable, and unusable. There's no excuse for
| this.
|
| And yes, I'm using the AIO docker image. I've also tried bare
| metal installs with the same performance. I've tried a more
| modern i5 machine. I've eliminated any problems that could be on
| my part and I'm left with the conclusion that nextcloud is just
| inexcusably bad.
|
| Which is a damn shame because this is everything I want from
| self-hosting. I'd _love_ to get my family onto this. Have a
| central place to share photos and files. Keep everyone 's devices
| backed up in a place I know is safe and secure. But I wouldn't
| inflict this thing on my worst enemy.
|
| This all sounds like hyperbole, but it truly is the worst of the
| worst. I have never, since the invention of the internet, seen a
| website this bad.
|
| Edit: oh and also all of the desktop clients are barely-working
| garbage. The UX feels like it was designed by aliens who heard
| about human interfaces in a Chinese-room scenario. Utterly absurd
| nonstandard unintuitive garbage. The android client isn't much
| better and the iPhone client is famously broken on purpose.
| touggourt wrote:
| This is very strange, we use a quite smaller VPS server (2
| virtual core, 2 Gb of Ram) to host NC with other things, our
| clients computers are 10 years old and we _never_ had such bad
| experience, while we use NC with macOS, iOS, Android, Windows
| and Linux (mainly Linux).
|
| There is obviously something wrong in your NC setup.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Nope. As mentioned in the original comment, I've tried this
| several ways on multiple different machines. The
| configuration is never the same, but the performance always
| is.
|
| I've tried everything from hardware to network configs,
| always the same abysmal performance
| rewgs wrote:
| Chiming into agree that, yes, Nextcloud really does not deliver
| on its promise. Its S3 performance in particular is absurdly bad.
|
| I want to love it, but it's just so not there yet -- I worry that
| its lack of focus will prevent it from ever getting there.
| bellajbadr wrote:
| Basic question, what problem it solves?
| bellajbadr wrote:
| what problem it solves?
| tomrod wrote:
| For my company, I needed a low-traffic Kanban board solution
| for cheap. Stood up on a small DO droplet and has been working
| well for a few days. It was my first time using Google
| Workspace's IdP and it mostly works without a hitch (though
| logout isn't supported, only way to logout is to clear site
| cookies and that is weird).
|
| Total cost should be under $250/year, which is about 10X less
| than a SaaS for our use (free Trello is missing a lot of
| features that I'd like), and gives us more options besides. I
| plan to evaluate some of the additional apps for chat/video
| calls and docs, though I know this would increase the price for
| beefier infra, because Zoom, MS Teams either expensive for
| accounts or just damn buggy.
| aborsy wrote:
| Snaps are not popular in hacker news, but if you want basic
| functionality, try nextcloud snap. It is good, and takes care of
| itself.
|
| I like nextcloud, and always have an instance for file sharing
| with people. For basic features, it works good.
|
| That said, I think it would have been better if they could focus
| on core features, remove code complexity, make it faster, remove
| bugs around the edges, make sure it just works and upgrades
| reliably. It could not possibly do such diverse range of
| applications, and now AI.
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