ownCloud 8 -- looking good!

[SteveRiley]

I have an ownCloud 8.0.2 instance running. Finally I'm impressed with this thing! (3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 left me underwhelmed, but a little bit less each time). I've moved my calendar and contacts away from DAViCal, RSS feeds away from TT-RSS, and file syncing away from DropBox. All is working well.

Now, for notes stuff so that I can ditch Evernote. The default Notes app is extremely basic: simple text files stored in the Notes subdirectory inside your file sync hierarchy. No formatting at all. I'd like a little more than that. An Android client is available.

Searching https://apps.owncloud.com/ for "notes" revealed some candidates. OwnNote, initially released in January 2015 and under active development, looks to be an ideal replacement for Evernote. Plus, an Android client is available.

[SecretCode]

Sounds good ... I will renew my efforts to build one.

What are you doing for infrastructure? Server at home, rented server at a hosting company? Multiple servers with automatic backups?

[TWPonKubuntu]

Steve, how big is the foot print for Owncloud 8.x? I've got lots of space available, but would prefer some idea of size before I do the install. I don't find this in the docs from Owncloud.org.

[SteveRiley]

Steve, how big is the foot print for Owncloud 8.x?

root@m92p:~# [B]du -m -d 1 /var/www/owncloud[/B]
5       /var/www/owncloud/lib
1       /var/www/owncloud/ocs
1       /var/www/owncloud/config
103     /var/www/owncloud/apps
1       /var/www/owncloud/themes
1       /var/www/owncloud/l10n
22      /var/www/owncloud/core
3       /var/www/owncloud/settings
27      /var/www/owncloud/3rdparty
1326    /var/www/owncloud/data
1484    /var/www/owncloud

Subtract 1326 MB from 1484 MB to get 158 MB -- an approximation of the base footprint.

[SteveRiley]

What are you doing for infrastructure? Server at home, rented server at a hosting company? Multiple servers with automatic backups?

Server at home. It's a ThinkCentre M92p with 4 GB RAM and a 512 GB hard disk. I have an ancient Windows Home Server that has tons of music and videos on it. I plan to replace it with a proper NAS, and I'll repoint my ownCloud's data directory to that. Backups go directly to an S3 bucket at Amazon Web Services.

[Feathers McGraw]

I upgraded a couple of weeks ago, did you have issues with your calendar and contacts apps? I had to disable and delete them before owncloud would even work (it was giving me a very unhelpful blank page/forbidden message in the web browser). I think this may be because I have upgraded quite a few major releases (from v5 I think).

The occ php script is very useful for doing things like that from the shell:

First I disabled the apps:

cd /var/www/owncloud
sudo -u www-data php occ -V
sudo -u www-data php occ status
sudo -u www-data php occ app:list
sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable contacts
sudo -u www-data php occ app:disable calendar

At this point ownCloud started to work again. I deleted (moved) the app files to my home directory:

sudo mv contacts ~/owncloudcontactsappBAK
sudo mv calendar ~/owncloudcalendarappBAK

Then re-installed the apps from within owncloud's interface. My contacts and calendar in the database were untouched.

[SteveRiley]

I wasn't using ownCloud 7. That version, like the previous ones, felt brittle. I know that's subjective, but hugemongous piles of PHP scare me. While that hasn't changed with version 8, my sense is that they've made some major code quality improvements.

One weird bit I've noticed is how long it takes to refresh the lists of applications in the admin page. Like, on the order of 10-15 seconds.

[RLynwood]

Can you explain the difference between ownCloud and NAS? I thought a cloud was distributed storage linked in a p2p, raid-like way. But that requires a large number of computer nodes. If you have only one node, storage place, then how does differ from NAS? Obviously, I don't understand how ownCloud works. I've read only a tiny bit about it. The idea sounds great. In fact, I've been wondering if there were a true foss cloud. I called the FSF and was told that they were thinking of it and working on one, but that was all they could tell me. What do you know?

[Feathers McGraw]

Seems like a good time to remind people of this:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/28450...ositories.html

Installing owncloud from the Ubuntu universe repo is not recommended.

[RLynwood]

Regarding note apps, have you looked at Papyrus? Much?

[SteveRiley]

Can you explain the difference between ownCloud and NAS? I thought a cloud was distributed storage linked in a p2p, raid-like way. But that requires a large number of computer nodes. If you have only one node, storage place, then how does differ from NAS?

As someone with experience working in two of the largest public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure), I'm going to be pedantic and follow NIST's definition for cloud computing:

The NIST definition lists five essential characteristics of cloud computing: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity or expansion, and measured service. It also lists three "service models" (software, platform and infrastructure), and four "deployment models" (private, community, public and hybrid) that together categorize ways to deliver cloud services. The definition is intended to serve as a means for broad comparisons of cloud services and deployment strategies, and to provide a baseline for discussion from what is cloud computing to how to best use cloud computing.

Lots of people have opinions on what constitutes "cloud," but if you're missing any of the five characteristics, you really don't have a true cloud. People who disagree are just wrong

Now, having said that, ownCloud can certainly be deployed in this manner. It scales very well. It supports many more kinds of applications than just file sharing, which distinguishes it from NAS. ownCloud's primary differentiator from the likes of AWS and Azure is that you host the services on-premises. However, this gets close to losing one of the five attributes: measured service. In public clouds, you pay for only what you use. When you start a virtual machine instance in AWS, you pay by the hour. When you terminate it, you stop paying. When you use an AWS storage service, you pay by the gigabit-month. When you delete files, you stop paying. An on-premises deployment of ownCloud offers many services, but unless an IT department institutes some kind of chargeback mechanism where the consumers (business units) only pay for what they use, ownCloud ceases to be a "cloud" and instead is just an application deployment platform.

But ownCloud is also perfectly suitable for individuals and small businesses, too. I'd argue that these are its primary use cases, even. Because ownCloud has a burgeoning application ecosystem, it's much more than just a NAS. (Fun fact: many people run ownCloud on their NASes.)

In fact, I've been wondering if there were a true foss cloud. I called the FSF and was told that they were thinking of it and working on one, but that was all they could tell me. What do you know?

Um, well, Amazon Web Services is largely a FOSS cloud: you'll see that the majority of their services are built on FOSS. There is certainly sufficient software to build a full infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing offering entirely out of open source software. ownCloud could be one part of that, as a development platform. But it isn't enough: you need an operating system, a web server, a load balancer, a queing service, a message passing service, a database service, a distributed caching service, and more.

[Feathers McGraw]

Can you explain the difference between ownCloud and NAS?

A NAS is usually just an FTP server - you authenticate and then it lets you upload or download files. ownCloud is much more than that (which could be good or bad, depending on what you want) - if you are familiar with DropBox, it is basically a free software implementation of that, written in PHP.

It can synchronise a copy of files on your client machines with the copy on your server (a two-way process - if you modify the client copy it gets synced to the server and updated on your other clients), allow you to share certain files with password protection, or share to other users and groups on the server. It also has calendar and contact applications for synchronisation with android etc. so that they are integrated into the calendar and contact applications on the device. One more feature that could be quite useful is the ability to edit docx documents in a web browser.

If your aim is to free an Android device, I'd say install Replicant on the device (no Gapps obviously), and then sync it with your own server running owncloud, your own XMPP chat server (prosody!) and your own email server.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Steve, footprint looks entirely manageable, thanks

[RLynwood]

Thank both of you. Those were excellent answers, though I still don't entirely understand them, as my questions/comments will make clear.

"ownCloud's primary differentiator from the likes of AWS and Azure is that you host the services on-premises. However, this gets close to losing one of the five attributes: measured service. In public clouds, you pay for only what you use." ... "An on-premises deployment of ownCloud offers many services, but unless an IT department institutes some kind of chargeback mechanism where the consumers (business units) only pay for what they use, ownCloud ceases to be a "cloud" and instead is just an application deployment platform."
This is precisely what I had in mind and why I was asking how ownCloud could be cloud computing--if it isn't distributed. And I still don't understand how it meets that cloud criterion. I guess I'll just have to get some direct exposure to ownCloud to learn what it is and how it works, esp. given all that other software that you, Steve, say one needs to have true cloud computing.

"Um, well, Amazon Web Services is largely a FOSS cloud: you'll see that the majority of their services are built on FOSS."
But, while the software we use may be foss, it's controlled by a profit-driven (even if it isn't currently making a profit) entity (Amazon, Microsoft, virtually all others), and they own and control the infrastructure, the hardware. So, while the software may be foss, it's captive. What I'm after is a true cloud that's owned and operated by a community that is simultaneously licensed as public and private in the sense that it's sealed from the general public and governments, as something the FSF or an intentional community would come up with.

"if you are familiar with DropBox, it is basically a free software implementation of that, written in PHP."
I have a DropBox account and some files stored there--for now, until I can find a proper, suitable home for all my information.

What form of Android does each of you use? Does either of you use CyanogenMod or your own rooted version? Or do you use what came on your presumably standard device (excluding Nexus and Moto X, which I believe have pure Android)?

[SteveRiley]

This is precisely what I had in mind and why I was asking how ownCloud could be cloud computing--if it isn't distributed. And I still don't understand how it meets that cloud criterion. I guess I'll just have to get some direct exposure to ownCloud to learn what it is and how it works, esp. given all that other software that you, Steve, say one needs to have true cloud computing.

It depends on how ownCloud is deployed. If you set up a single instance for yourself and friends/family, that isn't "cloud." However, if someone were to build a true cloud-type infrastructure, meeting all five requirements, then ownCloud would be a perfectly suitable platform for developing and deploying applications. In a sense, ownCloud is perverting the word "cloud" for their own purposes. Not at all uncommon, alas.

But, while the software we use may be foss, it's controlled by a profit-driven (even if it isn't currently making a profit) entity (Amazon, Microsoft, virtually all others), and they own and control the infrastructure, the hardware. So, while the software may be foss, it's captive.

Sort of true. The responsible providers make it easy to exit -- you can take all your applications and data and go elsewhere. However, that might be rather a challenge: if you develop your applications to run in AWS, you'll be using a lot of their APIs. Those APIs don't exist anywhere else. Well, that's not exactly true; Nebula clones the AWS APIs. I don't know of anything that clones Azure or Google APIs.

What I'm after is a true cloud that's owned and operated by a community that is simultaneously licensed as public and private in the sense that it's sealed from the general public and governments, as something the FSF or an intentional community would come up with.

The software for that already exists: OpenStack. It's the most mature open source cloud operating system. Another is CloudStack; it's not as well developed.

What form of Android does each of you use? Does either of you use CyanogenMod or your own rooted version? Or do you use what came on your presumably standard device (excluding Nexus and Moto X, which I believe have pure Android)?

Currently a rooted Nexus 4 running CyanogenMod 11. In a couple days I'll have a Galaxy Note 4 running DynamicKat. It just arrived today; I have rehearsal tonight so I won't get around to rooting the thing until tomorrow.